I’m a right-wing, red-wine-guzzling carnivore. I have even been known, after guzzling a few red wines, to rant about how vegetarianism is an eating disorder. So writing about the evils of meat farming is odd territory for me. But the world is an odd place and even I am compelled to admit, at times, that maybe there is more to learn about the things I feel strongly about.

Eating Animals

This all started a few months back when I watched an interview with Jonathon Safran Foer on Lateline. He was the first vegetarian/animal activist I’ve ever seen interviewed who didn’t make me want to throw hamburgers at the TV. He was practical, knowledgeable and interesting, and I wanted to find out more than the small amount of information he could impart in a 15 minute interview. So I bought his book Eating Animals.  It was one of the most horrific books I’ve ever read. It made me cry and gave me nightmares; but it did not turn me into a vegetarian.

It’s something I certainly have more sympathy for now than I used to, but it’s akin to being an evangelical pacifist. It’s a nice idea, but how can the people living in the real world help? Also, I have some problems with his view of a “natural world”. The natural world is not full of woolly lambs lying down with lions; natural predators do not subscribe to humane killing and prey animals do not lead long lives of peaceful abundance.

However, even if I am going to continue to eat meat, Foer’s book did change forever the way I think about the food my family eats.

Just to get it out of the way (and if you really don’t think you want to know, skip the rest of this paragraph) Eating Animals contains compellingly graphic descriptions of factory farming and the slaughtering process in America. The short and appalling lives the animals lead is gut-wrenching, sickening stuff. If you have a dog you know his capacity for love, fear, happiness and devotion. Pigs, who are at least as intelligent and emotionally complex as any dog, grow to adulthood in cages with no more than a centimetre space around them. Covered in shit and driven insane by their surroundings, the sows are forced to give birth in constrictive farrowing crates that prevent them caring for their young; piglets are castrated and mutilated with no aesthetic, screaming in pain and fear right next to their frantic mothers. They are weaned at 6 weeks and live short, caged brutal lives before being cruelly slaughtered without ever seeing the light of day. Poultry farming is very similar: disease ridden, infertile birds marinated in faeces and the decaying bodies of their dead cagemates, they are force-fed antibiotics and growth hormones because it’s the only way they can keep most of them alive long enough to get them to slaughter. Factory farmers have learned that even when they factor in a percentage of ‘losses’, it is far cheaper to farm sick animals than healthy ones.

I could fill the entire Tribune with details about the horrors of factory farming, but you wouldn’t read it and I don’t think I could write it. Suffice to say that the wilful ignorance of their customers is the only way these kind of farmers can continue practices that, were you or I to repeat on a dog, would have us arrested and probably appearing as the lead story on Today Tonight.

Eating Animals in Australia

Foer’s book was based on farming in America, and I wanted to know if we do the same thing here in Australia, so I spent the last few weeks trying to find out about the meat that we eat and how it is farmed.

The first thing I discovered is that it is incredibly difficult to find out any real facts about Australia’s meat industry. It would take more time and far more resources than the Tribune has available to be able to break through the walls of silence around large scale farming, but that alone told me enough. The only reason to build obfuscation around your business practices is if you have something to hide.

I had also assumed that in Australia something like the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act would protect animals from the worst excesses described in Foer’s book, which indeed it would - if it didn’t specifically exclude farm animals.

Farm animal welfare is regulated by breed specific Codes of Practise, which lay out the minimum requirements for animal welfare and are written “in consultation” with industry bodies. You can read the Pig one here, but suffice to say that the Codes of Practice have been written with lowest common denominator farming practice in mind, to ensure that the worst farmers are not disadvantaged by having to improve the way they care for their animals.

Free Range and Organic Food

The news is not all bad, there are alternative options, like organic and free range food. These options used to be a niche market for left-wing uber-hippies and animal activists, but the last 10 years have seen a change in the way they are viewed. ‘Welfare food’ is a huge business in Europe, where it’s captured a 17% market share in the two years since proper labelling was introduced. And therein lies the problem in Australia – labelling. Many people would like to have the option to buy free range food if they could, but the confusions about the meaning and reliability of food labelling means that most consumers have no idea how or where to buy welfare food and often end by giving up in despair.

Where it’s done properly, free range farming eliminates the unnecessary viciousness and inherent unhealthiness of intensive farming, its proponents are dedicated to cruelty-free farming practices and eschew any chemical or hormone based growth additives. They use antibiotics only when an animal is sick (rather than the broad based preventative treatments that factory farming uses) and require outdoor living conditions that allow farm animals to live according to their natural instincts.

But how do we know that the food sold as free range actually really is free range? The truth is that we don’t. Case in point, Ottway Pork sell their pork as “bred free range” (they don’t use farrowing crates, but their adult pigs still live in piggeries and are fed growth hormones to get them to slaughter as quickly as possible). David Jones, however, sell Ottway Pork and add a “Free Range” label to it. When it was repeatedly pointed out to David Jones that adding the “free range” label to Ottway Pork was deliberately misleading their customers, David Jones had this to say: “As there is no law or standard governing the use of the terms ‘free range’ or ‘bred free range’, David Jones is fully compliant with its legal obligations. This is a matter for the regulators.”

One of the many nauseating things about this response is that they are quite right - there are no legal or government regulation defining free range, so describing food as “free range” when it isn’t, is not actually illegal. David Jones and Ottway Pork are far from being the only ones to deliberately mislead their customers this way. Humane Society International recently conducted a consumer survey and found very high levels of confusion about ‘bred free range’ pork: 98% of people did not understand what the term meant, and 38% thought it meant the pigs had unlimited access to the outdoors. Lillydale Farm chickens, which are “free to roam”, are also misinterpreted by consumers as outdoor chickens that are not given growth hormones in their food – this is not true. They are probably better off than cage birds, but they are not outdoor free range birds either, not by a long shot.

Food Labelling Regulations

Australia’s food health and safety standards, and its food labelling standards, are set by the same agency: Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ). FSANZ is governed by an Act of Parliament which sets out three main tasks: promoting public health and safety, providing consumers with adequate information to enable them to make informed choices, and preventing deceptive or misleading conduct.

The membership of the current FSANZ Standard Development Committee for Meat and Meat Products is listed here. Of its 23 members, 12 are representatives of meat industry bodies (Cattle Council of Australia, Sheepmeat Australia, Australian Pork etc) and the rest are from government departments that deal with primary industry and the like. You can make up your own mind about how much the interests of the animals or consumers matter to this group, but let me just add the following little anecdote about FSANZ.

FSANZ is one of the few regulators in the world that have actually approved every single GM food application that’s crossed their desk. Monsanto, one of the world’s largest genetically modified food producers developed a product called LY038 corn, which is a genetically modified corn designed to accelerate the growth rate of farm animals. Professor Jack Heinemann of Canterbury University in New Zealand says he raised the alarm about the methodology FSANZ used to approve Monsanto’s LY038 corn, but his concerns were dismissed and FSANZ approved LY038 for use in Australian farming in 2007.

Last year, after safety concerns were raised by independent scientists, the European Food Safety Authority demanded that Monsanto provide more details about the safety of LY038. Instead, after sinking more than $US1billion into development, Monsanto withdrew its application altogether. In February this year, a former director of Monsanto India turned whistleblower, revealing that the company had faked its scientific safety data, and that it relied on government regulators having no capacity to verify its data with their own experiments

Organic Food

Given the difficulty in identifying genuinely free range food, it’s actually easier to look for accredited organic food. These accreditations were initially created for the export market (because Australia doens't have any domestic standards), so they meet the high standards required in places like Europe and have internationally audited inspectors checking their accreditation on a regular basis.

In Australia, the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS) is the controlling body for organic certification because there are no domestic standards for organic produce. There are seven AQIS approved certifying organisations authorised to issue Organic Produce Certificates. Any food produce under these certificates carries an identifying logo. These logos can only be used by accredited organic producers and are as close as you can currently get to reliable organic food labelling in Australia.

What can you do to make a difference?

This is not just an animal welfare issue, it’s a human welfare issue, an environmental issue and a lifestyle issue; and there are easy things you can do to make a significant difference

The first, and probably the hardest thing to do, is to find an accredited organic distributor near you. If you want some places to start you can try this website to find local organic food retailers. In our area the St Kilda farmers’ markets at the park behind Acland St on the first Saturday of every month. There's no guarentee that all the farmers are certified organic, but you can talk to them and find out for yourself.  Elwood General Store, Elwood Health & Bulk and Fresh@Elwood in Ormond Road Elwood all have genuine organic certification, as does T.O.M.S (The Organic Meat Specialist) at South Melbourne Market (they also do home deliveries). There are many others around, if you are unsure about their accreditation, don’t be shy, ask. If they are genuine they will want you to know about it and be keen to give you proof.

Organic food costs more than intensively farmed food, sometimes it can cost a lot more, the reasons are obvious, but it doesn’t have to mean you spend more on food overall. If every Australian were to remove one serving of meat a week from their diet it would be roughly the environmental equivalent of removing ½ a million cars from the roads. Cutting one or even two meat meals a week can probably save you as much extra as you have to spend on organic food, and despite what the meat industry would have you believe, you actually don’t need to eat meat every day to maintain a healthy and interesting diet. Falafel, quiche, home made pizzas and pasta meals are all delicious alternatives to meat and don’t require any tofu, bean curd or hemp wearing hippies to create.

Links

Australian Law Reform Comission -  Lifting the veil of secrecy on animal-derived food products

Lynda Stoner's blog. She's a passionate activist type, but she has an enourmous amount of information, the sort that is usually very hard to get.

Animal Lib info about factory farming. Dont read it while you're eating lunch.

Don't think that just because you live in Australia your beef is safe. It isnt.

I didn't make up the stuff about FSANZ. It's here.

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