Panic over California’s pork reform exposes everything wrong with the meat industry.

Source The New Republic

By Jan Dutkiewicz

Americans love few things more than bacon. American media outlets love few things more than running stories about bacon shortages. In 2012, in the face of drought and record-high corn prices, one headline predicted a “Porkpocalypse.” In 2014, outlets fretted over the outbreak of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, which killed millions of piglets around the world. In 2020, the nation was deluged with stories about meat supply chains disrupted as the outbreak of Covid-19 in meatpacking plants sickened workers and shut down slaughterhouses. And now, as California prepares to implement wide-ranging standards mandating more humane housing for animals like egg-laying chickens and pigs, the country’s top outlets have been filled with dire predictions about the coming “bacon apocalypse.”

This panic is different from prior ones. Production costs for hog producers and the price of pork for consumers could actually go up this time—unlike with prior fearmongering, when the shortages never materialized. In part, that’s because this piece of legislation is different from prior state legislations intended to reform factory farming: It would change not only how California’s pork producers need to raise their pigs but how any company in any state selling meat to California’s 40 million residents needs to raise them.This relies on so-called gestation crates: individually confining metal cages measuring about 7 by 2 feet, into which pregnant sows will be locked for the 114 days of their gestation.

The panic from pork producers is palpable. It shows just how comfortable American agribusiness has become with a business model predicated on appalling cruelty—and how uncomfortable it is with the public exercising its democratic rights to reel it in with regulations. But while California’s cage ban might save some animals from the worst of abuses, it will take much more than cage bans to challenge industrialized animal agriculture.

The vast majority of the approximately 130 million pigs slaughtered for meat in the United States every year come from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs—commonly known as factory farms—where animals will spend their entire lives confined indoors as they are fattened for slaughter. This economies-of-scale model of producing standardized animal commodities is predicated on squeezing as much productivity as possible from female breeding animals. This relies on so-called gestation crates: individually confining metal cages measuring about 7 by 2 feet, into which pregnant sows will be locked for the 114 days of their gestation, unable to turn around and often unable even to lie down or stretch comfortably.

Crates are so objectively cruel that they’ve been at the heart of animal rights campaigns for decades, producing promises from major processors like Smithfield Foods and major fast-food chains like McDonald’s to shift some of their operations to crate-free systems. Concerned citizens and groups like the Humane Society of the United States have succeeded in getting state-level crate bans on ballot initiatives, winning victories in places like Massachusetts and Florida. These states, however, are not major producers of pork, so even if local producers are obliged to go cage-free by new regulation, most bacon sold in those states will come from leading pig-producing states like North Carolina and Iowa, where crates are standard. (Exact numbers on crate use are hard to come by, but estimates suggest about 96 percent of all factory-farmed animals come from systems that use crates.Prop 12 has the power to shift how pigs are produced around the USA.

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