Last year, a bunch of students at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got tired of the
industrial dreck served up in the cafeteria. They discovered that the
landscape around them was producing some amazing, chemical-free meat
and produce and set about figuring out how to get some in school dining
halls.
Led by seniors Sally Lee and David Hamilton, they declared
themselves FLO Food (FLO = fair, local, organic), and began negotiating
with Campus Dining Services in earnest. CDC took them seriously and
negotiated respectfully, but a key gap in understanding between the two
groups quickly emerged.
CDC, it turned out, had listed Smithfield Foods — the world’s
largest hog grower and pork packer — as a “sustainable” company.
That’s because Smithfield runs the globe’s largest hog-processing plant
— 32,000 hogs meet their end there daily — in Tar Heel, N.C., 110
miles away. CDC defined any producer within 150 miles as “sustainable.”
The students found out that CDC was spending $20,000 per month on
Smithfield products. That inspired the FLO students to research exactly
what sort of company was benefiting from their food dollars, giving
rise to an extraordinary event on campus March 5 called “People, Power,
and Pork.”
Honestly, it was the most inspiring public event I’ve attended in years.
The event took place on a warm evening on the main quad of UNC’s
leafy, attractive campus. It opened with a free barbecue, sponsored by
the
Slow Food’s Triangle convivium.
The barbecue featured a hog raised by Cane Creek Farm,
a small farm
located just outside of Chapel Hill specializing in pasture-based pork,
chicken, and beef. I didn’t manage to push ahead of hundreds of hungry
college students before the ‘cue ran out, but I know from experience
that Cane Creek produces spectacular pork.
But this was no local-food-rocks, let’s-feel-good-about-ourselves
event. After dinner, the gathering moved to a large classroom indoors,
where the FLO-Fooders had managed to bring together players in
Smithfield’s global hog chain that the company would prefer remain
invisible: workers from the Tar Heel plant, and people who live in
Duplin County, a predominately African-American area where Smithfield
and its suppliers raise nearly 2.2 million hogs each year.
(Last year, I profiled
Iowa’s most hog-intensive county, Hardin, home to comparatively modest
1 million confined hogs. It was heartbreaking and disgusting to
experience the effect of such
concentration on the landscape, the air, and people’s lives.)
Duplin resident Devon Hall testified to the horror of living close
to knock-you-over stench and toxic hog waste. Smithfield workers
including Marvin Steele told of the pork giant’s abysmal disregard for
worker safety and ruthless, ongoing union-busting effort.
While these speakers delivered devastating indictments against
industrial meat production, two others offered a different vision for
pork: Eliza MacClean, owner-farmer of above-mentioned Cane Creek Farm;
and Jennifer Curtis, of NC Choices, a group trying to break down market obstacles to pastured hog production in an area dominated by Smithfield.
Several hundred students packed the hall, engaged and ready to take action.
The event left me energized to dig deep into these stories — hope
and resistance amid the naked brutalities of industrial agriculture. I
salute FLO Food for delivering such an inspiring, informative
presentation.