CAFOs, The Chilling Effect, and Saying No

This is the second part of my "WiLA" series.

There is a picture I wanted to get for this post specifically, but I couldn't convince myself that the trek to obtain said picture would be worth the damage to my old car.

The picture I wanted would have been taken from the side of the freeway, off of I-5, near the Coalinga exit. Who knows what I'm talking about? That's a stretch of interstate that all drivers do their damnedest to speed through, rolling up their windows to avoid the oppressive stench. There's a stockyard there, a collection of thousands upon thousands of cattle, and the choking stench of their lot is well known by travelers and detected early.

When I was a kid in the car on the long drives from Sacramento to Santa Monica, I remember the stink yard amid the desolation along Interstate 5; farther than half-way, but still with time to go before the Grapevine.

What's going on there, 220 miles away from where I live now (the distance being the reason I didn't make a day trip just for a few pictures), is a CAFO: a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.

The lot outside of Coalinga is one of few large holding places for cattle that are being pumped full of corn products, made to live their lives ankle deep in their own feces and crammed together like an uptown 6 train at 7:30 in the morning, before being sent off to slaughter.

CAFOs arose out of a practical need: if you have an entity placing an order for x amount of beef on a regular basis, and to have x amount of beef regularly, the only way that'll be possible is concentrate the cattle and bulk up the population.

Don't worry--there's plenty of blame to go around. Cattle aren't meant to live in places like Auschwitz (consolidating cattle ranching: boo). The purchasing power of fast-food giants is too great (fast-fooding of the market: boo). None of this would be happening if people would stop giving money to fast-food giants for sustenance needs (people constantly eating fast-food: boo).

All of these topics stem from the film Food Inc, a well made movie about the realities of the majority of the food available in the grocery store and vast majority of restaurants. I don't really want to beat points made in the film into the ground, like about how the government subsidizing the corn industry makes corn so cheap that we tend to use it in everything, or like how the purchasing power of the fast food giants drives prices down to a point that they can offer customers in the working-poor segment of the American population food far cheaper than non-processed and healthier counterparts. They do a better job with that in the movie.

I would like to type a few words about Monsanto, about how they own the rights to some huge percentage of seeds used in America, and about how they don't allow farmers to use the same seeds from year to year, forcing them to buy seeds each season; about how their corporate executives tend to end up in places of power in American government positions with the task of overseeing their old company. But I can't, or won't, anyway.

Not that I think I'm all that important, but, no matter how small my audience, I am using a public forum, and Monsanto tends to sue anybody who makes public claims against them. Even when they know they'll lose, they've been known to sue. That kind of thing sets the tone. Litigation ruins farmers and outspoken rabble-rousers.

The food-giant industry has gotten their hands on the law books and changed the libel laws in many states, creating so-called "Veggie Libel Laws". It makes it possible for those large multi-national corporations to sue people who utter disparaging words about their company or products. Usually the person doing the suing must show proof of their claims--not so in this new world order. It is the defendant's responsibility to prove their claims that disparaged the giant food company who's suing them. The beef industry even sued Oprah. After a few years of litigation Oprah won, but still refuses to discuss the topic.

When speech is protected by law, but litigation stands in the way of debate and stifles discussion, that's the Chilling Effect. The threat of being sued quiets the public.

Not that I'm actually scared of Monsanto or the beef-lobby, but I'm better safe than sorry...being a "literary blogger" doesn't pay anything, and I can't afford litigation of any kind. (Not yet...Pre-Paid Legal, you ready for a fight?)

One reason I wanted to get this discussion down in the blogosphere and later on paper is because the largest purchaser of beef in America, and maybe the world, have their very first establishment right in our backyard, in Downey:



It is a restaurant from which I'll never eat. I would've avoided it before seeing the Food Inc., but now, certainly. Their purchasing demands reshaped how food is engineered. Their hiring tactics of making it a Fordian factory assembly line, with unskilled workers doing the same action monotonously for hours, set the bar for food establishments around the country, and set the wage scale for all food workers dramatically low.

Don't get me wrong, I've eaten plenty of fast-food in my life. In the past seven or eight years, though, I've made a conscious effort to avoid it. While living in New York I never visited a White Castle; while living in Austin I never went to a Whattaburger; and being back in California? I'm sorry, but I never go to In-N-Out anymore. In that time span I've had something from one of those places at most five times, mostly in the midst of old friends and alcohol.

I'm just one man, trying to make some decisions: they're right for me, but they may not be for you.



When I was young my parents favored Burger King and Carl's Jr. over McDonald's, and later when I was in High School and college I tended towards taco/burrito places, Wienerschnitzel, and sandwich shops. It's because of these reasons I can honestly say I've never had a Big Mac.