Warning: There's graphic slaughter details in one of the paragraphs in the linked article. ... ... ... Link to S.3221 - Farm System Reform Act of 2019 which is starting to gain some traction.
Warning: There's graphic slaughter details in one of the paragraphs in the linked article.
About a year before Sen. Cory Booker officially ran for president, he took a trip through the Midwest, meeting voters in the states he knew he’d need to win. One visit, in particular, sticks in his mind. It was in the home of a Republican farmer, a man who told Booker’s team he wasn’t sure he wanted to host the senator because “this is a Christian household.” Booker is Christian, but he knew what that meant: He’s vegan, liberal, an African American Democrat from Newark, New Jersey. Booker wasn’t the kind of politician this farmer saw as his own.
The breakthrough came when the farmer began telling Booker about “the hell” he and his neighbors found themselves in. They used to sell their cows to five different companies, which meant if a buyer didn’t give them a good price or demanded practices that compromised their cows or land, they could go to another. But the industry had consolidated. Now there was one buyer, and that buyer controlled everything. The farmers had been reduced from entrepreneurs to serfs. Here, finally, was common ground. The farmer hated what his business had become, and so did Booker.
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“Independent family farmers and ranchers are being driven off their land, driven into bankruptcy, being forced into a system of industrialized agriculture that our values don’t support,” says Joe Maxwell, a Missouri farmer, former lieutenant governor, and co-founder of the Family Farm Action Alliance. “It’s either join up with these transnational monopolies or we’re going to bankrupt you. That’s the reality of family agriculture today.”
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There are few movements as alienated from the consensus position as the animal suffering movement. They look at the world and see tens of billions of animals being tortured and slaughtered in ways that poison the earth, warm the planet, and — as we are seeing with particular clarity now, as scores die daily from a pandemic virus that likely began in a meat market — harm human health. The practices of industrial animal agriculture are so cruel that you can’t describe them in polite company, so traumatizing that suicide and abuse are too-common worker hazards, so disturbing that agriculture companies pass laws criminalizing efforts to show the world where their meals are made. It is a structure of suffering with no bottom, no end, and what is most astonishing about it is that almost everyone simply treats it as normal.
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There is a coalition emerging here, one that could lead to overdue reforms in our food system, but one that also has profound things to say about our politics.
Warning: There's graphic slaughter details in one of the paragraphs in the linked article.
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Link to S.3221 - Farm System Reform Act of 2019 which is starting to gain some traction.