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Slaughterhouses 
Mon Apr 19, 2010 at 18:40:57 PM PDT
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One of the biggest hurdles to producing or obtaining local, sustainable meat is the lack of slaughterhouses that are USDA-inspected (or even state-inspected) and willing to slaughter livestock in small, occasional batches from small farmers. The big slaughterhouses want a constant supply of animals to kill - they aren't interested in processing 15 cows a year if that's all you've got. A friend actually looked into what it would take to have a local slaughterhouse process her chickens. The answer came back: Don't bother asking the price, you can't afford it. The reason? For the slaughterhouse to do all of the required cleaning before accepting her small number of chickens, it would cost so much that the cost-per-chicken would be outrageous.
It's with this in mind that I read a very disturbing email that was forwarded on by the Cornucopia Institute. The email lays out a problem very well, so I have pasted it below but removed anything identifying the sender. The basic problem is that the USDA wants to impose regulations on all slaughterhouses (big and small alike) that would cost the little guys (or their customers, small farmers) more money than they can afford.
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Wed Jun 24, 2009 at 10:34:03 AM PDT
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Food and Water Watch just released a report called Where's the Local Beef? that explains how a shrinking number of small slaughterhouses and processing facilities is keeping farmers from producing enough sustainable meat to satisfy customer demand. That sounds similar to stories I've heard in my own town... The customers are here, hungry for local, sustainable meat... The farmers are here, the have live animals... and yet, there's often no good way to transform the live animals into meat that consumers or restaurants can buy.
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Sun Apr 26, 2009 at 21:38:38 PM PDT
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I've been hibernating the past few days. My internet's still broken and my dad's mailing me my old laptop to see if that will fix the problem. In the meantime, I am writing this post from an internet cafe and I am very (VERY) annoyed. I'm sitting next to a woman with big hair who smells like hair care products and a family with a million small kids just came in. The kids are going crazy. In addition to internet, this place's main business is gelato. Anyway, here's what's on my plate besides mocha rum crunch gelato:
- In a poll, people say yes to subsidies for small farmers, and no to subsidies for large farmers.
- My new favorite school lunch blog gives us an update on school food legislation.
- Bonnie at Ethicurean tells all about the Kellogg Food and Society conference I attended last week.
- Coca-Cola denied human rights abuses in China at its annual stockholders' meeting. But this brings up an interesting point - one I've been meaning to discuss here for a while. Shareholders have power to make companies reform - that's what happened to McDonald's earlier this year when shareholders extracted a promise from the company to cut pesticide use in its potatoes.
- Here's a fantastic interview with Curt Ellis of King Corn fame. I got to meet him last week. I was very impressed.
- Check out this article on planting trees in Anacostia, a poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C. I got all excited when I read the title, and then realized once I read the article that they weren't talking about fruit trees. But that's OK. Any trees at all are better than no trees, even if they don't produce food.
- Another terrific article about chickens by one of my favorite farmers, Carol Ann Sayle. She writes about Austin's Funky Chicken Coop Tour.
- Here's an absolutely fantastic not to miss post about Food Inc, the new documentary coming out in a few months. By the way, the blog that posted the terrific article on the film is a blog for another upcoming documentary on food, The Greenhorns, a film about young farmers. Last week I met the incredible Severine Fleming, the film's directors. I definitely recommend checking out her blog and her film.
- Here are instructions for using coffee grounds as fertilizer.
- Want to see a scary animation showing how quickly animals are killed in a slaughterhouse? Check this out.
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Sat Nov 01, 2008 at 22:47:22 PM PDT
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Human rights - particularly in slaughterhouses - is something I'm concerned about that is (in my opinion) under-reported. I've just surfed into a fantastic series about the abuses of a poultry company in North Carolina, done by The Charlotte Observer.
If I'm remembering correctly, OSHA - the federal agency tasked with regulating workplace safety - has adopted more or less an honor system for slaughterhouses. Keep logs of your injuries and as long as you do better than the industry average, we won't inspect you. Or something. And I believe inspections are also announced in advance.
When The Charlotte Observer started looking into House of Raeford Farms, they found that its logs showed an unbelievably low rate of injuries, but only because they weren't logging the injuries that occurred. The newspaper confirmed several injuries by interviewing workers, double checking against medical records, and then checking to see if those injuries were logged. Of 31 confirmed injuries based on their interviews, only 12 made it into the logs.
Obviously the "honor system" isn't a good way to ensure workplace safety. Let's hope Obama changes things!
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