Hillary and big meat? We’ll get to that in a minute.
John Edwards, for his part, has opposed factory farming in North Carolina, the state with the highest number of hog
factory farms in the country. In Iowa last week, he told an audience
that he would support a nation-wide moratorium on factory farms.
Highly-unelectable due to his principled stands, Dennis Kucinich has long opposed factory farming.
Just last Monday, Hillary Clinton named Joy Philippi, the former president of a the National Pork Producers Council, as the co-chair of her Rural Americans for Hillary club. Over the years, corporate meatpackers have driven thousands of smaller businesses out. Pork may be a lucrative choice on the campaign trail, but we shall see how well this sells with Nebraskan voters and others downwind of the hog farms. Thomas Philpott reports.
While on the topic of pigs, Michael Pollan yesterday wrote about a “very scary antibiotic– resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria.”
Read “Our Decrepit Food Factories” from New York Times magazine.