A Mysterious Foam That Can Create Explosions on Midwestern Hog Farms

My friend and colleague Sean tipped me off to an article about a mysterious foam that grows in some hog farm manure pits, seen here in this remarkably disgusting photo. This foam traps methane gas, which can then explode. According to Brian Keirn, who wrote the report for Wired.com (here), six farms have exploded since 2009. The effects of the foam, which is a problem on one out of four hog farms in the midwest, are clear, but why some farms develop the foam and others do not is still unclear. One theory traces the foam to the increasing use of distillers' grain in the pigs' diets, although antibiotic use, changes in water use, and genetic modifications to pigs themselves are all on the table as possible contributors.

Feral Pigs in New York State

The New York Times ran an article (here) on March 11, 2012 about the wild-living pig problem in New York's Champlain Valley. These pigs now occupy five of the state's sixty-two counties and appear to be thriving in this agricultural region. The article, by Lisa Foderaro, notes the fear that these animals might eventually reach Adirondack Park, where they could do tremendous damage to this wilderness area.

Much of the article concerns the difficulties involved in capturing these pigs, seen in this New York State Department of Environmental Conservation night-vision photo. The source of these animals is unknown, but it is likely that these wild-living pigs are a mix of domestic livestock or pet pigs that escaped or were released and Eurasian wild boars brought to the state as a game animal. In Pig I devote my concluding chapter to wild-living pigs, a growing problem throughout the United States, as marking the return of the repressed. Given what I've learned about wild-living pigs, I'm not all that optimistic about the long-term success of efforts to control these animals in rural, agricultural areas of New York.

The Visibility and Invisibility of Pigs, Part One: Pigs in the City

I have contributed a blog post about the visibility and invisibility of pigs in the city to HumaneSpot.org, the web resource of the Humane Resource Council. You can find a link to it here. I'll have a second part about the sites and sights of slaughter sometime around the first of April.

Whole Hog, A Film by Joe York

My friend Jonathan called my attention to a wonderful documentary on barbecue culture in Tennessee, available (here) on the website for the Southern Foodways Alliance. The forty-minute-long film by Joe York focuses on Ricky Parker, the pit master at B.E. Scott's Bar-B-Que in Lexington, Tennessee. Well worth a watch if you have the time.

While on the Southern Foodways Alliance site, also check out their publications, including the excellent Cornbread Nation books of southern food writing, and recipes, such as this one for pork stuffed pork chops. If you are interested in the food and culture of the American South, whether you are a southerner or not, you should join the SFA.

1829 Recipe for Curing Hams

I took a look at a grocers' manual today at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. and thought I would share with you its recipes for Virginia ham. Have fun with this project!

"To Cure Hams as is Practiced in Virginia. Take six pounds of fine salt, three pounds of brown sugar, or three pints of molasses, and one pound of salt petre powdered; mix all these together; to serve for twenty hours; rub each ham well all over with this mixture, and pack them down in a cask or tub, and let them so remain for five or six days; then turn them, and sprinkle some salt slightly over them, and so let them remain five or six days longer, then add brine or pickle strong enough to bear an egg, and let them remain covered with it for a month, when they will be fit to smoke. Hams cured after this manner will be sweet and good for any length of time."

"Another Method. For three hams, pound and mix together, half a peck of salt, half an ounce of salt prunella, four ounces of salt petre, and four pounds of course sugar, rub the hams well with this, and lay what is the spare over them, let them lie three days, then hang them up. Take the pickle in which the hams were, put water enough to cover the hams, with more common salt, until it will bear an egg, then boil and skim it well, and put it in the salting tub, and the next morning put in the hams; keep them down the same as pickled pork; in a fortnight take them out of the liquor, rub them well with the brine, and hang them up to dry."

from Willliam Beastall, A useful guide, for grocers, distillers, hotel & tavern-keepers, and wine and spirit dealers, of every denomination; : being a complete directory for making and managing all kinds of wines and spirituous liquors; containing the most approved and valuable receipts, 1st. For making artificial and imitation wines, brandies, rum, and geneva. 2nd. For lowering brandy, rum, and geneva down to proof. 3d. For brewing and managing ale, beer, porter, cider, and vinegar. 4th. For making and distilling all kinds of French and English cordials. 5th For salting, curing, pickling, and preserving beef, pork, and fish. 6th For making the best pickles and preserves, and putting them up for sale, according to the London plan. 7th. For preserving fruits and vegetables, fresh and good, throughout the year. Many of these receipts are from manuscripts, and have never before been published. The whole forming the most complete body of useful and valuable information on this subject, ever presented to its readers. (New York: Published by the author, 1829), p. 306.

Pigs in the Supreme Court

The New York Times reports (here) on Monday's Supreme Court decision that unanimously struck down a California law that prevented the slaughter of non-ambulatory animals. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion, which held that the Federal Meat Inspection Act (a result, in part, of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle back at the start of the twentieth century) preempted the state law. Kagan's opinion focused on pigs, with the justice calculating that between 100,000 and one million pigs annually become unable to walk after being delivered to slaughterhouses. Under the California law--one prompted by a Humane Society of the United States undercover investigation of animals being kicked, dragged, and prodded to slaughter--these "downer animals" would have to be immediately euthanized and not killed for consumption. The Supreme Court's decision puts paid to the idea, put forth by U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, in support of the California law, that "States are free to decide which animals may be turned into meat." The current system, in which federal meat inspectors decide what is done with "downers," remains in place. By the way, the USDA estimates that over 28 million hogs will be slaughtered in the first quarter of 2012 in the United States.

Smithfield, NAFTA, and Mexico

David Bacon has a long investigative piece (here) in the January 23rd issue of The Nation that shows the implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for farmers in Veracruz, Mexico. Although you wouldn't know it from the title--"How U.S. Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration"--the entire essay focuses on transformations in the North American pork industry. In short, when NAFTA opened up Mexican markets to pork imports from U.S. companies like Smithfield, Mexican pork prices dropped 56 percent and approximately 4,000 Mexican pig farms had to shut down, displacing workers and devastating local economies. This in turn fueled migration to the U.S., both illegal and legal through the H2-A visa program that allowed U.S. agricultural employers to bring workers into the country on employment contracts. Ironically, many of these Veracruzano pig farmers and slaughterhouse workers wound up in North Carolina, where they got jobs in Smithfield's Tar Heel slaughterhouse.

Bacon's well-researched article looks at efforts to unionize the Tar Heel plant and the anti-immigrant climate and crackdowns by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that have subsequently driven many of these Mexican workers from North Carolina. The photo above, one that accompanies the on-line version of Bacon's article, is of a market in North Carolina named for and catering to these Mexican migrants, although many of these businesses have lost customers as they have fled the state.

Although it is less central to the article, Bacon also examines the environmental and economic effects of large scale pig farming operations in Mexico, especially those at the plant known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico in Veracruz's Perote valley, one now owned and operated by Smithfield. Throughout he is interested in activism on both sides of the border dedicated to improving people's living and working conditions, activism that has to be transnational because it is responding to global trade and transnational corporations. Overall, this is a great read and contains material I wish I'd been able to include in PIG, although I do tell similar stories about the implications of the expansion of industrial-scale pig farming for local communities and traditions in North America and throughout the globe.