In the spring of 2007, more than a million panicked pet-lovers visited the blog to which I contribute as part of my work as a syndicated pet-care columnist. They were looking for information they could not find elsewhere: Was the food they bought going to kill their pets?
What had started as quiet recall notice, meriting little more than a short story deep in the Wall Street Journal, had become a media firestorm. As part of the team of reporters that first sounded the alarm that death of thousands of pets were linked not only to each other but also to their food, I was right in the middle of it.
While the corporations and the FDA minimized the deaths and the ramifications, we continued to report on it all. We realized from the first that the pet deaths were, to appropriate the title of Marion Nestle's important new book, "The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine," just the beginning.
The melamine put into food by rogue operators in China turned up in food fed to hogs. To chickens. To farmed fish. In infant formula. And now, eggs.
Which brings me to California's Proposition 2, the Humane Farming Initiative.
I'm not a vegetarian, and my dogs and cats certainly are not. But just because I have no problem with humanely, sustainably raised and slaughtered food animals (or, I need to note here, with ethical hunting) doesn't mean I believe we should treat living beings like cogs in a machine, and like trash when we're done with them. Nor do I believe the direction corporate agribiz has taken is good for us as the end consumer of this chain of cruelty.
But the No. 1 reason I support an end to factory farming is not because I care about the animals (and the workers) in this sick and immoral system -- although I very much do -- but rather because what has come to pass for food production is a disaster for us all -- the animals, those who do the hard, dangerous and dehumanizing labor of factory farming, all of us as consumers and indeed the entire big blue marble we live on, the world we're finally realizing we're in a desperate fight to save as a viable place for us to live.
In short: We've taken a perfect system of farming that mimics how things are meant to be, and perverted it beyond all measure.
The melamine mess was just one of the symptoms, but there are many, many others.
How did we get here?
Ther short version: In "old-fashioned" farming, the land was rotated between crops and livestock. The livestock grazed gently on the land and returned their rich manure to it, and in so doing prepared it for the crops that would grow on it in time. But after World War II, we had a lot of ammonium nitrate left over from the production of bombs. What else is this stuff good for besides exploding? It's a powerful fertilizer, and cheap.
The next explosion you heard was the industrial revolution of agriculture.
Since food animals were no longer needed to enrich the fields, it made economic sense to put them into concentrated environments and feed them a portion of the extraordinary yields the new fertilizers helped to produce. Eventually, of course, these feeds because "scientifically" enhanced with everything from leftover doughnuts to melamine. Crop farms became bigger and so, too, did livestock operations -- all thanks to the seemingly endless supply of cheap fossil fuels.
Corporate agribiz continued to refine the formula, with the aim to grow food animals as cheaply and quickly as possible, in conditions that were concerned only with keeping an economically significant portion of the population alive and producing without regard for their needs as living, sentient beings. To help with this, these animals had to be constantly provided with another scientific miracle: modern antibiotics.
No one said much. After all, the new agricultural miracles brought the cost of food down to the point where people were spending less money relative to income feeding their families than ever before in history -- and less time preparing it, too.
What could be wrong with this? We voted our assent with every cling-wrapped bloodless package of meat we picked up in our shiny-clean supermarkets, every carton of perfect white eggs, every bright package of processed food with ingredient lists a mile long and completely foreign to us, but sounding oh-so scientifically reassuring.
But the time bomb was ticking, and a few alarms were sounding.
In 1996, the Raleigh News and Observer won a Pulitzer Prize for its series, "Boss Hog," which looked at the shift to factory farming in hog farming, complete with its lagoons of toxic hog waste. Yes, you read that right: Concentrated animal production turned the rich gift of manure into a concentrated environmental hazard that kills everything it comes in contact with, including and perhaps especially the drinking supplies of the nation.
More recently, the rise in antibiotic resistant disease -- including the return of tuberculosis -- has been traced in large part to routine use and overuse of antibiotics in factory farms.
All that cheap food came with a big price, and the bill is coming due now. And that's true even if, as a co-worker so colorfully put it in asking me about Proposition 2, "I can't see a reason why I should give a fuck about a bunch of stupid chickens. I mean, who the fuck cares?"
I care, and not just because I think we should be better than to get our food through torture, when we know there is another way.
When you say these things, the voices of corporate agribusiness tell you that you just don't understand, you silly city dweller. A reporter friend of mine who was doing a story on backyard chickens was told by a poultry expert at the University of California, Davis, that there was no such thing as a factory farm, and that the concentrated poultry operations were geared to the maximum production of eggs -- something that couldn't happen if the chickens weren't cared for adequately. ("Adequately" is a long way from "optimally" from a chicken's point of view, it should be noted.)
Others argue that if we force corporate agriculture to change its ways, the cost of food will go up and the production of food will move off-shore. This is a war we have already lost -- surrendered, really, in the name of quick profit. The increasing cost and scarcity of fossil fuel is already changing the equation of food production, even though much of it is already offshore, in places like China, where the eggs are testing positive for the melamine poison they put in their animal feeds to cheat the protein readings, poison that has already killed thousands of pets and even the most tragic of victims, China's own infants. (And by the way: Does anyone else have a more than sneaking suspicion about what's really behind the sudden and dramatic increase in kidney diseasein American children?)
Enough.
We need reform of our food supply system, and voting to stop the cruelty of factory farming is as a good a place as any to draw the line in the sand. The days of agribiz-knows-and-anything-goes must end. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration need to stop dancing to the tune of their corporate masters and start looking out for the people who pay them ... us.
It's time to speak up and say no.
No to lagoons of waste that pollute our precious water supplies.
No to the routine use of antibiotics that keeps animals alive in unlivable conditions, and is the leading reason why we now are dealing with "superbugs."
No to the mind-blowing cruelty of an industry that treats living animals like widgets, to be used, abused and discarded at will.
And that's why I'm voting Yes on Proposition 2, because I long ago stopped supporting the cruelty -- I will not buy factory farmed meat, dairy or eggs -- and because I am done trusting the corporations who run our government to care about anything more than their bottom line.
If you're in California, join with me. Because ... it's not just about the chickens.
(A version of this appeared on the Pet Connection blog.)