Our Daily Bread is an unscripted film that just videotapes typical daily scenes on the large scale agricultural operations that bring us most of our food.
If you watch it you will see workers picking fruits and vegetables, driving machinery, and eating. Chicks riding conveyor belts, being thrown into bins, having their beaks clipped, scenes of life in the chicken house, and even the harvesting and cleaning details. From the first seedlings to the final harvest, and from the calf, piglet, and chick all the way through the slaugher you see in short segments just how it happens. It's simple, without commentary telling you if it's bad or good, just what it is. Granted it appears more biased toward, "it's bad"
Two things I gleaned from it were
1. Not everything in industrial agriculture is innately bad, but it easily can be when the goal is ONLY profit, and
2. maybe people in the agricultural system are just as mechanized as the animals.
1. In my line of work, some colleagues, and I throw around terms like "industrial agriculture" and "factory farms" like they are completely terrible, but maybe not. I think we'd all have a hard time convincing a grain farmer not to plant the rows of monoculture year after year with the gas-guzzling machinery, or persuade a meat producer he's killing and cleaning his meat wrong because it's done by machine. Were I to kill, clean, and slaughter every cow without the machine to pick them up and move them around dangling by their feet, I'd think twice about eating meat. Were I or anyone else to go out and scythe, rake and pile wheat by hand, then separate the wheat grains from the rest of the plant I may think differently about monoculture and machine harvesting. I spent a day bailing hay at a neighbor's farm a few years ago with my friend Gus. Even with the tractor to cut, rake, and bale it for us, it was still the hardest day of work in my life. Farming is work and technology can make it easier and more efficient. That's why we make it. Maybe the productivity of a combine does help the world?
However, most agricultural technologies ease the work of farmers, but the question is where do we draw the line? What ag. technologies and practices make food easier and better for the consumer, for the environment, the animals? Does the massive yield and lower price make things better for the customer? With the obesity epidemic, and type 2 diabetes on the rise, I don't think so. Even if the cheaper hamburger or corn syrup frees up some pocket change, you could pay for it in hospital bills when you're older.
I argue the problem with our food system is that the idolatry of money has focused the emphasis on technology on maximizing yields thus maximizing profits, yet this serves the wrong master. We need to and are slowly adding other values to the mix besides profit. Perhaps good health, lower hospital bills, clean air, equal access to healthy food should all be worth attaining with food. Don't stop with money. Make the end result something valuable beyond dollars. It's not the industrial agriculture that's wrong, it's the way industrial agriculture only worries about money.
2. The film also showed some scenes of farm workers eating alone, or driving a tractor, fig-tree-shaker, or other machine. I wondered if they were drawing parallels between the farmers crammed into the box of a tractor doing a tedious job to the cows and pigs trapped in cages in side where it's crowded. Neither one looked particularly excited to be there...
This is a little on how the film affected my day.
Before we watched the film we had our "Salad Dressing Throwdown" where Maggie had us split into two teams and make our own three salad dressings from scratch. And we ate a ton of salad. Read about that here (Kathleen's post,)
After the film we went to Tavern in the Square for Libby's Birthday. It's a restaurant with DELICIOUS Mac&Cheese. Good enough to hit the person next to you. Since we ate salad for lunch, I went crazy and ordered meat for dinner. Come to think of it it was the first time I had beef since Ana and my parents visited in January! Woah. Meat has become a special treat here. On the local food diet, meat is expensive, or rather it is the price of something that gives the farm hands a fair wage and the animal a good life. Plus it's not fed cheap excess subsidized corn, or grown up packed into a tight feedlot or poutlry house to maximize the yield and productivity of a space while damaging everything but the profit margin. Our chicken CSA has been our main meat supply and it gives us enough for about a full chicken once a week. That's a little less meat than a person in 'Merica eats I think. But when you see (and actually pay for) the environmental and health costs it's worth it you won't mind that extra 50cents a pound. Consider this: All four of us on the local Massachusetts food diet did not get sick one day this winter (more than a brief stuffy nose)--None of us have ever spent winter in New England, and none of us got flu shots!
Since it was Libby's birthday, I ordered "Meatloaf Cupcakes" They cut meatloaf in cupcake shapes and wrap it in bacon, and "ice" it with mashed potatoes and onion rings. It looked like cupcakes, and reminded me of the "Bacon-wrapped Bambi" at a friend Jeff's house as he called it, which was way better than the meatloaf at the restaurant. that's more like 'Merica! (Bacon-wrapped Bambi was locally sourced venisin steak with bacon and cost a pretty penny).
It wasn't until about halfway through my second meatloaf cupcake when I remembered the artificially inseminated cows in the film, the castrated piglets from the film, and the mother pigs squeezed into cages so they don't roll over on top of the piglets nursing them for milk. I was eating both of them the pig and the cow in my meatloaf cupcakes. the old quote from Becca Deeds on the Baja trip, "how many animals are you eating today?" came to mind. They tasted so good, but gave me the feeling that I was just perpetuating the system of the good bad and ugly from the film. The restaurant claims to serve only grass-fed and free-range meats, but how much of America's meat fits that category?
I used to say you know the true cost of heating your house in winter when you split, haul, burn, and clean the ashes from the wood yourself. So maybe if every one of us were to raise, feed, slaughter, and prepare a cow instead of just have it wrapped up for us hidden between ketchup and bread at the drive thru, or wrapped beautifully in bacon on a fancy plate, we may understand the true cost of eating meat. A year ago at NuBeginning farm in Virginia I harvested quail. I "did the deed" on 4 of them, watched them twitch, de-feathered, cleaned and packaged em up. The whole bit. It was a powerful time. It felt like the movie Avatar, when he tells the animal "I see you and I thank you." Audrey and Kathleen did this with chickens in the fall up here (Click here to read their stories: Kathleen's and Audrey's)
Some of my neighbors at home made their kids go to see a slaughter at least once in their life so they knew what has to happen for us to eat--something has to die so that we might live. Life is given and sustained through sacrifice. (hint: Jesus)
I'm not a dirty hippie, vegan, or vegitarian--entirely. I'm a Food Justice YAV. I still like a good burger, love me some bacon, some chicken fried chicken, and shrimp 'n grits, but I'm seeing now that it's worth paying for the quality, limiting my meat intake, and knowing where it comes from. And beets and radishes aren't all that bad. Lets face it there are 7 billion human mouths to feed and we're feeding all this grain and food to animals so we can have cheap meat at every meal. Where is justice there? So many people in the world don't get dinner on Libby's birthday, and I'm eating a cow wrapped in bacon shaped like a cupcake, and both of those animals ate enough to feed those hungry people for a long time. Where is justice on my plate? When we really see what's going on, it's clear that we have a lot of fixing to do. Our Daily Bread shows us a little of what's really going on. So stand with me and eat less meat and learn where your meat comes from. See your food animals. Know them and thank them for dying for you, like Avatar.
I challenge you to start going one day a week without meat--OR if you think that's easy, only eat meat once per week. Can you out-do me and become vegetarian? How little meat do you eat? What's holding you back? Leave a comment
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