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In this essay by Arun Gupta, the industrial meat industry is revealed in all it's gory glory:

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) churn out cheap but flavorless meat. However, for the CAFOs to exist there must be demand for the product. That’s where the industrial food sector comes in. Chains like McDonald's, Chili's, Taco Bell, Applebee's and Pizza Hut approach the tasteless, limp factory beef, pork and chicken as a blank canvas with which to create highly enticing, even addictive, foods by pumping it full of fat, salt, sugar, chemicals and flavorings.

Ummm...yummy...

The chains lard on bacon in particular as a high-profit method of adding an item that has a "high flavor profile," a "one-of-a-kind product that has no taste substitute." According to David Kessler, author of The End of Overeating, a standard joke in the restaurant chain industry goes, "When in doubt, throw cheese and bacon on it." In essence, the chains conjure up endless variations on the McGriddle that itself is the mass-produced version of the maple syrup-soaked bacon strip from our childhood.

Thus, the crisis of factory farming becomes its own solution through the use of the industrially produced bacon. We know our industrial food system is killing the planet and killing us with heart disease, diabetes and cancer, but how can we resist when it tastes oh-so-good?

And yet...what is the cost to the environment (not to mention our arteries)?

In the 1970s Smithfield Foods revolutionized hog production. According to a Rolling Stone 2006 expose, Smithfield "controls every stage of production, from the moment a hog is born until the day it passes through the slaughterhouse. [It] imposed a new kind of contract on farmers: The company would own the living hogs; the contractors would raise the pigs and be responsible for managing the hog shit and disposing of dead hogs. The system made it impossible for small hog farmers to survive -- those who could not handle thousands and thousands of pigs were driven out of business."

Rolling Stone's stunning report describes the lakes of manure that surround pig factories as Pepto Bismol colored because of the "interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs …”

And of course, our government has been there all along enabling the explosive growth of this polluting industry:

Beef, poultry and hog CAFOs could not exist without large-scale environmental devastation. Governments at every level exempt these operations from laws and regulations covering air pollution, water pollution and solid waste disposal. They are also largely free from proper bio-surveillance, that is, public monitoring to detect, track and report on the outbreak of diseases.

The essay goes on and should be read by every lover of ham (and all the other industrially produced meats).

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