dragonlady7

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I’ve been reading a lot on Twitter about the huge ICE raid on the poultry processing plant in Mississippi– here’s a link to a news story about it if you haven’t read anything about it, just for background. There are many layers of horror to it– one being that the plant was in the process of unionizing and had just won a big sexual harassment settlement, another being that ICE spent months setting up the raid and quite deliberately neglected to involve any social services to prevent the arrested workers’ children from coming home to empty houses on the first day of school, because the cruelty is the point– and of course the overarching realization that the plant owners basically invited ICE in to take care of their pesky workers-rights problems, and so on.

The major takeaway is, this company, Koch Foods, is terrible in every single way, and is everything any person of decency regardless of their political alignment should deplore. (Another takeaway is that this raid was absolutely scheduled, on behalf of a major donor to Trump’s campaign, to be a campaign event for Trump 2020, because of how much publicity it would attract and how clear a message it sends about this administration’s priorities.) I’ve seen a lot of good analysis of this on Twitter; here’s a good thread, and others are linked to from there. Here’s the thread I read that really got me going. 

I keep thinking about it, though, from the perspective of someone who is a poultry processing worker. That’s what I do, among other things, on my sister’s farm; mostly I’m an eviscerator but I work other places on the line when necessary, mostly plucking, sometimes removing necks, things like that. I wrote a Twitter thread about what this is all making me think about, here, but I don’t have many followers, and so not many people have responded. So I’m going to restate my point here.

Customers ask us all about the chicken. How humanely is it raised. What are the accommodations like for the birds. Sometimes people ask us about how this affects the flavor; do happy chickens taste better? Lots of people want to know what kind of feed the chickens get, if the corn’s GMO. I occasionally have someone angrily demanding to know why the chicken’s not grass-fed. (If you’re curious, chickens aren’t ruminants, so they can’t survive on just grass, and only eat it because they like it; the point of raising them on pasture is not so much to let them eat grass so much as to avoid the really terrible shit you get from the more efficient and yet disgusting confinement operations that are the commercial standard. Now you know.)

Nobody’s ever asked me about the slaughterhouse workers. 

I sometimes volunteer that the birds are processed on-premises, meaning they don’t have to be transported in inhumane conditions to a strange and possibly unsanitary place. People like that, but mostly don’t want to know.

So think about that, as you’re considering cutting meat from your diet, and such. Because all agricultural workers are subject to similar pressures, whether they handle livestock or vegetables. I certainly encourage you to seek out local foodways, and consider sustainability and such. But I urge you to think alongside all that about who processes your food. Who collects the eggs you pay sixty-nine cents for a dozen of. (Hint: human traffickers supply a lot of the workers who staff commercial production chicken egg facilities.) Who harvests your strawberries, who picks your grapes, who picks your tomatoes. You can stop eating meat, but you can’t just entirely stop eating. 

The reason the farm’s eggs cost six bucks a dozen, the reason our chicken is $5.50/lb., isn’t just the organic-certified feed. It’s the fact that the workers want to be there. And the farm doesn’t even pay that well. I would go so far as to say you literally could not pay me enough to process poultry; I do it for love, I do it because I believe in it, I do it because it has to be done and I am rewarded by the sense of community I get. But that’s a choice I’ve made (and one that’s a choice in the first place because of a lot of privileges and advantages I have). 

The decision to source your food locally isn’t just about the environment in terms of carbon footprint, in terms of sustainability– it’s about confronting the hidden human costs of cheap food. 

Maybe it’s time we stopped looking away from those human costs. 

(My advice is to join a CSA or similar (search on localharvest.org to find one near you in the US, or do some web-searching if you don’t know much about it, there’s more of this sort of thing around than you’d think!), or find some way to reconnect to your local food web, or at least try to research who supplies your grocery store, and maybe write some letters about it, or whatever. There’s no perfect answer. But just boycotting Koch foods, or cutting back on eating meat, is just kind of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s the vegetables too; it’s everything.)

(sorry the crosspost stripped all the URLs out; if you click through to the original they're there, and I'll try to come back and edit them into this version, but I kind of spent too long writing this and have to go run errands.)