 Good afternoon. Thank you so much for coming First of all, I want to acknowledge that it is a major breach of etiquette to have an event at 1215 without serving lunch But I guarantee that in about 20 minutes. Nobody's gonna have an appetite That is for sure and you will see the wisdom of sticking with chips and soda, but we're gonna lose our appetites for a good cause today My name is Chris Leonard. I'm a Schmidt family foundation fellow here at New America And I'm the author of a book called the meat racket the secret takeover of America's food business Which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's the story of how a few companies took control of our meat industry And as a journalist who has written about the meat business for a long time I'm really excited to have our guest here today Ted Genoway's the author and journalist I followed Ted's work for a long time Ted has done a number of really important and revelatory articles about the meat industry that have been published in Outlets such as Bloomberg Business Week on earth news harpers others. I'm leaving out a lot Ted has really been on this beat in the Midwest and and breaking a lot of important news Which is culminated in his new book the chain Farm Factory and the future of our food which as someone who's written about this for a long time It it had a lot in here that surprised me and we're gonna get get through it But I want to say it one even till after we set up this event that I discovered Ted is a pretty big deal Outside of the journalism circles that I run in He was he was editor of the Virginia quarterly review from 2003 until 2012 at a time when that that magazine really Exploded in terms of size and influence Won six national magazine awards including the award for general excellence, which is an incredible track record Ted is also a celebrated poet whose work has appeared in several volumes of poetry and his most recent book kind of Amazingly is a biography of the poet Walt Whitman during the early years of the Civil War and like all good Whitman Biographers Ted then shifted to the meatpacking industry and and wrote the chain so Ted Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me Chris. It's great to be here Thank you all for coming So So to start Ted like I said there was a lot in this book that really even surprised me having covered this for a long time And we're gonna walk through it all I mean you follow this chain so to speak from beginning to end you bring a lot into this book But I walked away Feeling like your book did two really critical things first of all it profiled this company Hormel That is not just any company It is a real Harbinger of things that are gonna come for a lot of important reasons It's sort of like a canary and a coal mine For this new method of meat production that really affects anybody who eats me and could become the new norm Down the road and so we'll talk about that But I also felt like your book was a really vivid and and frankly kind of troubling portrait of The meat industry and agribusiness in general during a time of recession and during an economic downturn and I hadn't really seen that before what's going on out there in these meatpacking towns over the last four years So so we'll walk through all of this. We'll unpack it all But I really kind of want to start at the beginning and ask as we said you're you're a poet you're a Guggenheim fellow What's a nice guy like you doing writing about stuff like this? I mean why go from Whitman to Hormel? Well probably the the easiest answer to that question is that my my grandfather worked in the Swift packing house in in Omaha during the Depression Around the Union stockyards that were then the center of Omaha's meatpacking industry So I grew up with stories of what things have been like for him when he was working there But the other part of it and this really informed the approach that I took was that once he had Worked in the plants for a while and and couldn't do that work anymore He went to Western, Nebraska where he made a go as a farmer and He was able to keep his family afloat, but he was never really able to get ahead and Those things were always connected in my mind the the ways in which The systems that he had tried to escape when he left the packing plants were connected to the same problems that he encountered when he Went over to the supply side as a farmer so You know it to me it doesn't actually seem that strange I mean these are the stories and the locales that I grew up with and My first book of poems was almost entirely about that that sort of dual subject as well and Really this book grew out of Discovering that the things that I had grown up thinking were a product of the depression and and a much earlier era We're still very much Going on in the middle of the country. That's what really was Shocking to me is how much the meat industry today is starting to resemble the meat industry of Even a hundred years ago We were all familiar with this book the jungle by Upton Sinclair which showed these really horrific Conditions in slaughterhouses in terms of workers being injured in terms of the safety of the food You know, I'll be honest. I had kind of I was working from the assumption. We had gone past that we have this food safety inspection regime We have OSHA to protect workers safety and and I thought the slaughterhouse today What was different from from the slaughterhouse of yesteryear? Let's talk about why that's changing. Let's talk about the company Hormel, which is really at the center of your book Talk a little bit about I mean we all know the most important inventions of the last 50 years have been antibiotics the iPad and spam the tend to me which came from Hormel So talk about this company. Where did it come from and how did it how did it become as big as it is today, right? So Hormel was was founded in in Austin, Minnesota. It was founded by George A. Hormel It's worth noting right off the bat that that the family still pronounces the name Hormel It's a German name not a French name as The company was sort of rebranded in the 70s at a time when Americans were discovering French cuisine but so George A. Hormel founded the company and really founded it originally as just a Small business where he was Processing a few hogs in a week and supplying the local market in Austin but interestingly right from the beginning the company sort of had a A way of taking advantage of economic downturns when when there was a major economic downturn in 1893 That had to do with overbuilding of railroads Hormel recognized that this was an opportunity because It meant that that there were going to be lower prices for shipping and so He could not only bring in hogs from farther away, but could take advantage of the refrigerator card that was recently developed and and as as his competitors focused on that Refrigerated meat he said well, I think that there's also a market there for people who can't afford that meat in smoked meats and eventually in in canned meats But that that economic downturn Interesting to me George came up with the idea of taking the back meat instead of just the pork belly And selling that as Canadian bacon, okay? Which is where that comes from we have a lot to be grateful for I think And so it was but his son J. Hormel was the one who who looked at that as a kind of model when the depression came around for Finding ways to take what had been treated as as waste product and find a way to market it And and improve your your profit margins at a time when when the it may be sort of lean years for the company Wow, and so is born spam. It becomes for you know ubiquitous. We all know it. It's this huge product What is really germane to our conversation today is that Hormel? Hormel can I call it Hormel that's what it is today. I'm just gonna call it Hormel It becomes this pioneer For a sort of new system of food production a new regulatory regime about how fast you can run a meat plant So talk to us about this really started strangely enough with with the food poisoning scare, right at the jack-in-the-box Food poisoning scare what happened then and and what kind of regulatory regime came from it, right? So for those who may not recall that the the the jack-in-the-box outbreak was was an an outbreak of a new strain of E. Coli that that spread among people who had eaten undercooked beef patties at at jack-in-the-box or in some cases had had contact with people who had and it spread a great deal of fear about the safety of of ground beef And so it was at that moment that that the leadership at Hormel said, you know, this is this is a market opportunity for us and They they came up with the simple idea of encouraging consumers to take cans of spam and slice them long ways so that you could get three quarter pound patties of Spam out of it that you could grill and and they started the spam burger campaign and if you look on the spam can this the so-called spam burger is still on the can that's that's the sort of Emphasis that is placed on the as a way of of consuming the the spam up until that point that had not been the case The other thing that's interesting is that that was the moment that their campaign started emphasizing Spam as an alternative to what they called messy ground beef and the message of course is that that ground beef was not That it didn't just make a mess, but that there was hazard there And the sales of spam skyrocketed they climbed, you know about 20% in a couple of years and with that incredible new market spam started or it's hormone started Shopping around for ways that they could increase production Now certainly the easiest way to increase production is to do more building to hire more people that sort of thing But the cheapest way to do that Is simply to increase the output with the existing plants that you have and so what they were looking for was Something that would allow them to increase the the speed of production within their plants and Very soon they got exactly what they wanted in the form of a pilot program that that was instituted by the USDA that was testing out reduced inspection within packing plants and It's important for a couple of reasons the first is that when you Reduce inspection. You're able to increase the speed of production as As sort of a natural outcome of that up until that point Really the the the speed of inspectors is what set the speed of production You could only run the line as fast as an inspector could physically inspect each Carcass, but with this new model. They said we're gonna do Microbiological testing that will allow us to be much more accurate It's not going to be what they derided starting at that point as poke and sniff The the old method of manual inspection. This is going to be high-tech. This is going to be scientific but What gets left out of that discussion is that what they're really doing is handing over most of the inspection to The companies themselves that are in the pilot program and doing spot-checking So yes, there's microbiological testing, but it is it's carried out by fewer inspectors which means that the line is able to go much faster and what you end up with now is is a Situation where the the five plants that were allowed to be part of the test group Are running their lines at about 20 percent faster than any other packing plants the pork packing plants in the country and Hormel becomes the case study because Two of their main plants were in that group of five and then they bought the one of the other three so The three main cut-and-kill operations that Hormel uses for all of their supply are part of that test group So what we see here is that the USDA has a pilot program to try out a new form of safety Inspection a new kind of safety net around the meat we eat Right and it's going to incorporate Ramping up line speeds ramping up the speed of production and then shifting how you're you're testing that meat It's instead of having the USDA inspector, which is a crazy sight I'm sure you've seen it right this USDA inspector standing alongside a Convair belt with these animal carcasses whizzing by trying to spot problems, right? They're gonna shift some of that to testing for microbial pathogens and we're gonna have fewer people standing along the line and and it's amazing that Hormel is Right in the middle of this experiment you look at Hormel and you're gonna see the impact of this kind of experiment And let me say quickly ramping up line speeds is the holy grail meat companies I remember one time in Missouri. I Was at a Tyson foods plant talking with the plant manager and I'm sitting in this guy's office And we're chatting and behind him his computer goes into sleep mode and we see his Screensaver and it's this one sentence going by it says run debone full speed exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point debone is the line where workers are cutting apart chicken carcasses So that was this guy's like mantra. I mean, that's what the industry wants more than anything because you've got this giant Expensive slaughterhouse and you can run more product through there, right and boost your profit margin. So this is what they really want Let's talk about what life looks like Inside one of these hemp plants You're gonna have more workers Along the line. Well, you'll have some more workers. I mean that's and that's to me. That's really the key here is that if you look at what's happened in in the Hormel plant in Fremont, Nebraska and the the quality pork processors plant in Austin, Minnesota, which is the subsidiary that exists inside of the the the fence of Hormel foods and supplies them What you see is that their line speeds over the last decade During this this pilot program have increased by about 50% at the same time the Yes, there are jobs that have been added, but the number of workers that have been added at these plants is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent so and some of this yes is is picked up by adding more automated processes and that sort of thing but there's no denying that everybody who's working inside the plant is working faster and and You know one of the the people who actually was in in charge of implementing the The reduced inspection model at the Fremont plant told me that they you know they would have weekly meetings where the new line speed was announced and that there was always a great deal of anxiety going into those meetings because Everybody knew that you know the line speed only goes in one direction The intention is always to make it faster and faster and faster and so as the new speed is announced you're aware that you're You're working faster and working harder And to me that's that's where this becomes much more of a than just a story about the meatpacking industry it's really a story about the American recession and the American recovery because Yes, we can say that the company has added jobs since The economic downturn and that seems like a positive indication But the reality is that they've increased output by 50% While only increasing staffing by 10 to 15% Which means that everybody's working harder at the bottom and everybody's seeing greater gains at the top and Remember that the upper management their their income is determined by how the stock prices are doing and A company like Hormel the profits are soaring the stock prices are going up Everyone's always you know advising that this is a recession proof company That's going to make profits at times like this So the upper management is making money hand over fist While the people at the bottom have not seen real pay wages for decades Talk about what life is like For these workers in and I mean you were right there you interviewed a lot of folks who are working on the line And let's talk raw numbers here for a second the line speed went from was it? 950 hogs an hour right up to a thousand hogs an hour Which I think is something like 15 hogs a minute going by and we're talking tough manual labor to do these cuts these repetitive motions And you say the line speeds were even reaching 1,300 hogs an hour. Yeah. Yeah, so the At the the point where this all began with the the reduced inspection model They're they were running in most of the the Hormel plants were running about 900 hogs an hour At at some points it got up to 1,350 hogs an hour, which is as I say it's a it's a 50% increase Even now depending on on the supply and some of the what's happened recently with with The viruses that have gone through hogs and affected hog supplies the the speed of the line has been adjusted But at peak times it's still running at over 1,300 hogs an hour And so that that is really the intention is to try to move the line just that much faster and and As much of an increase as that is I've been amazed talking to some of the people who worked at Hormel for decades Who can remember when you know, they were processing Fewer than 500 hogs an hour and so The increase in speed is just Kind of hard to fathom even it is it is and you uncover some Unexpected effects. I mean, you know tragically you point out if somebody works at a plant like this for five years There's kind of a 50-50 chance. They're going to be injured and that could be you interview a woman who lost a finger their Injuries like that This is where everybody's going to lose their appetite. I think we're about 20 minutes in just as I said Let's talk about the brain machine. Is that what you call it? Yeah, you uncovered that when you Ramp up line speeds like this. You have some on an unexpected Effects and consequences. What happened at the brain machine? Okay, so and and Chris has already warned you Gird yourself a little bit the There's a section of the the production line that is called the head table Which is where the heads of the hogs are processed That's where the ears are removed the snouts the the cheek meat is removed the tongues are removed they even scraped the palate meat out that all of that sort of thing and Some of this is done with with straight knives Some with what are called wizard knives, which are These power knives that that are our circular blades and so everything is moving very fast and and also everything in that area is those wizards are powered by By a pneumatic system and so there's a lot of airflow At the end of the head table the very last spot is where the denuded skull winds up and At the time that Where the book is set at the beginning Hormel was was harvesting the brains from the hogs and selling them into the Korean market as as thickener for stir fry And the way that they collected them at the at the plant in Austin at the QPP plant there was by inserting a brass novel nozzle into the the Opening at the back of the skull where the spinal column would go in and There was a pin on the nozzle that would trigger Automatically and release a blast of pressurized air Which was enough to liquefy the brains inside Which would then be poured into a catch bucket and the skull was then dropped down a chute Where the bones were taken and rendered or ground for for bone meal But what they discovered was happening was that just enough of the the brain matter was Being blasted by this air that it would aerosolize and the workers were inhaling the the brain matter and Because of the air current through the plant It was not just affecting the person who ran the brain machine But drifting down the head table and actually Drifting in other directions as well so that supervisors who regularly came through the area were affected and They didn't know What was happening really until first workers started complaining about extreme pain in their extremities Hands and feet and then people actually Collapsing on on the plant floor and what they eventually figured out that first the Mayo Clinic was involved and then the Minnesota Department of Health was that as they inhaled the brain matter it triggered an autoimmune response and The workers bodies were not only killing then the the neural tissue that they had inhaled from the pigs But then their bodies started attacking their own neural tissue It started with with the sheaths that that Protect the nerves the long nerves that run to the extremities and that was what was causing the hand and feet pain But in the more extreme cases, especially the people who actually ran the brain station There were people who had Permanent spinal damage and even brain damage from from doing this And you know, they're more and more the brain machine is running at full speed So there's more and more of this air is in my aerosol eyes brain and in the atmosphere So they're breathing in a lot more than they used to and I think what really bothered me about this passage in the book And what's really the story runs through the whole book was that these employees are discovering it I Don't want to say that they were guinea pigs in a lab, but I mean they're discovering it by accident They're they're being challenged in the authenticity of what they're saying, right? But they're some of these people I think suffered permanent nerve damage from this. Yeah, and and as you say I Don't by any means think that that this is something that could have been foreseen in its particulars But the reaction to it the initial reaction is Sort of denial that there's anything going on. There was a lot of active Effort to separate the workers so that they didn't most of them didn't know that anyone else in the plant had been affected until they started seeing each other at the doctor's office and And the and the way that it was actually eventually pieced together was by By a translator and a driver who did translation for the medical center and they had been Translating the same symptoms to doctors From enough people that they started to realize that there was something going on and so And and then once there was Concern you know from like I said from the Mayo Clinic and then the Department of Health There was this kind of public reaction of saying well, we're going to do everything that we can We want to take care of our workers, but behind the scenes QPP as a company was engaged in a squabble with AIG over who would have to pay for the medical bills and denying worker comp claims and eventually There were a number of the workers who were called in And their immigration status was questioned almost all of the workers in affected were Undocumented workers and a number of them fearing that they were facing deportation simply fled and so Many of them even the people that that I interviewed for the book many of them are Simply gone and because they were working under false identities in the first place You know, it's it's not a matter of tracking them down someplace else Wherever they are They're almost certainly still suffering from from these symptoms, but there's someplace where They have no way to get medical assistance. Wow And and we're gonna save the the talk about Undocumented workers for a little bit later, but Ted it was just really infuriating to read those those passages About these folks just trying to get basic worker comp Coverage for these terrible injuries that they didn't get I'd like to Talk a little bit about the safety inspection element of this and whether or not the food we're eating from a hemp plant is safe There's a great line from the jungle that you quote where Upton Sinclair was saying he's interviewing a food safety inspector And kind of didn't want to point out that there were like dozens of carcasses running by behind him that we're not even inspected That the inspector was really Perfectly happy to step away from the line and talk to him while he while the line was still running. Yeah, and So you point out that the USDA itself Did a large survey study of These hemp plants right an OIG report. Yes, the results were not encouraging The results were not encouraging. Tell us a little bit about what this long-term study Showed about the the efficacy of a hemp plant and providing safe food Right. So the the OIG report the Office of Inspector General's report looked at the the food safety records for the for the five plants that were brought into the program and the the main yardstick that was used was was what the industry refers to as Nr's non-compliance records. So places where where there's been some sort of a food safety violation What the OIG report found was that of the five plants that are Part of the hemp program for pork that three of them are among the ten worst food safety violators in the country Including the plant that is the worst and the obvious question that the report raises is If this is supposed to be a pilot program if this is testing a new model of inspection Why would we possibly say? We've run this for over a decade The the food safety implications seem to be Terrible all by themselves Not even looking at the impact on on the workers in the plants, but just looking at food safety Why would we make this the model for all of the pork packing plants in the country? but Talking to people within the USDA my sense is that that is exactly where the momentum is headed That that hemp will be expanded in spite of these the massive amounts of violations that are found I mean, this is a disconnect that I just don't understand Well, I don't either I mean I don't I don't have I don't have a good explanation for this because I mean the only thing that I can say is that I Understand perfectly well how this benefits the packers But I don't understand how it benefits anyone else and let's point out Here that hemp is not likely to be just constrained to the pork industry The the big poultry companies are pushing correct me where I made a mistake here They're pushing a hemp like rule if you will to speed up line speeds Change the inspection regime They they faced tremendous blowback from that over the last year And they've kind of got this hybrid right now where they're going to change the inspections not speed up the line But you pointed out that there's language in there that might let them speed up the line Yeah, there's there's wiggle room certainly in the in the language of of what's been negotiated and and I think Even this this sort of compromised position That on the poultry rule that the industry is not fully happy with I I Think it's it's still clear that things are headed in in the direction of benefiting the industry Wow I was talking to USDA economist a couple weeks ago And he said you know USDA is much more like a trade association than a regulator And I think that this drives that point home pretty well Yeah I For I want to move on because there's so much to cover in this book and and just for a few minutes here I want to touch on farming and what this kind of system has done to farms as we think about them And you've got a lot of really powerful powerful stuff in here from farms Let's start quickly with the environmental impact you you profile this farm New-fashioned farms fashion pork new fashion pork. How many? The numbers of pigs a facility like this raises is incredible Yeah, the it thousands of hogs and in a single barn and you know a standard sized Breed barn for some of the the larger producers are you know 6,000 sows and then piglets on top of that new fashion has interestingly settled on a on a size that is About 2200 hogs and It's it's chosen for a very specific reason in order to to face Environmental review within the state of Iowa you have to have a facility that is over a thousand Animals right Except it's not actually animals. It's livestock units Which is calculated by what percentage of a cow the animal is and the the calculation is that a hog is 0.4 cows and therefore 2200 hogs is just under a thousand animal units and you can build a barn that's that size without facing Environmental review and you point out. I mean environmentally Okay, even though they're not a full cow pigs are big animals Yes, they are the waste they produce when highly concentrated. It is a serious pollutant I mean hog manure used to be a terrific fertilizer and that was the model But in high concentrations, it's a terrible pollutant and you point out that it has completely Overwhelmed the public infrastructure for cleaning the water that's running off these farms for example Yeah, absolutely And you know I talked to the people at the Des Moines waterworks Which is of course the largest of the water treatment facilities in in Iowa and They have monitoring stations That are positioned upriver At 40 different points along the rivers that they're drawing from the Des Moines and the Raccoon River watersheds and so they can see What happens and when they get a heavy rain they can see the the nitrate levels the Coli levels everything spikes and They know that they're going to have to bring Equipment to remove some of those Contaminants online and in some cases bring on line emergency water reserves so that they can dilute and get down Below certain levels to be in compliance with the Clean Water Act but they said That the contaminant levels are now so high and sometimes And especially in the spring after there's there's a lot of manure that's been injected in the fields that it is it's difficult to Even with everything that they've got in place to get below the the 10 milligrams per Leader that that they're required especially on nitrate Because what's coming in is often three and four times the allowable levels under the Clean Water Act the industry ag and The the pork producers at writ large Respond that this is coming from human sources um The absurdity of that doesn't really take hold until you go and visit some of the places that we're talking about A place like Green County or Jefferson County in Iowa You're talking about places that have fewer than 10,000 people in them And spread across an entire county that has hundreds of thousands of hogs There's also the fact that you know that hogs produce Somewhere in the ballpark of about eight times as much waste as a human does So, you know the people at the Dwayne Water Works said to me, you know When you've when you've got 22 million hogs in the state producing eight times as much waste as a human does Do you think that's the point source or do you think it's the three million humans across the state? And that doesn't that doesn't even take into account the feedlots the The chicken barns all of those sorts of things so to say that this is a non-agricultural source To me just seems absurd. Yeah, but how do you know Ted? Well exactly, okay? And that's a key point too because there's actually a very simple test that will tell you if this is coming from humans or animals Okay, I love this It's a caffeine test, okay because Just about every human is taking in caffeine and they don't feed caffeine to hogs, okay Not yet, so you can be right, but but you can do a caffeine test but but when I talked to The microbiologist at the Des Moines Water Works and he said, you know We wanted to do this test so that we could identify the source and know exactly what we're dealing with That they got lots of pushback from state government Wow And I hate there We have to move forward here a little bit to to talk about the animals them themselves. Yeah, you have some incredible Reporting in here about some of these undercover camera operations of animal activists you interview one of them who goes on to an operation like this Really got some explosive video that changed the conversation around this whole topic You know, I've taken a lot of heat for my generally unsympathetic comments about the chicken as an animal I just don't think a lot about the chicken and I guess there's this whole body of evidence that shows they can do math and stuff like This but like I'm still not impressed frankly and but hogs Really are a different Matter to me honestly these animals are very Intelligent they're they're very sentient I mean you can look into their eyes and see this this consciousness and They're raised now in the same kind of factory model that chickens have been for decades I just actually kind of want to start this part by asking you a question That I have not been able to answer Do you think there is a way to morally and ethically properly raise hogs? On an industrial scale to the level that could support the kind of plant we have in Fremont, Nebraska Yeah, I don't I don't know about on an industrial scale. I I know lots of small-scale farmers hog farmers who continue to Raise their their hogs more traditionally and I think that that that Seems perfectly sustainable as it was for a Very long time in this country up until the 80s. I'd like to point out by the way you're not talking about Yeah, exactly exactly. I mean this is not nostalgia for the 19th century. I mean we're talking about the way things were done a generation ago But there was a Farmer in Nebraska who who said to me not long ago that that what he saw as The difference of philosophy was that that the larger industry is aiming at a global market They're trying to be able to take over and feed the whole world Where he said that his objective was to be able to feed his neighbors Now if you're gonna take that strategy though What that means is that you need as you know a lot less farm consolidation You need a you need more farmers you need more people engaged in farming And that's just not the direction that things are currently going And it's not the way that any of the economic incentives are set so if If we were to try to Meet the current demand While raising hogs With dirt under their feet and the sun on the back their backs We would need a lot more hog farms and a lot more hog farmers and For that to be possible means big changes that are really gonna have to be top-down This isn't this isn't something that is about tweaking the current system It it would be something as radical as the change that we saw in the 80s when the consolidation really took hold and right now we're at this very contentious status quo where we are not moving in that direction you just described but instead we have an industry that That seems very intent on doing things the way they're doing and yet frankly consumers are very troubled by it and in the middle You've got these kind of folks you interviewed who are activists who thinks animals should be treated differently and They are going in with hidden cameras onto these hog farms and it's you know It's a contentious situation. You know hog farmers are some of the nicest people you're ever gonna meet in your life And I think they're really feeling embattled right now so I The the responsive policymakers of course has been to outlaw videotaping right what else would you do right? So we have these ag-gag laws Tell us a little bit about what an ag-gag law is and what it makes illegal. Yeah, so the Iowa is actually a kind of perfect case study for how that what the ag-gag laws are and how they mutate the the the case that you were talking about occurred in 2008 in a in a set of sow barns in in Iowa that was supplying Hormel and There were two different PETA investigators who spent months there documenting abuses of the sows as they were being especially as they were being moved from gestation crates the farrowing stalls and so These videos come out the the responses initially We're gonna we're gonna outlaw Being able to to shoot these videos We're gonna you know make it so that you have to have the the permission of the owner in order to be able to shoot video all these sorts of things When there are concerns that were raised by the Attorney General of Iowa and other Lawyers who looked at this that this was not going to pass muster constitutionally The eventual version that goes through allows Employers instead to ask certain questions and and deny employment on that basis So now if you pull up a job application for any of these hog barns in Iowa at the very least You're likely to see a question. Have you ever been a member of PETA or HS us? the Humane Society of the United States But you in more extreme instances may see questions such as You know art Are you intending during the the course of your employment to? Record What you see here in any way, you know video documentation written documentation any of these sorts of things and If you answer yes They can deny you employment on that basis if you answer no then you've lied on a job application and you're guilty of of Entering of you know of filing a false document and so the situation as it stands is is Quite complex in a place like Iowa there are more extreme versions of this that exist in other parts of the country and You know my hope is that eventually the courts will and the Supreme Court will take up this issue because of the different versions that are proliferating But in the most extreme cases You know there there was one person who was was arrested and eventually not charged but arrested in Utah for shooting iPhone footage from a public road of Some of a crime that was occurring and the police came out and took her away. Wow Wow, so well I think we have to switch at this point back to the people even though there's a lot we could talk about About the farms, but again, you really covered this system from from the beginning to the end I Talked earlier about the effects of the recession on this. Yeah, the meat industry as we know it I think was really born in the 1990s Which was a time of general economic growth and everybody in the Midwest I wouldn't even call it an open secret It was just a given truth that big companies like Hormel and Tyson foods and Cargill were built on Immigrant labor in the slaughterhouses the vast I'm sorry not the vast majority a great deal of it of undocumented workers Because we decided not to enforce our federal immigration laws during that time. Yeah, it's just a fact It was a wink and a nod to these big companies When I was a reporter in Arkansas around 2004 I was really struck by how harmonious frankly this situation was you'd see towns that went from 5% Hispanic to 30 to 40% Hispanic Life was okay. I didn't see any kind of tension. I felt like the new populations were really welcomed and and and I was surprised frankly at how Harmonious the whole situation was you paint a very different picture of What life was like in Fremont, Nebraska in 2008 when things started to go bad and I think that that really exposed fishers In this industry and in rural America. So talk a little bit about this sort of campaign that started up in Fremont, Nebraska Yeah, so that that that whole Movement in Fremont really to my mind kind of starts in two places the first is that In 2006 there were what are known as the swift raids that occurred in six swift packing plants Where they were immigration and customs enforcement showed up sealed the doors hauled everybody away in Homeland Security buses and And then there was a similar rate at agri processors in in Iowa in post-ville, Iowa and This gave immigration and customs a Real kind of black eye because what they succeeded in doing was not just rounding up These undocumented workers, but in a number of cases, especially where you had two parents who were working in the same plant They rounded up people who had children who were in school at that time Who suddenly had no parents? And had no idea how to contact them and in many cases were born in the US and therefore were legal citizens so there was There was this decision to kind of change that Strategy by by immigration and customs and not do that sort of thing but for The people who were hardliners on immigration That's suddenly what everybody wanted to see in their town the people who were really As I say sort of Ruthless in their approach to to immigration Enforcement they said why do I have a plant on the edge of town and they're not showing up and hauling everybody away And when you combine that as you say with the economic hard times that we're starting to befall especially these small towns That starts to also get wrapped up in the jobless rate and the sense of Stolen jobs and all of those sorts of things and so In a town like Fremont The conditions are sort of right and I think it's also a factor of The the geography of a number of these plants You know the industry made a decision a long time ago to move outside of urban centers Because that's where labor unions are And and it was much harder to organize a union or and unionize a workforce in a smaller town But what that also has created over time is a proximity to towns that are often growing in the direction of the meatpacking plants and the meatpacking towns Where in Fremont if you're a young person who has big ambitions and sort of dreams beyond a Life in Fremont and beyond working in a packing plant Omaha Lincoln These places are less than an hour away and so What you're left with are the people who are sort of the hardliners of the community also the people who are Committed to a certain version of the town and are very often terrified of the city that seems to be creeping toward their door and You know inevitably that turns into anger toward minorities and outsiders and Ted you documented a Fight that happened in Fremont that was also happening around the country where this local coalition of citizens gets together And they want to pass the town's own immigration law, which would require The companies to verify the immigration status of their employees which would also very importantly require Homeowners to verify the status of people that they rent homes to there were lots of little Instances across the Midwest of towns trying to to pass laws like this you document from beginning and what happened in Fremont It was a big ugly legal fight because frankly the Constitutionality of laws like that is very much in question. Although some of that's been settled in court. What interested me was the terrible Cultural spillover of this legal fight. I mean it got really ugly definitely, yeah, and I mean, I think it's first of all, it's important to note that when we start talking about these ordinances that popped up around the country at the local level that the the the Laws that were passed in Arizona and Alabama This can seem from the outside like a movement of some kind It's actually the work of one person Chris Kobach who's the Secretary of State in Kansas and is now facing a kind of serious Re-election challenge there Is the person who has authored all of those ordinances and laws? and so It's now a case where when you have a community that is Looking to do something like this they reach out to Kobach in order to get language that that will hold up in court So there is this this kind of outside element that exists in in creating all of these things But at the same time It taps into this What I can only describe is sort of this Nativism that exists in a lot of small towns now the xenophobia and racism that exists at a moment of real economic insecurity and fear This This sort of terrible negative reaction toward anything that doesn't look familiar What's strange about this to me and utterly wrong-headed about this to me is that you know Fremont? Royal town in Nebraska 20,000 people or so But my dad grew up in Western Nebraska in a tiny town a town of about a thousand people and He remembers vividly from his childhood in the 40s That first of all in when he was very young all of the field labor the Especially with the sugar beet harvest was Japanese American immigration immigrant labor when the internment camps were opened FDR approved bringing in Hispanic labor bringing in labor from Mexico And not only was their Mexican labor that was brought in and this is where the foothold for that community started in that part of the state But they also were using POWs from from Germany from Italy My dad's recollection of growing up in a rural community outside of a rural community in Nebraska in the 40s was of of a farming community that was made up of people from all over the world and This notion that these are white small towns that That have never had this kind of influx of immigrants is just it's a falsehood and So that the version of small town America that that is being created there In my opinion has much more to do with a version of America that's been created by the Tea Party Then one that has to do with actual history Wow and as as you point out I just want to Emphasize that as this you know as you point out the nativism. I mean The ordinance in Fremont was approved by voters whole overwhelmingly twice That's correct and yet it was challenged in court and during the point of these legal battles You had shop owners of Hispanic defense who are getting bullets shot through their windows You're seeing growing contention between neighbor and neighbor. It's a really ugly scene and And I just want to ask you about the architect of a lot of this Chris Cobock because he's been in you know I grew up two blocks from Kansas and he's been in the news a lot lately He's an interesting guy You have this great scene in your book where he's describing something to you and says it was a beautiful vignette And they says let me stop and use the English words. Yeah, let me call it. It was a little picture Yeah, a little picture. So we were then and let me point out no French was spoken during this talk either Um What do you make Legally of this effort because surely it must appear To these to someone like Chris Cobock that these laws have been mostly ineffective I think in actually having any sort of change on immigration patterns and yet you're sowing discord and strife right in these towns Do you feel like there's a legitimate legal effort here to stem the tide of illegal immigrants? Is there something else going on? I I Don't think that this is I certainly don't think that this is an effort to create a larger Effect on on immigration and immigration policy Cobock himself has said that this is about what he says is changing the equation that you you basically make life less comfortable you make the the fear of of discrimination or deportation or any of these sorts of of Negative impacts you make that chance those chances higher It decreases the likelihood that people will come to the US in the first place It increases the chances that they will leave it's deep self deportation as he describes it Well, well, I think you show that the the equation was changed. Yeah, all right for better for worse Well, Ted, I know a lot of people here have a lot of questions for you So I think if it's okay, we will open it up to question and answer that'd be great And we have a gentleman here with the microphone Andrew. Wow. Look at that. Yeah, so We have ma'am on the aisle there, and then we have someone here in the front row that we'll get to It's on. Yeah. Hi Marsha Johnson, I do some writing for Modern Farmer just the year that those pilot Farms went that Hormel was part of what year was that you never said? Yeah, so that that program When it started it is a bit of a slippery date Because it was officially approved in first in in 97 the the meat inspectors sued Because they said this is privatizing inspection where the federal meat inspection act requires that it's being carried out by government inspectors and it took a while for there to be a Settlement and the settlement was reached in 2002 and then the implementation started at that point and It was it was 2003 and into 2004 by the time all five The plants were were online with the with the inspection model We have a question in the front row Thank you. My name is Roberta Stanley, and I'm a public school advocate work with the child nutrition programs actually I have two quick questions one you kind of glossed over the pushback in state government Those of us who work in government and so forth view Minnesota is quote-unquote an enlightened state and Secondly is Alec involved with these Writing these laws that Chris Coback out of Kansas. Okay, so the second answer is a little easier Alec is involved in the the writing of especially of the ag-gag laws Alec is not directly involved with what what Coback is doing that I that I'm aware of but I I think I think we can certainly see sort of how some of those things work together The first question on on state government pushback, I I live in Nebraska right now. I have lived over the last 15 years in Iowa and Minnesota as well and I can tell you that these are states that are entirely beholden to the interests of the Farm Bureau's of the of the various states They are huge campaign donors. They are sort of the the gorilla of State politics. They are the big industry that exists in the states and Iowa in particular Terry Branstad the governor there has made quite clear that whatever the ag industry wants He's there to give it to them And so you end up with situations where You know the the not only is the industry asking for specific things and getting them But any any time that there's an opportunity to reduce the the regulation of the industry It's sort of offered as a as a matter of course Sir in the front row Sam here, and then we have a question the second Yeah, hi Name is Sam from arts and Ted I'm just wondering if you ran into any of the ag-gag Restrictions or did Hormel shut down on you or what was your reporting experience? Yeah, so I haven't I haven't run into ag-gag restrictions per se I what I have seen is Over the course of the reporting a kind of heightened sense of Awareness from the places that are publishing the work that I'm working on About how the the material was gathered about how things are described to make sure that Not only that that the publication and that I'm protected but also that the people that we're relying on are not in you know Running afoul of the law As far as Hormel goes I'm fascinated by Hormel as a company for a number of reasons, but certainly one of them is is how incredibly Tight-lipped they are as a company I've been writing about them Publishing Work about them for over three years now. They've never issued a statement in response to anything I've written They the strategy seems to be to pretend as if I don't exist And so I Don't know what to make of that I mean, I know that they know I exist because I've seen the letters that they write to my editors But But I you know, and I don't know how many Emails and letters and phone calls I've sent to various people there and always making the case, you know You've got to have a side to this. There's you have to have a perspective on this Help me to understand how you're approaching this and it just gets no reply The the only thing I've ever gotten directly out of Hormel was when I got some internal documents that had to do with the ordinance fight that Chris was talking about that Hormel actually gave money for the the PR campaign against the ordinance that would have Required them to do some changing in their hiring practices and I Sent them those documents and said are these Legit are these real and they wrote back and said yes, those are That's correspondence from us That was it Okay, second row here Tony corporate from food and water watch good to see Ted Has the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service ever done a study? showing the efficacy of the hemp pilot projects in pork I Love the leading question You're gonna be shocked about this the answer is no That I mean and that's and this is this is always the the the issue, right? I mean that that much of what's being argued for is common sense it and because they say You know what we're looking at is doing testing for microbial pathogens that's obviously going to be better than just having some guys who go around and Look at things based on their color and and poke them to see how they smell This is more scientific and yet There's very little to do to actually follow up on Providing the data that would support that I want to also point out is that FSIS has used that pilot project to recognize similar privatized inspection systems in Australia right Canada that is and New Zealand and here They're basing that on a pilot project. They've never evaluated, right? That's correct It's a great point. Well, we have ma'am right there in this Okay The study you spoke of earlier was the office of Inspector General USDA, which has nothing to do with that was just on food safety records distinction that the Tony's making is is looking at how The particular kinds of tests that they're running on the line How well they match up against if you were doing a lab test You know where you were doing a more complete test and and not just that testing But the larger sort of model of Implementing that testing within a plant So what what oig was doing was just looking at the cases where the food inspectors had Reported non-compliance reports and in some ways the oig stuff is Especially troubling to me because most of it because they weren't specifically studying this is What's referred to as a stumble upon finding? Which is to say we weren't actually looking for This particular violation You know and I mean the one that that gets me the most that's in the report is an inspector Who says you know I I spotted a contaminated carcass when I was on my way to the bathroom for a bathroom break And and if he hadn't have spotted it it would have gone into commerce. He said yeah, sorry. Yeah, that's correct So it's so but that's so the difference is basically assembling all of the Anecdotal evidence that they have into this report As opposed to doing a full-scale sort of systematic study Okay, ma'am second row purple sweater Thank you This is Sarah born I'm also from Food and Water Watch and I happen to be from a small farming town in Indiana So this hit home The question I have for you is just where you might see any Chinks and the armor in this system if you're looking at a place I mean I imagine most people in the room here work on policy You know and certainly as an organization that opposes these kinds of systems, you know, where do you see? The weakness where groups like us might be effective Yeah I mean The thing that I think is problematic is that what we really need is federal regulation And enforcement of existing regulation as well Because the the state governments that where all of this is taking place are are just simply too indebted to the Farm Bureau interests and to the and to the meat packers as well and They they're willing to to really Give them anything that they want and in the name of trying to Bring in more tax revenue and trying also, you know to get their support as as they're you know running for re-election but you know one of the things that I wrote about in the book and Chris has as well is You know that all these states used to have Laws against vertical integration so that there was a protection To keep these sort of full market monopolies from occurring and Now that those bands have been rolled back in almost every Midwestern state it's possible for a Meat packer to not only own the packing plant but to own the hog barns to own the fields that where the feed is grown to feed them and to Consolidate all of that and and manipulate the the prices of the food In the hog industry, I would think right now that this would be a point of particular concern for us now that Smithfield is is owned by By money that was provided by the Chinese government And I keep wondering in these you know intensely red states How how it's happening that people are perfectly fine with? You know with companies that with a company like Smithfield that's Chinese owned showing up and acquiring everything in sight Well Ted don't get exercised. I mean Smithfield only makes one-third of all the pork in the United States Exactly, let's not embellish this So in the front row we have a question Thanks, thank you and Charles bloom I asked group in fact I was going to raise Smithfield and ask Because the Chinese obviously benchmarked themselves against us in many areas They have a major supply a major problem with safe food supply themselves. There's almost hysteria about that in in China certainly in the upper classes Is there any way that we can turn that to our advantage because if if if what it does is add to the pressures like to Maintain the status quo We may have that much bigger problem Changing things here as they invest in the US. Is there any way that you can see that we could turn that to a positive force for change? It's a great question, you know the the thing that The the the only way that I could see is is sent it's essentially by leveraging that concern to say look we we can't allow It's bad enough to allow giant American owned corporations to have this much control over a market especially a market that is food But do we really want to then hand that over to? to a foreign Not just the foreign corporation, but I mean the Center for Investigative Reporting did a magnificent Piece on showing that I mean the funding for that came straight from the Chinese government I mean this is something that And they bought Smithfield at it at almost a hundred and fifty percent of the market price. I mean this there's There's a strategic decision being made here and It does seem to me at that point that that we should be At least paying closer attention than we have so far to what this means and and yet and so as I say I mean, I think the only thing that I could see is is Asking at that point, you know, do we want to continue to keep laws in place? That that make it not only so that there's so much consolidation But that that consolidation can be taken advantage of by anyone who comes in with with enough money And we have a question in the third row here gentlemen with blue shirt in the tie Thanks so much Paul Shapiro with the Humane Society of the United States Thanks to the New America Foundation for this great event and Chris I will be following up with you with extensive information about the intelligence of chickens Reason and science. They're not bird brains. Haha. Anyway Ted thanks for your great book and Thanks, especially for your very passionate writing about animal welfare and the rampant amount of animal cruelty that occurs within these pig factories As you know a lot of companies in the pork industry including Hormel and Smithfield and cargo and others have made announcements in response to public criticism that they're gonna move away from practices like gestation crates and I'm wondering why you think it is That these companies have been so responsive to that criticism over animal cruelty and gestation crates But perhaps not some of the other ones that we're talking about today and that are often levied against them Yeah, well for one thing Gestation crates I think are something that that the public was able to kind of easily understand When you describe what a gestation crate is when you show someone what a gestation crate looks like a Lot of people are uneasy with that Especially when you're talking about, you know, here's a space that's essentially like a hog sized cage That the sow is going to be kept in for a hundred and fourteen days While she's pregnant I Think I think it's sort of specific enough for the public to react negatively to it But at the same time I've been fascinated by The the way in which the the the politics of this shift around You know Chris Christie is Not eager to To approve a gestation crate ban And I thought you know that the editorial that Bill Maher published in in the New York Times Where he said, you know might this possibly have something to do with the fact that this guy is planning in 2016 to be campaigning in Iowa where gestation crates are viewed quite differently And so, you know, I think it's fascinating to see on the one hand You've got something that that the public at at large and especially, you know I think the number of people that support the ban in New Jersey is 93 percent You know, it's easy to see how It would make sense politically to respond to that but you've got the local politics that Make it national politics when when you're talking about someplace like Iowa coming into an election year so and And to the other part of your question Turning gestation crates into shared Spaces shared pens There's a little bit of retrofitting that has to be done, but it it primarily involves removing things Which I think is a lot easier to agree to than massively reformulating and so I think it's also something that the industry can can offer as as a sort of Gesture of concern and showing that they're responding without Having to move too far Yes. Well, sir in the aisle with the blue shirt. You've been waiting a long time and then right next to him, please The doctor research Institute for independent living. I'm a public health advocate and I'm wondering about the Health conditions of the meatpacking chains with respect to OSHA I mean, are they doing anything and then the other thing would be what's EPA doing with respect to the toxic waste from the hog farms? both a great questions and and Really interesting areas for for a discussion I mean, so OSHA is involved in in looking at how the safety of the workplace is Determined but it's an interesting loophole that that the way that that packing plants are designed and because they're Import packing plants at least there's no There's no cap on line speed. It's always been an informal cap on speed That it's really the the USDA inspectors the FSIS inspectors who set the pace of work So there's there's a kind of gap in the regulation that exists where the meatpacking workers are concerned and Right now, there's there's a lawsuit pending that that has been brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center And the Nebraska Appleseed Center Which does fantastic work for advocacy for meatpacking workers in Nebraska? That is suing both OSHA and the USDA for not doing more to address that that problem that that regulatory gap The other question about the EPA The The EPA has been reluctant to get involved in especially in Iowa where there's been Where there's been the sort of the biggest problem to date But the EPA has been threatening to step in and take control of a direct control of enforcement of the Clean Water Act If the Iowa Department of Natural Resources does not do more to regulate itself It seems impossible to believe but up until this year in a state that has nearly 10,000 Confined animal or concentrated animal feeding operations CAFOs They had seven inspectors And those inspectors are the ones who are who who are responsible for going in and Making sure that the manure management plan is Being carried out properly Well, you know, you can imagine what seven people are able to do Against 10,000 confinements. I mean essentially all that they do is a few random checks but mostly they're responding to citizen complaints and If if you ever want to see a truly fascinating online database The the state of Iowa does maintain a database of the animal feeding operations and you can pull up The individual history of any confinement that's there and You'll see that in almost all of these cases. There's an inspector that will that will come out We'll see that there's one problem or another with the manure management plan Which generally means that there's there's a leak that the that the confinement has been cited too close to a well or a Waterway that the manure that was that was trucked out and and spread was in Was exceeding the amount that was allowed And what they get issued is a correction order, you know, essentially don't don't do this again And so the EPA has been talking about Expanding its its control of of those waterways But then you know the pushback from Farm Bureau in those states has been Oh, well the EPA is coming and they they want to take control of of the pond on your property They you know and there's been a lot of talk of like, you know, the EPA wants to regulate your horse tank and so that's the the the message that's being put out is that That this is a sort of unreasonable environmental overreach But the reality is I mean Something like the Raccoon River watershed, which is one of the major watersheds in Iowa The Iowa DNR Estimates their own estimate is that the E. Coli levels need to be reduced by 99% to be safe It's it's a crisis It's amazing. I think we have time for two quick questions if we can I see Eliza there and then on the aisles Woman's been waiting a long time Eliza Barclay with NPR So the the beef industry it seems like is starting to kind of rally around this idea of Sustainable beef partly because you know McDonald's said it would buy it wants to buy verified sustainable beef by 2016 which who knows what that is really it doesn't exist yet But I'm wondering why the the pork industry does not seem as far as I can tell to be rallying around this idea of Sustainability and and may not perhaps because it's not being pressured yet by consumers and and why the beef industry is Is doing that in the pork industry isn't So I think one of the things right as you said at the top that that this is being driven by McDonald's and what McDonald's Says this has been true for a very long time if McDonald's says this is what we want to do with the beef industry Responds because that that is how a huge number of Americans consume their beef the the flip side to that is that The the American consumption of pork has actually been dropping slightly in recent years But where all the growth is for the industry is is in the Asian markets and so You know, there's there's just not the same pressure being being brought to bear there and so But that's again to come back to the Smithfield example, I think that's one of the the reasons that You know trying to keep a handle on this now is important because if if the market is allowed to expand to the point that American consumers Don't have any pressure to bring on the industry Then the majority of the consumers will be outside the United States, but the production will be happening here And as bad as the waterways are in Iowa now or the working conditions are in the packing plants now I can't even imagine what they'll be like if if that's allowed to happen All right, we had the right on the aisle Hi, my name is Rose Wells and I grocery shop And I find all this heartbreaking and I just would like to know what I can say to my neighbors in our Affluent suburb who think that a five dollar roasted chicken at giant is a good thing to buy Yeah, so I Really I struggle with this myself because on the one hand I I Think that there are things that consumers can do to make better choices, especially where The sort of Quality and wholesomeness of their food is concerned For for people who eat meat You know, I I don't think that there's anything wrong with Deciding to find better quality and smaller quantities And if you're in a place that it's possible to deal directly with the farmer I Certainly for all of the meat that that I eat at home I've seen that animal through the entire process and Including right up through the the slaughter and butchering Um to me, that's that's kind of What it what the what the animals do But unfortunately, I don't think that that is enough I don't think that Saying I'm gonna buy Organic or grass-fed or animal welfare approved is enough because First of all not everybody can afford that and the system isn't designed right now To make that kind of food affordable to large numbers of people, especially people on fixed incomes And I I'm very wary of a situation where we end up demonizing people who can't afford to buy better food And that's where Pressuring our Lawmakers and leaders to do better comes in and saying, you know that there needs to be regulation there needs to be a System that that favors high quality safe food that is affordable for everybody Let's wrap it up on that note Ted. That is fantastic You've written an incredible and important book and I thank you for your hard work. Thank you I highly recommend it. We have copies for sale outside It's more appetizing than our discussion has been and it's really well written. So thank you so much for being here today Thank you. Thank you