Thousands Support Campaign To Pull Smithfield Pork In 22 Cities

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/5628

Thousands Support Campaign To Pull Smithfield Pork In 22 Cities - 04/04/07

By Doug Cunningham

Thousands of people in 22 cities have signed petitions calling on the Harris Teeter food chain to pull Smithfield pork from its shelves because of alleged mistreatment of workers at Smithfield. Workers, clergy and civil rights leaders and consumers are joining the campaign to get Harris Teeter supermarkets to find another source for its pork and house brand bacon. Other supermarkets carrying Smithfield meats are being targeted by the campaign against Smithfield in New York City, Wisconsin, Indiana, Chicago and Boston.

AUDIO story here: http://www.laborradio.org/files/lo/winsheadlines.ram

[mcscajun]

1. Great idea! If it's not in the supermarkets people will look to alternate brands.

I read this article in Rolling Stone a while back, and Smithfield products have been permanently off my shopping list ever since.

Just a few key excerpts that stayed with me (I've bolded the particularly frightening or revolting facts):

Looking down from the plane, we watch as several of Smithfield's farmers spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks like a public fountain. Lofted and atomized, the shit is blown clear of the company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison-control center and described her symptoms. "Ma'am," the poison-control officer told her, "the only symptoms of hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately." When you fly over eastern North Carolina, you realize that virtually everyone in this part of the state lives close to a lagoon.

-snip-

If the temperature and wind aren't right and the lagoon operators are spraying, people in hog country can't hang laundry or sit on their porches or mow their lawns. Epidemiological studies show that those who live near hog lagoons suffer from abnormally high levels of depression, tension, anger, fatigue and confusion. "We are used to farm odors," says one local farmer. "These are not farm odors." Sometimes the stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl back into the house.

That has happened several times to Julian and Charlotte Savage, an elderly couple whose farmland now abuts a Smithfield sprayfield -- one of several meant to absorb the shit of 50,000 hogs. The Savages live in a small, modular kit house. Sitting in the kitchen, Charlotte tells me that she once saw Julian collapse in the yard and ran out and threw a coat over his head and dragged him back inside. Before Smithfield arrived, Julian's family farmed the land for the better part of a century. He raised tobacco, corn, wheat, turkeys and chickens. Now he has respiratory problems and rarely attempts to go outside.

-snip-

In addition to such impressive disasters, corporate hog farming contributes to another form of environmental havoc: Pfiesteria piscicida, a microbe that, in its toxic form, has killed a billion fish and injured dozens of people. Nutrient-rich waste like pig shit creates the ideal environment for Pfiesteria to bloom: The microbe eats fish attracted to algae nourished by the waste. Pfiesteria is invisible and odorless -- you know it by the trail of dead. The microbe degrades a fish's skin, laying bare tissue and blood cells; it then eats its way into the fish's body. After the 1995 spill, millions of fish developed large bleeding sores on their sides and quickly died. Fishermen found that at least one of Pfiesteria's toxins could take flight: Breathing the air above the bloom caused severe respiratory difficulty, headaches, blurry vision and logical impairment. Some fishermen forgot how to get home; laboratory workers exposed to Pfiesteria lost the ability to solve simple math problems and dial phones; they forgot their own names. It could take weeks or months for the brain and lungs to recover.

[Heidi]

2. There's plenty the packers can do about H2S, if they _choose_ to.

In my experience, though, they don't do anything unless they're _forced_ to.
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