A man's man, the rancher. The tough guy who supports himself with the blood and sweat of his own two hands, keeps his family fed and all excess he sells to local townies looking to by bulk porn round or mutton or even just some flanksteak. Maybe the rancher grows a little bigger, doing the dirty work for folks in the next biggest city, the shoveling shit and feed, waking up before dawn and asleep after sunset. Slaughtering, butchering, sterilizing it all. The last real tough men.
That man's mostly gone. Medium family farms have all but died. We're consumers and as such we want the most for the cheapest. We don't care how it happens, where the thing comes from, the conditions, any 'o that shit. We just want it and damned if anybody tries to get in our way.
Take pork. Pigs have been shown to have brains about the same as a toddler. And I love pork ribs. I love bacon. I crush me some pulled pork or some barbecued shortrib. But just recently I saw something that appalled me, that made me rethink everything.
Not about meat. I love meat and this will never change. Man evolved by eating meat - if we'd stayed eating solely plants we couldn't have gotten enough fuel to power larger brains (as brain power uses much more energy than muscle power) and eventually died out. Or stayed apes.
But about where it comes from. The rancher used to be able to live alone, just look after his kind and raise a few animals to fill his kitchen table and trade or sell for accoutrements he couldn't raise or build. Like gunpowder and Winchesters. His animals grew fat off the land and off the feed. He killed them and sold them but how they were raised was up to him. He fed, raised, and killed them with his own hands or the hands of a few hired, well, hands. He didn't try to corner the market, didn't try to take out the other ranchers, didn't try to bite off more than he could chew. Just carve out a little corner of paradise where he and his brood could live, love, dance, and die. And eat, of course. But he's gone. The ranchers of old can hardly keep their farms anymore. If it isn't being hit up for land taxes as ranchlands get bought up by vacation prospectors, it's the much more damaging demon of commercial super-ranches. Places run like factories where animals are forced into squalor, packed in, passing diseases and feces and reek back and forth. Animals thrown on conveyor belts to be systematically slaughtered by machines, sorted by zombies, and frozen for the long icey haul to your neighborhood grocer where they're defrosted and wrapped in plastic and styrofoam. Or defrosted, trimmed, and presented as "fresh meat" (having worked as a supermarket butcher for a spell let me assure you of something - unless you're at a high-end or organic place the meat and fish in the case was pre-frozen and thawed. I hate Whole Foods and all it stands for but those damn hippies got some good meat.) If he wants to run a little family ranch, making just enough to support his family, raise his animals in the old way, showing them respect for the eventual sacrifice of their flesh, and not take from anybody else? Tough shit, fuck you and your farm, it's time for the super-abattoir. Apparently, however, this capitalist struggle isn't enough for these bastards in Michigan. They, like every slimey corporate monster before them, are resorting to the most dastardly accomplice in America - their local government industry, wildlife, and other bullshit regulators.
Check this out - this poor family just wants to raise their pigs naturally and respectably and now the government is coming in with some bullshit accusation that makes no sense and will accomplish nothing but to consolidate the strength of the super-pork monopolies:
Okay, so the small farm is being attacked by the state government. Sure, this is an example of state government over-reaching, trying to say that a feral species law applies to a privately-held farm. Bullshit. Certainly the incentive for them is big. Some invasive species have been bred on hunting reserves that skirted earlier and/or the lack of regulation and the government wants to cut them out as they're the ones who can escape, breed other feral pigs. And the Michigan DNR says that technically this applies to the small Baker's Green Acres farm, like saying drunkenness is enforceable by law whether a person is a hazard out on the streets or in the safety of his own home. I mean good god man, next thing they'll come through handing out citations for private intoxication and illegal sodomy.
So they're trying to take out these private hunting lands not only because that's where the accused feral pigs haunting the Michigan highlands come from but also because people have to pay nice fees to the state Government to hunt on public lands but don't for private lands. Just trying to get their hand in the honey jar after Detroit collapsed, it would seem. But that's not even the biggest issue. Government is what it is and it'll always have its own agenda but for the most part the government agenda can be swayed by committed protestors and a media exposure - the public sector doesn't have the money or, for that matter, the time and patience for fighting battles like this. No, this looks like something much bigger. With much more free time and influence. Enter the Michigan Pork Producers Association.
Interesting how these bastards have, front and center on their website which is supposed to be about helping the pork ranching industry, these evil feral pigs, an obvious threat to public health. One would have to assume they aren't affected by this and one would be right. The president has 1500 hogs, certainly more than the Bakers. And as president, he's above reproach; erego there's no risk of it jeopardizing his business. The VP raises cattle, an industry plagued by similar problems. For example, cattle are now sold mostly based on conformity of appearance. The conformity ensures it's an equal playing field - and, namely, that no one farm creating special cattle can claim superiority bred by natural purposes over a super-farm that essentially clones and engineers the same cow over and over, playing god as it were. This not only keeps out farmers with smaller ranches where animals are raised based on breed, without engineering or eye on color, it gives the ones who do mass-produce their cows more power, thus even more leeway to kick the smaller ones out. The treasurer's farm swine makes somewhere between $1M and $5M a year. And so on. It's a damn travesty and if allowed to stand this will only set a precedent that the high and mighty will be able to control what animals we raise, how we raise them, and what we eat. They'll limit our choices to those grimy little pink rat pigs with all the trichinosis from growing up in each other's filth. But even more important, it kills the livelihood of people not looking to take over the world - just their own sweet little chunk of it. And if this were a result of the capitalist system alone I could take it. But this is the result of the fact that America's getting taken over by bullies - large associations turning to the government enforcer in its pockets and paying them to run the small farm off for them.
Alright, so you don't care about how pigs live. And yes the American farmer is a great hero but fuck him, he doesn't pay your grocery bills. Then how about this. That in spite of all this over-production you're still paying too much for your swine. And that the factory-farm-fed meat, the same that we deride as being used in McDonald's and at Denny's, is being sold to us by the same big distribution companies, the ones who have strategically bought up all the contracts, giving the smaller farms the choice to either adapt to their "churn 'em out" techniques or get run under. Seriously, this is all but an oligopoly which our economic and political systems are supposed to prevent but here it is, right in our fucking supermarket aisles.
What's amazing is that in spite of the fact that we have more pork than normal, which has sent prices dropping and fucked farmers and commodities traders alike, you and I are still paying ridiculous prices for shitty supermarket pork chops. It's because the distributors dominate the supply chain and as such can fuck everybody on both ends, like a Chinese finger trap. The big guys lobby the union of their professional organizations, the organizations have to do whatever these bastards tell them because they don't wanna be in the cold and what happens? The great stoic American Farmer is no more. The farmer has to cut corners and churn out inferior product to compete. Partially it's because of manipulations but partially because of us.
So here's the first step: Go to the damn farmer's market to buy meat. Buy (and I can't believe I'm saying this as I hate people who preach about organic vegetables, which is a lie) organic meat.It costs more but we need to start taking some responsibility for what we're buying into. Stop supporting bullies and croneyist manipulators.
And what can be done here, for this Michigan family? Click on this page for some more info and a politician you can yell angry things at.
Because I will always eat meat. And I'm tired of being fed shit.
And someday I wanna run my own fucking ranch. And god help the bastard who gets in my way because I don't join his twisted little club. God help him.
- Ryan
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