Last night’s winner on Top Chef served grilled shrimp with a pickled chili salad and miso smoked bacon. The dish looked delicious, and who can blame the judges for going with the clear winner: bacon. What self-respecting meat eater doesn’t love the salty, crispy stuff? On a recent episode of Iron Chef America, Cat Cora referred to maple and brown sugar bacon as “pig candy,” which I find both hilarious and a little disgusting. Regardless, one thing is clear: many of us freaking love bacon.
Here’s the bad news: Smithfield Farms, the world’s largest hog producer (based, regrettably, in my home state of North Carolina) is responsible for true environmental injustice in rural communities in NC and IA…and now they’re expanding to Europe. Grist reports (emphasis mine):
In the 1990s, Smithfield perfected the meat industry’s infamous “vertical integration” strategy that it’s now unveiling in Eastern Europe. In an old-school meat market, packers bought livestock from independent farmers. But starting in the early ’90s in the United States, dominant meat packers began to raise vast numbers of their own animals, stuffing them into concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs).
In doing so, they put independent farmers in direct competition with [Smithfield's] own livestock operations — a game that the meat packer usually wins. Farms go out of business in droves, unable to sustain themselves on the low prices offered by the packers; survivors scale up, mimicking the packers’ intensive techniques. That is, they CAFOize, using debt to erect large confinement buildings into which they stuff thousands of hogs. Most of them essentially cede their independence, working under contracts wherein the packers supply the feed and the hogs.
The trends now playing out in Poland has already flattened small farmers in Iowa and North Carolina. When Smithfield first bulled its way into Poland in 1999, after buying an old state-run processing plant, it declared its intention to make Poland “the Iowa of Europe.”
