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Twilight Greenaway is the Managing Editor of Civil Eats. Her articles about food and farming have appeared in The New York Times, NPR.org, The Guardian, TakePart, Modern Farmer, Gastronomica and on Grist, where she served as the food editor from 2011-2012. See more at TwilightGreenaway.com. Not every writer can speak to both seasoned experts and curious newcomers, but that is precisely what Barry Estabrook can do well. In his 2011 book, Tomatoland, Estabrook took a deep dive in the modern tomato industry, shining a light on labor abuse in Florida, and the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. In addition to telling a riveting and complex story full of pesticides poisoning, escape from slavery, and tense court cases, Estabrook helped bring attention to one of the most important American labor struggles of the last few decades. With his new book, Pig Tales, Estabrook takes a good, long look at American pork production, telling a new set of fascinating, detailed stories about farms, communities, and the many haunting repercussions of industrial farming. He suits up and goes inside huge pork production facilities in the U.S. and Denmark, meets with animal welfare expert Temple Grandin, and walks through pastures with Paul Willis from Niman Ranch. The result is a thorough and alarming look at the path our pork takes from farm to fork. We spoke to Estabrook about the research he did, the implications of what he found, and what everyday eaters can do to make a difference. Do you want to start by talking about what you learned about the pigs? One of the first things that surprised me was just how incredibly intelligent, and sensitive, and curious pigs are. Research at the University of Cambridge showed that they are as intelligent as 3-year-old children. I spoke to a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who had taught pigs how to play a rudimentary computer game–and they did pretty well at it. Pigs can also watch other pigs and predict their actions, which was something scientists once thought was reserved for humans and the great apes. They are incredibly sentient and aware animals. Then I got to thinking: when you take something this smart and this curious, and you pack it into space where it has no room to really move, or express any of its natural instincts, it becomes positively frightening. These animals are way smarter than the average dog or cat, and yet if someone treated a dog or cat that way, they’d be put in jail. I was interested in what Temple Grandin told you about how giving a pig a small ball of straw can change their behavior radically. Normally, a pig spends 75 percent of its waking hours rooting. So something as simple as throwing a softball-sized fist full of straw into a pen containing a couple of dozen growing pigs satisfies their minds, and it makes a remarkable difference in how they grow and how they act. The pigs don’t eat the straw, they just nuzzle it and bat it back and forth. It’s such a tiny thing and yet we don’t do that with our pigs here in the U.S. But they are required to give pigs straw in Denmark. You dedicate a whole chapter to your visit to a large pork operation in Denmark. What was the biggest take-away from that experience? Denmark’s pork industry is every bit as concentrated, modern, and sophisticated as ours. These are not wood-thatched houses with a couple of pigs running around. Their pork competes on the world market against ours. Yet they’ve made several small, but very important changes in the way they produce it. For one they don’t keep their sows in gestation crates. Three quarters of our sows spend their entire lives in crates that are actually too small to accommodate their bodies. In Denmark, the pregnant females are kept in larger stalls with a couple of dozen other females, and they don’t seem to have any problem at all. More important, they don’t use antibiotics for growth promotion at all in Denmark. And when they do use antibiotics it’s very strictly limited to cure disease. Producers here claim they can’t raise pork without feeding the animals constant low doses of antibiotics. The fact that the Danish farmers were so involved in setting and maintaining standards around antibiotics use for one another was especially interesting. They actually hold each other accountable. It’s Scandinavia, so all the farmers belong to a giant cooperative, which owns the slaughterhouse, etc., and that changes the whole dynamic. They’re not contracting for a giant company. And 15 years ago they decided there was going to be a problem with antibiotic resistant bacteria if they kept using antibiotics in the way they were. And they all made the change together. That gave no one an advantage over the next farmer. A great deal of the book focuses on large facilities, and you have a short section on small-scale, pasture-based farms. Is there a future for mid-scale meat production in this country? Niman Ranch functions like a mid-scale operation. It is not a ranch, despite it’s name. It’s a marketing company that sells pork from around 500 mostly modest-sized family farms. That model is working. It gives the farmers more money, and the meat is available nationally. I also feature a group called the Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative. They’re a cooperative, rather than a marketing organization, and their farms are usually twice the size of the average Niman farm. These are mostly former confinement farmers, who have changed their practices, and they’ve been successful marketing their meat through Whole Foods and Chipotle. If you look back a few decades, we are raising the same number of pigs at any given point as we were in the 1970s. But two things have changed. Confined pigs grow a lot faster, so we produce more per year. Pigs are also now kept in larger and larger concentrations. In North Carolina, for instance, the average pig herd went from less that 200 in the 1980s, to several thousand today.
