Being in the land of Lexington BBQ and being an omnivore of great accomplishment I do love me some pork.  Unfortunately for my peace of mind I read this article from Rolling Stone about the hog processing industry, and Smithfield Foods in particular.  I don’t recommend reading it right before a meal.

The whole article is disturbing, but this excerpt hit home because the operation in question isn’t too far from where I live:

Smithfield’s expansion was unique in the history of the
industry: Between 1990 and 2005, it grew by more than 1,000
percent. In 1997 it was the nation’s seventh-largest pork producer;
by 1999 it was the largest. Smithfield now kills one of every four
pigs sold commercially in the United States. As Smithfield
expanded, it consolidated its operations, clustering millions of
fattening hogs around its slaughterhouses. Under Luter, the company
was turning into a great pollution machine: Smithfield was suddenly
producing unheard-of amounts of pig shit laced with drugs and
chemicals. According to the EPA, Smithfield’s largest
farm-slaughterhouse operation — in Tar Heel, North Carolina —
dumps more toxic waste into the nation’s water each year than all
but three other industrial facilities in America. (Emphasis mine).

Ain’t that nice?  There’s a whole lot more about Smithfield’s North Carolina operation in the article and it’s enough to make any normal person sick, if not by the descriptions of the pig crap then by the polluting practices of the industry.  Here’s another excerpt to get an idea of what you’re in for:

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle
is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and
terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They
become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters
microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will
rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory
pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and
are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds —
oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would
likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying
until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be
slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many
drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own
power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally
killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit
its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a
host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide,
carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals.
In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens
that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella,
cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit
can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons —
cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single
slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run
thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions
between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn
piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the
lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods
have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate
swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and
spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the
industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn
hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow
mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be
punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the
liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can
inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding,
accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the
lagoon in all directions.

and

Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a
theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In
North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2
million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million
gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the
Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia,
Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of
the Clean Water Act — the third-largest civil penalty ever levied
under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of
Smithfield’s annual sales.

and

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming
happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by
a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of
effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina.
It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history,
more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years
earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched
it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen
miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea,
every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the
millions.

It’s hard to conceive of a fish kill that size. The kill began
with turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and
dying. Then it spread in patches along the entire length and
breadth of the river. In two hours, dead and dying fish were
mounded wherever the river’s contours slowed the current, and the
riverbanks were mostly dead fish. Within a day dead fish completely
covered the riverbanks, and between the floating and beached and
piled fish the water scintillated out of sight up and down the
river with billions of buoyant dead eyes and scales and white
bellies — more fish than the river seemed capable of holding. The
smell of rotting fish covered much of the county; the air above the
river was chaotic with scavenging birds. There were far more dead
fish than the birds could ever eat.

Spills aren’t the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste
lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999,
Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste
into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers.
Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several
feet underwater. Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide
closing over the region’s waterways, converging on the
Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a long,
well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained
behind. Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the
land. Beaches located miles from Smithfield lagoons were slathered
in feces. A picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead
pig three miles off the North Carolina coast.

Reading this reminds me about the time in college I was assigned "The Jungle" as part of an English Lit course.  I couldn’t eat burgers for a while, that’s for sure.

BBQ anybody?