Caging The Hand That Feeds: Estabrook, Cook, and Pollan

These three articles (including the infographic) expose the disturbing underbelly of the food industry. Each of them generally focuses on one particular food item: Estabrook on tomatoes, Cook on chickens, and Pollan on the consumption of meat in general. All three of them unveil details that most of are not aware of in the food industry, and hope not necessarily to turn us off of eating those products, but to notify us of the places from which they came and describe why others may or may not have chosen to boycott those goods.

Estabrook: Estabrook became curious about the process involved in tomatoes getting from the field to our plate when he witnessed a green, unripened tomato fly out of a moving truck and bounce along unharmed. His interest piqued, he began researching the commercially produced tomato and learning its differences from the tiny, misshapen, delicately soft tomatoes he grew in his own Vermont garden. What he found was an astonishing expose of the forced labor of migrant workers in slave-like conditions, and chemical process to make the identical, enormous red tomatoes that have become the second largest item of produce Americans consume.

(Estabrook). The appearance should be scarier that it is appealing, they are picked from the ground looking like a granny smith apple and then sprayed with ethylene gas to gain their striking red hue. This is after they are sprayed with any number of pesticides, and picked by horrendously underpaid migrant workers who live in near slum conditions right by the fields. After all this, the tomatoes are genetically designed to look beautiful and have the ability to be hurled off a truck on the highway and stay intact, but they don’t even have the taste of real tomatoes.

Cook: The infographic is a picture of a chicken with some blurbs around it about chickens, but it is succinct and to the point with the hard hitting information. Not only are the chickens virtually tortured to death before they even get to the part of the assembly line that is meant to kill them, but the workers handling the chickens and the equipment on which they are processed are nearly as much at risk as the chickens are. It goes through the different positions in the assembly line, and the dangers associated with each, from the occasionally poisonous gases floating around in the air, or slipping a dull knife, or slipping in the accumulation of waste on the floor, or getting sick from the accumulation of filth the workers are surrounded in. Apparently chickens are not the only casualties in the cramped, hyper mechanized chicken meat factories.

Pollan: The Pollan article was by far the lengthiest and most philosophical of them all. Pollan goes to great lengths to describe the particularities of one’s decision to eat meat regularly, regardless of where it came from, or to only eat meat farmed humanely, or to forgo the consumption of meat entirely. Pollan’s main line of thinking goes along the line of similarities/dissimilarities between animals and humans. Mainly, that of sentience and an overall conscience. It is obvious that animals can feel pain just as humans can, but is it still wrong to kill them since they don’t have a soul, or a personality, or any perceivable values like a human might have? He points out that we are most likely to make these judgments when we are aware of the suffering the animals have gone through, but what if we are witness to the fact that they were taken care of and appeared to be happy when they died? Pollan noted “In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too” when he visited an open-pasture farm where the animals were basically free to roam and then were slaughtered in the most humanely way possible. Still, abstinence from meat entirely brings about the fact that animals die in many of the processes involved in harvesting organic, vegetarian fare, like combines that harvest wheat constantly killing field mice under their rotors. Maybe, as Pollan cites yet another whose has given thought to this issue, “…Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody.”

These sources all have similar things to say about the food industry. There is a serious disconnect in the food item in its “natural state,” and when it is on our plate in front of us. Ignorance is apparently bliss, so if we read about tomatoes or cows in their ideal, native state, then blink a few times and they appear on our plate, our conscience is no worse for the wear. However, if the veil is lifted and we have full transparency on the worker trimming the beak off a live chicken with a hot wire long before it is actually going to be slaughtered, suddenly we have this guilt that this animal which we previously considered to be some inanimate object in a biology book is now being tortured and expressing pain. Suddenly we feel as if this chicken is important, the saddest chicken in the world which we have to singlehandedly save. Pollan concludes “were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it [the processing of food] this way.” Wherever your sentiments may lie in the processing and handling of meat, produce, or anything that takes more than a few steps to get to you the consumer, the people in charge want you to know as little of it as possible so you get the food in your stomach, not nagging at the back of your mind.