Free Range Trickiness

A friend sent me a link to an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times today that questions what the author considers the assumption that free range animal agriculture is inherently superior to CAFO meat manufacturing operations. Free Range Trichinosis is the clever title, and it was penned by a history professor at Texas State - San Marcos who conveniently has a book coming out about "how locavores are endangering the future of food."

The gentleman does know how to turn a phrase, and I am sure that the loyal employees of the industrial food companies will buy enough copies (with company money?) to keep it up in the Bestseller Beauty Shows and Amazon Rankings for a goodly while. But the piece in the paper is riddled with logical fallacies, non-sequitors and dirty rhetoric. If I get the time, I'd like to do a little background research that it seems The Times did not (at least not before the piece ran -- there is an addendum on the web now, pointing out that the research which forms the heart of his critique was funded by the National Pork Board). I'm not sure they could have, given the way things are written, and of course Op-Eds are held to a different standard than news, and unless the book is self-published, simply enticing a publisher with a juicy, topical title makes the writer a hot property -- and, in the case of The Times, a small proof of "balance," sort of like the Washington Post printing the vacuous stupidity of Charles Krauthammer.

There is the core conflation of "locavore" and "free range," and later, "slow food." These are hot terms of the moment that are bound to sell books, but while often used near each other in the Googlish sense, the terms are not inherently connected in the real world of food production -- I doubt that "local" veal or fois gras is free range, and so these words are mere straw men the author has set up to bat down.

One example: right in the first paragraph there is a quote from a "purveyor" as to how the benefits of free range are indisputable and then immediately the author notes that this is "another reminder that culinary wisdom is never conventional." Now apparently the professor has been outside the city limits of San Marcos, because he correctly understands that chefs (I assume this is what he means by culinary) haven't always had the best grasp of how food is actually produced.

Twenty five years ago I hosted a vegetable tasting at a prestigious local resort (this was in Vermont, where such things were just getting going...California was years ahead of us) and the executive chef was astounded that we had twelve kinds of carrots to taste.

"When I was in culinary school, there were only three kinds of carrots," he told me.

Intrigued, and having some experience of fifty or so different varieties, I asked him, "Which three?"

"Five pound bags, ten pound bags and twenty five pound bags." We became instant friends and he has gone on to become a staunch advocate of local food.

But our author slyly conflates "purveyor" and "culinary" in this case. Quotations are usually from a specific person, who is identified, so we can assess the credibility of that person (disclosure: my quotation in the first paragraph above is part of the overly long title of the forthcoming book). Some "purveyors" I have know over my thirty years on the production side of the food business buy and sell damaged crates of iceberg from the trunk of a too-old Cadillac, while others not only run top notch operations, but are as familiar with trade press and scientific journals as any professor of history.

Did you notice the subtle diss? I called him a professor of history (which he claims to be) and thus planted the meme that he doesn't necessarily know anything about food -- he might, and I would like to read this "forthcoming" book to see -- and that is another of his unexamined tactics in the piece, which can only help sales of the book: the use of terms for people he purports to disagree with to essentially play off their mind share. A Swift Beef bogosity attack; Colbert X Coulter -- now there is a hybrid (or chimera) that outdoes even Carville X Matalin.

So the second paragraph includes a salting of "data" from the scientific journal; I am definitely going to have to look up the original article, as I used to analyze journal articles for a PhD candidate, and found it is amazingly easy it is to honestly or dishonestly, misunderstand or mis-represent the findings (again, the research was funded by the National Pork Board, which promotes CAFOs).

Next we hear that "just a little time outdoors increases pigs' interaction with rats and other wildlife" (etc., I don't want to violate the Times copyright <G>) but it also involves domesticated cats, and -- OmiGod: moist soil, where he says, "pathogens find an environment conducive to growth." (I find it odd not to mention the 24 / 7 heated barns where animals are jammed cheek to jowl, or the "processing" plants where now-dead meat and parts are held in similarly petri-like conditions. Moist soil...Omigod!) In the next paragraph we learn that this will be especially troubling to "connoisseurs of fine pork...supporters of sustainable meat and slow food advocates" who claim that free range meat tastes better.

The oversights, elisions, conflations and (at the end of the paragraph) mindlesss conclusions of this paragraph are almost too numerous to list...the presentation, is, in the end, flakier than a pie crust. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a good report from last September called "Uncovering CAFOs."

The first of those two paragraphs is about the potential for infection of the animals, not about their taste, but the author seems to think that taste and infection are connected in the same sort of way "tasting" a toke at a rock concert (inevitably, OmiGod!) leads to hepatitis C, or oral herpes. I'm sorry...it was a bad example, but no more far out than the one offered. It just doesn't follow, it is not a valid syllogism, no matter how fancy the verbal footwork; he makes no connection between the infection part of the argument and the taste part, but implies it anyway.

There is a hidden connection behind both paragraphs and does honestly join them that the author does not mention -- and if in the book he even considers this aspect, I think I can safely predict he will have something negative to say about it -- and that is the breed of pig in the study he cites. I should be able to check this when I check the journal article. If it is not identified, the study is flawed, and if it is, I think it is likely to be illustrative.

I am going to speak from my prejudice for a moment (no I have not been doing so up till now!). My kids were raised on a vegetable farm, running wild outside and coming home dirty on a regular basis. They were free range kids. Sure they had the usual ear infections and such, but those were picked up a school, an environment more like a confined animal operation than their home. They are now two healthy, robust adults, and my daughter lives in Africa, but even there, with a little appropriate attention to hygiene, has not gotten seriously ill, though surrounded by pathogens. These days, however, kids -- especially suburban kids -- are raised in a near sterile environment and never have a chance to develop the kinds of antibodies and resistances that our kids did.

With modern domestic animals, the situation is even more extreme, especially with chickens, and with pigs, both of which have been bred for confinement production for generations. And that breeding has occured within sterile environments, with the breeder concentrating -- a breeders must -- on a few traits. I would make a guess (which it will be easy enought to check later, since I know where to look) that weight gain, and litter size are two of those. Disease resistance, foraging ability, taste; those were likely no more important than they were in the case of the cardboard tomato that is harvested green, gassed with ethylene and shipped 2000 miles to sit in a supermarket bin for three weeks before being eaten with a notable lack of relish. Myself, as a vegetable gardener, I confer equal Buddha nature on plants and animals; to see the noble pig -- I raised them, small scale, free range, for local sale, for about ten years -- reduced to a commodity is hurtful.

So there are at least two, maybe three, maybe many more distortions even in this small segment of the article. This post is likely going to be two, three, maybe many time longer than the original article simply because of the layers of ignorance and distortion the article displays. To name a few: the taste the author pooh-pahs is due as much to the breed of pig -- say a Hungarian Mangalitsa -- as it is to the free ranging -- though many of the best tasting pig breeds would not thrive in modern confinement any more than a modern industrial pig would thrive in the "wild" of a pasture; the choice of free range is not only one of taste but of ethics, and of environmental responsibility; I see neither of these mentioned, and so will be interested to read the book and find out about the part of its title refered to by "...and how we can truly eat responsibly." But we'll leave that there, or for our other blog, Hand To Mouth.

That conclusion is foreshadowed at the end of the the piece, and I am losing interest in wasting my time to critique this loosely reasoned and tightly written little screed. One last point that I had highlighted from my first read-through, but will never get to if I am going to have a Friday night; after all I am just a blogger, not a media or dot.org professional. That point is shortly before the conclusion and leads directly to it (at least in the authors twisted universe). "Free range is ultimately an arbitrary point between the wild and the domesticated." Du-uh. All agriculture (and horticulture) is by nature un-natural, as it is a controlled environment (a point he makes while trying to prove the opposite) and it is only a matter of where on the continuum your preferences, premises and practices fall. All points on that sort of space-control continuum are arbitray, as dates and times are arbitrary in the phenological world of seasonal time. And not to seem obscure, a phenological world is what both agriculture and horticulture are all about. Methinks our professor should employ a bit less sophistry, and spend a little more time with the people -- farmers, not factorymen -- he so disdains.