Back then, Mathers had yet to develop the sangfroid needed to maintain emotional sustainability in a business that saw her send off to slaughter animals she had an emotional connection with. ‘I load the pigs onto the trailer and they are wary at first and then it is another adventure to them,’ she said. ‘And then I hand them over to the abbs (abattoir) and I know what is going to happen to them and what is going to go through their minds and … and …’ she started to struggle for words. ‘And I just start crying. I spend the first twenty minutes driving back home crying. I must have looked a mess.’
LIFE ON THE FARM
I met another pig farmer. One who was constantly criticised for using the term ‘bred free range’ by the free-range movement. Judy Croagh has Western Plains Pork, a brand known for its quality and consistency. Out in the western volcanic plains past Geelong, she raises 50 000 pigs each year. The sows give birth to their piglets in insulated farrowing huts situated in paddocks. At four weeks the piglets are weaned and raised in eco shelters. These are great domed barns covered with translucent roofs and lined with a deep layer of straw in which the piglets tunnel about and do what piglets do—play. The barns are open to the sky at one end, with a low fence keeping them from escaping.
Croagh stood in the middle of the eco shelter with the pigs for a photograph. The curious young pigs began to mob her like teenagers would Justin Bieber or One Direction. The photo shoot done, she climbed over the barrier. ‘When we started out in 1997, we were using the term “bred free range” to try to describe to the market our process,’ she said. ‘This was happening in a vacuum of regulation and industry oversight.’ The fledgling free-range industry were staunch critics, claiming that the term ‘bred free range’ was a derivative of ‘true’ free range and was confusing the market. Recently Judy started using the new Australian Pork Industry Quality Assurance Program definition ‘outdoor bred’.
This was true. The term ‘bred free range’ was, through convenience or ignorance, extrapolated to ‘free range’. I have witnessed scores of butchers and restaurateurs sell bred-free-range product as free range. At the time of writing, there was a well-known butcher who marketed himself as free range. Like many butchers, he claimed all his meat was free range. ‘Just like organic’, ‘free from … antibiotics’ and ‘that for no period of time, the animal has been confined to a cage, pen, stall, crate or feedlot.’ I have seen where his pork comes from and he is telling pork pies. The pork he sells is outdoor bred. The description of outdoor bred from the Australian Pork Industry Quality Assurance Program reads: ‘At weaning piglets move to bedded grow-out housing with adequate feed and water provided where they remain until sale or slaughter. Housing can be permanent or portable structures or outdoor pens with shelter … Pigs may be temporarily confined to pens for routine health treatments and husbandry practices’. This is not ‘just like organic’.
The description of outdoor bred and the standards for organic certification differ at many levels. The use of antibiotics would render a pig no longer organic, for example. Outdoor-bred pigs are almost exclusively bred using artificial insemination—something the organic standards do not recommend. I contacted the butcher concerned. He assured me that he no longer stocked outdoor-bred pork and that he now exclusively stocked free-range pork. I said that didn’t explain why, as a ‘free-range’ butcher, he had stocked outdoor-bred pork. His response was a pause, then, ‘The problem is that you just can’t get enough free-range pork.’ That was tacit admission of a lie. He said that in the eyes of the customer there isn’t much difference. In reality, it comes down to price. True free range is much more expensive than outdoor bred. That is why there are so many free-range pig farmers selling direct to the customer. If there were a middleman, then the meat would be, in most people’s eyes, way too expensive.
The advocates of free-range animal husbandry, however, maintain the difference between the two standards is a matter of chalk and cheese. In so many ways, it is. However, I found myself defending outdoor bred as a way to raise pigs. It is not bad. The pigs were neither agitated nor depressed. They were not chewing each other’s tails off. They were not dirty or smelly. There were no burly blokes throwing piglets in the air.
‘Pigs don’t respond at all well to mistreatment,’ Croagh told me. ‘If you have people on the team who are attentive and handle the animals properly, then the pigs are more productive,’ she explained. ‘Stressed pigs, sick pigs, pigs that are forced into unnatural behaviour, they don’t do as well. I am a farmer and a businesswoman. We need to maximise the return on our investment in feed, which means making sure there is a high level of animal husbandry.’ Croagh has a good number of British and Filipino workers on her farm. She believes they come from cultures where pig farming is respected. ‘We are not a nation with a pig-farming culture,’ she said. ‘Most pigs are raised in intensive feedlots.’ She started to describe it as ‘the other side of pig farming’, then stopped herself. ‘I actually can’t comment on intensive farming. I have never seen it.’
I have. And I don’t like it.
THE FEEDLOT
Several years ago I was writing a story on beef. I was interviewing a senior executive of Certified Australian Angus Beef (CAAB). His company had spent years and invested much in establishing paddock-to-plate traceability of its premium grain-fed beef brand. During the interview he referred to hormone-fed chickens. I knew for a fact that hormones were not used in the Australian chicken industry. Prophylactic antibiotics, yes. As well as a diet that included recycled chicken bits, yes. It was the insistent tone in his voice that alerted me. Knowing he was on the record, was he trying to goad me into propagating a myth about a competitor?
Australian red meat consumption had been falling in favour of white flesh. In 1976 the average Australian ate 66 kilograms of beef and 21 kilograms of lamb each year. By 2011 this had fallen to half:33 kilograms of beef per person and just 9 kilograms of lamb. Over the same period, the consumption of poultry more than tripled. Similarly, Australians doubled the amount of pork they ate, from 12 kilograms per person in 1976 to 25 kilograms in 2011.
This led me to investigate further. I organised a visit to a feedlot in Central Victoria. This was a cattle feedlot that had supplied cattle to Coles. It was also a feedlot fattening animals for a well-known grower of wagyu. I had read about American feedlots in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He wrote: ‘Animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass must be adapted by us … to live on corn, for no other reason than it offers the cheapest calories around’. He writes of appalling conditions where cattle, almost identical to Angus, suffer hideous stomach ulcers, and in which they stand in their own faeces in massive feedlots that create offending sulphurous and ammoniac odours.
What I encountered at that feedlot was quite different. And there is a reason. Much of the food apocalypse literature we read in Australia comes from overseas. We import our food politics. Writers such as Marion Nestle (from the United States), Simon Poole (United Kingdom), Sandor Katz (United States) export quite powerful arguments based on well-researched examples. The only trouble is that the United States and the United Kingdom have quite different food cultures, business models and farming practices to Australia. Milk-inducing hormones are used in the US dairy industry but are not permitted here. While bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, has infected cattle in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, Australia has never had a case. Almost the entire planet is affected with the bee mite varroa that has contributed to, along with systemic pesticides, the dramatic collapse in bee numbers. Bees pollinate 33 per cent of our food crops. At the time of writing, the destructive mite had infected bees as close to Australia as New Zealand. While the Northern Hemisphere, particularly parts of Europe and the United Kingdom, were dusted with the fallout from Chernobyl, Australia was not affected. We don’t have a nuclear industry and therefore don’t have an underlying unease about atomic accidents. Us reading food-scare lit from the
Northern Hemisphere is like Australian kids watching World War II films in the 1970s. These are stories from other countries. And while without drastic food policy changes at every level of government and community we will probably follow the sad path these countries have taken, the stories in imported food-politics literature are not yet our own.
The ICM feedlot outside Wangaratta did not stink. There were no animals standing or lying in faeces. Instead there was a rich smell of fermentation. Some of the feed used, such as corn, is fermented. This emulates the digestive process inside the animal, making the food more nutritious, giving better weight-gain-to-feed ratio. This means the number of kilos eaten by the cow needed to convert to a kilo of muscle or fat. The animals had shade and the floor of the feedlot had ample straw for them to lie down comfortably on. The effluent was collected in ponds and was being treated. It was in no way an ecological or ethical disaster. The animals were well fed and watered.
The general manager, Gina Lincoln, was fresh faced, down to earth and reeked of being a star graduate of an agricultural college. She told me quite openly that part of the feed mix for a good percentage of the animals was made with genetically modified organism (GMO) cottonseed trash. Under Australia’s food labelling laws, the meat from an animal fed on GMO fodder does not need to be labelled as such. The rise of GMO crops in Australia will create a supply for GMO-based feeds for the feedlot industry. GMO corn has been approved in Australia.
Lincoln also told me that, depending on the specification of the client, HGP pellets were inserted into the animal’s ears. This is hormone growth promotant. It makes cows get heavier faster. Like insecticides and other food chemicals, there is a withholding period. With HGP the last of the hormone is metabolised before the cow is slaughtered. Back then, their client Coles was finishing cattle in the feedlot using HGP to help make them fatter faster. Coles was feeding cattle at the feedlot for around seventy days and trying to get as much weight on as possible. I wrote an article for Fairfax on this topic, following my trip to the feedlot, and after publication, they stopped this practice. At the time of writing, Woolworths, however, continues to use HGP in its beef.
Supermarket cattle being brought into a feedlot to fatten for around seventy days increase their overall weight, but it does little to improve the quality of their flesh. The meat does not ‘marble’ with fat during this time. The process sees cattle born and raised on farms then trucked to feedlots. These are concrete-lined pens in which a feed mix is delivered to the animals via truck. ‘The real change in flavour and marbling happens at the 100 to 150 day mark,’ said Lincoln, explaining that marbling describes the fine layers of fat interlacing the muscles. Marbled fat is released into the diner’s mouth during chewing, giving a pleasing and juicy sensation. The aroma of the feed, especially corn, gives a nutty flavour to the meat.
But there was something missing. The cows were not—I would not have used the word before, but since I see the word now used freely by the Australian meat industry—happy. The cows were not head-down grazing. Neither were they all on all fours quietly chewing their cud. They were standing. They didn’t look like a normal herd. I grew up on a dairy farm and was brought up looking at herds. Animals feed or chew cud, sleep or—well, for want of a herdsman argot—‘do cow stuff’. These animals were standing quietly, too quietly. Their heads were a little low, their backs ever so slightly arched. Their tails were ever so slightly lifted. Their back ends were droopy and discharging. This was not all the cows. But to me they looked physically sick and depressed. There is a rule that every hunter, fisher and farmer knows—‘You never eat a sick animal’. It was enough to make me never knowingly eat grain-fed beef again.
13
The D Word
She is over it now. But she was treated deplorably. She had argued a good case and presented very well to the packed Melbourne Town Hall. But she mentioned the D word. It proved to be a chink in her armour and ended up overshadowing her and her team’s overwhelming success, with a nasty public flaying in which ardent vegans used the post-debate Q and A to attack the vegetarian team.
Veronica Ridge had been asked to take part in an Intelligence Squared debate hosted by the Wheeler Centre and St James Ethics Centre (now called The Ethics Centre) at the Melbourne Town Hall. The topic was ‘Animals Should Be Off the Menu’.
Ridge had been asked to take part as former editor of The Age’s Epicure section, a position she had held for several years. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, was a British newspaper man and had previously edited The Scotsman in Edinburgh. He wanted to attract new readers to the section by aligning it more to the ‘food as politics’ sensibilities of the Observer Food Monthly in the United Kingdom. ‘He wanted less making jam and chocolate cakes on the cover and more Michael Pollan and Super Size Me,’ said Ridge, referring to the breakout documentary in which a man eats McDonald’s every day and accepts the offers of larger fries and Cokes to the detriment of his health, and the works of American food activist Michael Pollan. Ridge was serious about the food section, a lift-out dismissed by a former Age editor as the realm of ‘soufflé tasters’.
Back when Ridge was appointed editor, the announcement set the foodie world alight. Ridge has been a vegetarian for most of her life. Ed Charles—proto-blogger and an earlier adopter of technology and social media, who quickly realised its capability of disseminating information—took to his website, tomato.com, to publicly decry that a non-meat eater was appointed to the helm of Australia’s most respected newspaper food section. There were internal ructions as well, with comments made to management.
Of course it did not pose a problem, and why should it? Ridge promoted a plethora of articles that championed ethical meat and pieces looking at artisanal meat product production. This was good news for me as I suddenly had a lot more work, since I had established my credentials as a writer interested in food production more than food consumption. And that includes meat.
The plan for the debate at Melbourne Town Hall was that Ridge would run whip to intellectual heavyweights ethicist Peter Singer and former Citibank vice-president Philip Wollen (who went on to found the Winsome Constance Kindness trust). The trio had mapped out their game plan well before the debate. Singer was going to argue that meat production was a major polluter and contributor to global warming, saying, ‘Livestock production is a bigger contributor to climate change than all transport. Twenty years worth of methane production is seventy-two times more damaging than carbon dioxide.’ He also argued that not eating meat was healthier for humans. ‘Even small portions of red meat are likely to increase your chance of dying, including from cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes,’ he argued, citing a study from Harvard University.
Wollen mounted the animal rights argument. In an impassioned speech, he said, ‘Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in slaughterhouses,’ describing in detail what he witnessed when he visited abattoirs in his former career as a banker. ‘We murder them [animals] at our peril. If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we wouldn’t be having this debate tonight.’
Ridge’s role was to describe the joys of eating meat-free. In their planning meeting, she brought up the subject of dairy. She was concerned that discussing the ethical raising of cows for milk might lose them the support of the vegans in the audience. She felt that they were needlessly creating an Achilles heel in their argument. Singer and Wollen felt it safest to stick directly to debating the topic ‘Animals Should Be Off the Menu’. This meant meat was off the menu. To them, dairy was on the menu but off the table for discussion.
The town hall was packed to capacity, with around 2000 seated in the grand old hall. Audience pre-polling showed that 65 per cent supported the proposition that meat should be off the menu, 22.5 per cent were against, and 12.5 per cent undecided. The atmosphere was rich with a defiant air of anticipation, as if the fans of a reigning football team had landed for an away match in the hometown of a struggling side. It was a social affair
with people waving across the packed floor, couples clambering across those already seated to gaps in the rows; the aroma of stale BO, patchouli and self-righteousness hung in the yellow-lit room. The lights lowered and the debate started.
Singer made a compelling case for a meat-free diet being good for human and planetary health. The first speaker for the negative was Fiona Chambers. She is an ethical pig farmer with a small herd who was one of the founders of the rare-breed farm animal movement in Australia. She reasoned that if we don’t raise rare-breed livestock for meat then they will become extinct. She then linked soil fertility with livestock grazing, saying that healthy, fertile soils were dependent on rotated grazing and the ensuing manure. This discussion is popular in the ethical farming movement but didn’t pass muster in the room stacked with vegetarians. The fumbling of programmes and jiggling of knees suggested the crowd’s lack of appreciation for her argument.
Wollen, the former capitalist turned animal activist, was next and debated with the vehemence of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, the rhythm of his delivery evoking call and response. He whipped the audience into a moral froth.
The second speaker for the negative side was animal scientist Bruce McGregor. Acknowledging the impact of Wollen’s impassioned performance, he began with a self-deprecating line: ‘I’m on a hiding to nothing already,’ he said. ‘But being a St Kilda supporter, I’m used to it.’ This raised a little laugh. He went on to argue that taking animals off the menu would threaten the food security of ‘at least two billion people’. The audience were not having any of that, punctuating the air with derisive calls of ‘legumes’ and ‘grain’.
My Year Without Meat Page 12