Super Size

October 5, 2016 3:48 PM

The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st Century Agriculture [NYT link] Our industrialized food system nourishes more people, at lower cost, than any comparable system in history. It also exerts a terrifyingly massive influence on our health and our environment. Photographer George Steinmetz spent nearly a year traveling the country to capture that system, in all its scope, grandeur and dizzying scale. His photographs are all the more remarkable for the fact that so few large food producers are willing to open themselves to this sort of public view

From the food issue of the NYT Magazine

Why Did the Obamas Fail to Take On Corporate Agriculture?

The Fight Over Transparency in the Meat Industry

posted by helmutdog (25 comments total)

There's a fascinating (to me anyway) German documentary called Our Daily Bread which is like a feature-length film version of this gallery: no narration, no music, no obvious politics, just glimpses of the gigantic machine that keeps us alive.
posted by theodolite at 4:03 PM on October 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

I've seen one of those "baby green" harvesters up close - they're amazingly specialized pieces of machinery. And they have a high-speed six-foot long razor blade belt that cuts the lettuces off an inch off the ground. It's amazing how the processing plants are simultaneously the same old dirty places that every factory is while at the same time being sterile and obsessed with cleanliness. The workers we met who harvested salad greens in California aren't allowed to eat or drink anywhere near the fields - they have to eat elsewhere for fear of contamination.
posted by GuyZero at 4:04 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Man.

Those shots of the industrialized animal husbandry. I dunno. No obvious cruelty or suffering, in fact the animals look well cared for given the context. The path to the slaughterhouse is clean, well lit, and efficient. Shudder.

The rows of salad mix in a bag made me laugh, though. Clever!
posted by notyou at 4:21 PM on October 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

This post brought to you by the good people at Monsanto.
posted by Fizz at 4:23 PM on October 5, 2016

I've been on a Lovecraftian fiction reading binge over the last week or so, and one of his favorite words seems appropriate as I look through those photos: CYCLOPEAN.

This post brought to you by the good people at Monsanto.

Bayer, actually. Are you saying it's propaganda, or...?
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:08 PM on October 5, 2016

All I know is the boneless chicken breasts down at my local megamart are close to the size of an entire chicken from 30 years ago.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:16 PM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Those shots of the industrialized animal husbandry. I dunno. No obvious cruelty or suffering, in fact the animals look well cared for given the context.

I get what you're saying (given the context) but the sow pen?
posted by atoxyl at 5:32 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Anyone else suddenly remembering you were considering going fully vegetarian some day, don't forget that this is the International Year of Pulses.
posted by sfenders at 5:43 PM on October 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Brought to you by Nixon's Mr. "Get big or get out." SecAg, Earl Butts.
posted by ridgerunner at 6:11 PM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

No obvious cruelty or suffering, in fact the animals look well cared for given the context.

There's a problem of scale in that concentrating them concentrates their waste as well, turning what is a useful biological input into a hazardous contaminant. In other words, there are a lot of impacts beyond level of human treatment that can't be depicted in a single picture.

And the face mask on the turkey farmer speaks volumes.
posted by Miko at 6:20 PM on October 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

The turkey photo makes me sad. I look at their eyes and think, "What does this say about us as a species?"
posted by polymodus at 7:06 PM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I get what you're saying (given the context) but the sow pen?

The farrowing pen keeps the sow from crushing the piglets to death. There's an argument that providing more space and a pen with deep, soft bedding gets similar results with less stress on the animals.
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:15 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

It was the warehouse of farrowing pens that put me over the edge. There's all that pig motherhood and pig care for pig young redirected to efficiently, and profitably, sell me bratwurst. That's a tough thing to be a part of.
posted by notyou at 9:35 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm aghast to read that someone's take-away from these photos is "no obvious cruelty or suffering". This is an enormous neatly laid-out tableaux of cruelty and suffering.
posted by stevedawg at 1:06 AM on October 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Jesus, this makes me want to stop eating anything (even vegetables).
posted by Brittanie at 3:52 AM on October 6, 2016

Eaters gonna eat.
posted by chavenet at 4:03 AM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

This should not be shocking. I get that it's big, and big things tend to have a majestic awe. I've been on plenty of farms, and nothing here is all that different from them. This is just more efficient and epic. Places like this keep the human species alive and allow for our ridiculously super-sized population. Because Aztechnology controls it doesn't change the fact.

That said, we need to get the biologists to ensure that human meat tastes terrible, lest the alien invaders put us all in places like these.
posted by mr_book at 5:05 AM on October 6, 2016

By obvious cruelty, I meant horrorshows like forklifts and crippled cattle and male infant chickens sorted onto the red conveyor belt.

The images presented here show us our cruelty after we've organized it for maximum efficiency. Clean, well lit, rendered on a spreadsheet.
posted by notyou at 5:29 AM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been on plenty of farms, and nothing here is all that different from them.

Wow, I've been on dozens of small-scale farms myself, and I couldn't disagree more. Scale really matters. Its effects are harmful in many ways.
posted by Miko at 5:47 AM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

It is fascinating displays like these that actually got me to subscribe to the NYT. The one about melting ice in Greenland tempted me, then the panama canal piece sealed the deal. They're everything I hoped online reports would become.
posted by Theta States at 7:00 AM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is the price of our civilization. Small farms and local producers simply can't wring out the economies of scale needed to cheaply produce the food to feed our population. Frankly, the images I see are worlds better than they were 20 years ago; Factory farms today are a damn sight better than they were in 1990. Big Ag isn't an ideal situation, but with public scrutiny they are making massive improvements. The solution isn't to break up industrial farms into small mom & pop operations, it's to regulate, inspect, and hold accountable all producers and to continue to revise best practices as new science and technology becomes available.

This is the first time in history that we have such an abundance of calories that obesity is a bigger problem than starvation. People forget that, even within the 20th century, a sizable percentage of our population was so food insecure they could starve with a bad harvest or economic downturn. Hunger hasn't gone away by any means, but the percentage of the population living with hunger has fallen.
posted by Lighthammer at 7:17 AM on October 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Taylor Farms doesn’t grow vegetables — it processes them, taking produce from some 200 farms and and preparing products consumed by one in three Americans. This entire facility follows the lettuce-growing season, moving 1,400 tons of machinery from Salinas, Calif., to Yuma, Ariz., in November, then back again in April. Each move only interrupts processing — like the washing lines seen here — for 56 hours.

Fantastic! Modern day carnies?
posted by Chuckles at 10:23 AM on October 6, 2016

Those shots of the industrialized animal husbandry. I dunno. No obvious cruelty or suffering, in fact the animals look well cared for given the context. The path to the slaughterhouse is clean, well lit, and efficient. Shudder.

I work on the regulatory side of some of these operations. You are very definitely not being granted a view into the average animal facility through this article. There's also no visual representation of animal agriculture or slaughter or processing facilities outside the U.S. in this article, even though the U.S. market is not exclusively sourced from animals raised and slaughtered in the U.S.

There are plenty of image-rich internet-discoverable exposés of average facilities. The press are conflicted about covering those exposés, sometimes under the pressure of ag-gag laws. These laws are complicated, and many have been struck down, but the effect of their implications certainly keeps these facilities on the deeply obscure side of transparency.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:47 PM on October 6, 2016 [7 favorites]

This is the price of our civilization. Small farms and local producers simply can't wring out the economies of scale needed to cheaply produce the food to feed our population.

Often repeated but not demonstrably true. We can't afford it now, but we are subsidizing it and providing very cheap fuel (at a very high cost to the environment, future fossil fuel yields, and human life). In addition, we waste as much as 60% of our produced food, and we feed a lot of potential food to livestock. Finally, we depend on very lengthy national and international supply chains to move the food around, but these are now quite fragile because of fuel costs and supply fluctuations, potentials for natural disasters (some of which are rising), and conflict. So the story is much more complex than "we need industrial ag that's as big as possible to feed the world." That narrative supports certain interests and conclusions, but it's not so easy to state as fact with complete confidence.

I agree that regulation and inspection is needed, but that at least part of the solution to the intolerable compromises required by industrial ag is re-regionalizing some elements of food systems.

Factory farms today are a damn sight better than they were in 1990

I can't imagine on what you're basing this, but I can't agree and find it counter to reality. In every dimension, large farms today are bigger, riskier, run at a more corner-cutting budget.

This is the first time in history that we have such an abundance of calories that obesity is a bigger problem than starvation....Hunger hasn't gone away by any means, but the percentage of the population living with hunger has fallen.

Obesity is a direct product of our overproduction of calories. We need people to consume the calories we are subsidizing, so we have found more and more ways to squeeze them into manufactured foods and to encourage their consumption by multiplying eating occasions and portions. That has to happen to keep the market for these food products strong. As for hunger, it has nothing to do with a lack of potential food. We have plenty of food. Hunger is caused by poverty, or the inability to purchase sufficient food on a regular and predictable schedule. We actually may have more hunger today in the US than in the 1950s-70s, when we had the strongest combination of food relief, government food stamp programs, and local hunger charities; the poverty rate has been climbing since the mid-1990s, though there was a slight downturn in the past few years, there are still nearly 15% of all people (1 in 6) and 20% of America's children (1 in 5) living in poverty, and that is by the draconian poverty rate standard, which is well below the standard of living most people find acceptable.

We should also always talk about population growth, female education, and birth control when we talk about "feeding the world" in the future.

I understand the instinct to defend industrialization and recognize its positive contributions, but any reasonable defense has to be specific about inputs and outcomes, and not just defend it based on the widespread and shallow corporate line about "needing" industrial ag as it's constructed today to meet a nation's or world's food requirements. It's a much more complex issue.
posted by Miko at 1:53 PM on October 6, 2016 [10 favorites]

What Miko just said.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 10:19 PM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]