Nightlight News

(This is a continuation of Friday's post, for the newbies)
There are the pigs that I knew like Estabon, Boris, and Pearl. And then there are the caged, tube fed pigs.

Those pigs, and the people that work for the companies that raise them, are way bad off. Recently Smithfield farms decided that instead of storing their pigs in cages, they will now be in pens. Well, that's good, I guess, that the pigs don't live in cages their whole life, but they still never get to root up the ground ever in their life. Their basic instincts, like the mother pig's innate desire to build a nest before birthing, are denied in favor of concrete floors and "sanitation". In the concrete pen, they are still stressed out, and at least the cages kept the stressed-out pigs getting poked with needles and fed through tubes all the time from biting each other. Pigs don't bite each other in the field. Sure, they fight over tasty grain, which supplements their diet when the acorns aren't dropping, and squeal loudly when a bigger pig takes their spot in the food line. But they are simply establishing a social hierarchy, which is good, natural, pig-like behavior.

In that picture above you are looking at two different things - the buildings where the hogs are housed, and then the gigantic hog-waste lagoon, where the vast quantities of manure that are produced by the thousands of pigs at that Sampson County farm are housed. That lagoon, and the waste housed inside of it, is just one of many lagoons that have been causing problems for North Carolina. Ever since Hurricane Fran swamped the lagoons and sent the waste into the Neuse River, there has been a continuous public outcry and every stakeholder involved is trying to figure out the hog waste problem.

You've got Progress Energy saying they can make electricity by burning hog waste, which I find puzzling only because it seems like burning hog waste would produce two things that are already big problems - greenhouse gases and awful smells. Nevertheless, biomass, which is the oft-used term to describe any biological food source, esp. materials from living or recently living organisms, like plants and animals, is a popular conception of late. North Carolina is being touted as the Saudi Arabia of biomass, which I suppose means the Bushes will be making frequent visits to our shit empire, shmoozing with our Imams of Hog Feces. Or it means every time me and the folx take a day trip to Duplin county so we can play dominoes and go swimming, we are not smelling the offensive offal of porcine detention camps, but rather the richly sick smell of energy and money.

It's not just the piggies that have fucked up lives - the workers in the plant are also screwed. We have in Tar Heel, NC the largest hog processing plant in the entire world, owned by the giant agribusiness monster Smithfield Foods. The largely Latino labor force works long hours, and at that plant in particular, efforts to unionize have been affected negatively by Smithfield's intimidation tactics for some time. On Martin Luther King Holiday of this year, the Smithfield workers walked out. Check out what Nation editor Katrina Vanden Huevel had to say.

The rights of the workers and the pigs they dissect at alarming speeds are in dispute. It doesn't mean I have stopped eating pork products, only that you won't catch me ever knowingly eating any pork product that came from Smithfield. I seek out my pork from local growers. And this year my buddy George is gonna give me a box of produce every week, also known as a CSA (community supported agriculture). A CSA is like a weekly produce subscription, but this year I am lucky enough to be getting pig meat every other week in my fruit and vegetable box - bacon, sausage, pork chops, maybe even some of that shoulder (the source of the most succulent barbeque with that sweet tangy vinegar sauce that I make at fuggin home in the Eastern NC tradition!). YES.