[applause] is there a Nonfiction Author of book you would like to see is featured to max and an email treat us post on our wall. The state of the american meatpacking industry next on. An indepth an indepth look at the production of its most popular product. This is about an hour and a half. Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. It is a major breach of etiquette to have an event at 1215 without serving lunch but i guarantee in about 20 minutes no one will have an appetite, that is for sure. We will lose our appetites for good cause today. My name is chris leonard. Of book called the meat racket which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, the story of how few companies to control of our Meat Industry. As a journalist who journalist who has written about the meat business for a long time i am excited to have our guest year today the author and journalist. I followed his work for a long time. He has done a number of really important and revelatory articles about the Meat Industry that have been published in out words such as Bloomberg Business needs. He has really been on the speed in the midwest and breaking a lot of Important News which is culminated in his new book which has someone in israel about this for a long time and have a lot in here that surprised me and we we will get through it. But i want to say, after we set up this event i discovered ted is a pretty big deal. He was editor of the virginia quarterly review from 2003 until 2012 at a time when that magazine really exploded in terms of size and influence, 16 National Magazine awards. Also a celebrated poet. His work has appeared in several volumes of poetry and his most recent book amazingly is a biography of walt whitman during the early years of the civil war he then shifted to the meatpacking industry and wrote this wrote the chain. Thank you for being here. Thank you all for coming. [applause] so to start ted like i said, there was a lot that surprised me. We are going to walk through it all. He followed this from beginning to end bring in a lot into this book, but book, but i walked away feeling like youre booked into critical things. First of all, and profiled this company, not just any company a real harbinger of things that we will come a lot of important reasons, sort of like a canary in a coal mine that really affects anybody and could become the knew norm. And and so we we will talk about that. But i also feel like your book was a really jaded and frankly kind of troubling portrait of the Meat Industry and agribusiness in general during a time of recession and an economic downturn, and i had not really seen that before the mole was going on. So we we will walk through all of this, unpack it all but i want to start at the beginning and asked as asked, as we said, you are a poet, a guggenheim fellow commode is a nice guy like you doing . The easiest answer to that questions our grandfather worked in the swift packing house in omaha during the depression. Then the center of all walls meatpacking industries. I grabbed the stories of what things of been like for him when he was working there. The other part of the command is really informed the approach that i took was that once he had worked in the plans for a while and could not do that work anymore he went to western nebraska where he made again was a farmer. And he was able to keep his family afloat but was never really able to get ahead. And those things were always connected in my mind, 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 is a farmer. So you know to me it does not actually seen that strange. Strange. These are the stories of the locales that i grew up with. My 1st book was almost entirely about 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 a much earlier still going on in the middle of the countries. That is what is really shocking to me. How much the Meat Industry today is starting to resemble the Meat Industry of almost a hundred years ago. Were all familiar with this book. Really horrific conditions in terms of workers being entered. I was working from the assumption we had gone past that this food Safety Inspection regime osha to protect workers and different from the slaughterhouse of yesteryear. Lets talk about why that is changing changing, the company hormel which is at the center of your book. The most important invention has been antibiotics ipad and spam. So talk about this company, where it came from and how it became as big as it yesterday. The families still pronounce the name hormel. It is a german name, not a french name as the company was sort of rebranded in the 70s at the time when americans were discovering french cuisine. So founded the company and really found it originally as a Small Business where he was processing a few hearts in a week and supplying the local market in austin. Austin. But interestingly right from the beginning the company sort of had a way of taking advantage of economic downturns when there was a Major Economic downturn in 1893 that had to do with overbilling of railroads or melt recognize this was an opportunity because it meant that they were going to be lower prices for shipping. And so he could not only bring in hearts from farther away but to take advantage of the refrigerator car that was recently developed, and as his competitors focused on that refrigerated meat he said well, i think that there is also a market there for people who cant afford that meet smoked meats and eventually encampments. But that economic downturn interesting to me, george came up with the idea of taking the back meet a set of just the pork belly and selling that as canadian bacon, which is where that comes from. We have a lot to be grateful for. Absolutely. But his son was the one who looked at that as a a kind of model when the depression came around for finding ways to take what had been treated as waste product and find a way a way to market it and improve your Profit Margins at a time when maybe they were lean years for the company. And so is borne spam, it becomes ubiquitous. It is this huge product. What is really germane to our conversation today is that carmel becomes this pioneer for sort of knew system of Food Production new Regulatory Regime about how fast you can run the plan. So talk to us. This really started strangely enough with the Food Poisoning scare. At jackinthebox Food Poisoning scare. What happened, and what Regulatory Regime came from that . As he may not recall the jackinthebox outbreak was an outbreak of a new strain of e. Coli that spread among people who had been undercooked beef patties at jackinthebox or in some cases have had contact with people who had. And and the spread a great deal of fear about the safety of ground beef. And so it was at that moment that the at carmel said, you know this is a market opportunity. And they came up with the simple idea of encouraging consumers to take kansas spam and slice them long ways so that you can get three quarter pound patties of spam out of it that you can grill and they started for the spammer campaign. And if you look the socalled spammer is still on the can. That that is the sort of emphasis is placed as a way of consuming the spam. Up until that. That have not been the case. The other thing that is interesting is that that is the moment that there campaign started emphasizing spam as an alternative to what they called messy ground beef. The message, of course, is that ground beef was not too far that it did not just make a mess but that there was hazard there. And the seals of spam skyrocketed climbed about 20 percent in a couple of years. And with that incredible new market spam started for mel started shopping around for ways that they could increase production. Now, certainly the easiest way to increase production is to do more building building do more hire more people, that sort of thing, but the cheapest way to do that is simply to increase the output of the existing plant that you have so what they were looking for was something that would allow them to increase the speed of production within their plants. Very soon they get exactly what they wanted in the form of a Pilot Program that was instituted by the usda was testing out reduced inspection with an packing plants. So it is important for a couple of reasons. The 1st is that when you reduce inspection you are able to increase the speed of production as sort of a natural outcome of that. Up until that. Really the speed of inspectors is what set the speed of production. You can only run the line as fast as an inspector could physically inspect each carcass, but with this new model they said we are going to do microbiological testing it we will allow us to be much more accurate. Wont be what they derided polk and smith so what is left out of the discussion is what they are really doing is handing over most of the inspection to the companies themselves that are in the Pilot Program and doing spot checking. So there is microbiological testing but is carried out by fewer inspectors which means that the line is able to go much faster. Running the alliance at 20 faster 20 percent faster than any other packing plant, pork packing plant in the country. And and hormel becomes the case study because two of their plants were in that group of five and then they bought one of the other three. The three main and kill operations are part of that group. So what we what we see is the usda has a Pilot Program to try out a knew form of Safety Inspection, safety net and it is going to incorporate ramping up wind speeds, line speeds, wrapping up the speed of production and then shifting how the tests that meat instead of having the usda inspector which is a crazy site. New line fewer people standing on line. And let me say quickly, ramping up line speeds is the holy grail. I remember one time in missouri i was at a tyson foods plant sitting in the skys office and we are chatting. Behind him his computer goes into sleep mode command we see his screensaver and is this one sentence going biases run the bone. The. The line where workers are cutting apart chicken carcasses. That was this guys mantra. This giant expensive slaughterhouse. The stock about what life looks like inside one of these plants. Shall have some more. The plan in austin, minnesota which is the subsidiary that exists inside the fence of hormel food and supplies them what you see is that the line speeds over the last decade during this Pilot Program have increased by about 50 percent. At the same time yes, their are jobs that have been added, but the number of workers is somewhere between ten and 15 percent. And some of this there is no denying everyone is working off the plan is working faster. There was always a great deal of anxiety going into those meetings. Everybody knew that the line speed only goes in one direction. Direction. The intention is always to make it faster and faster and faster. Your aware that you are working faster and harder. To me to me that is where this becomes much more of a much more than just a story about the meatpacking industry. Its a story about the american recession and the american recovery. Yes,. Yes, we can say that the company has added jobs since the economic downturn which seems like a positive indication but the reality is their income is determined by how prices are doing. And Companies Like all no the stock prices are soaring everyone is always advising this is a recession proof company. Lets talk run numbers are for 2nd. 950 hogs in our up to a thousand dogs in our which is Something Like 15 hogs a minute. Were talking about manual labor. Reaching 1300 hogs in our. So at the. Where this all began with a reduced inspection model learning about 900 hogs an hour. They got up to 1350. Even now depending on the supply and what has happened recently with the viruses that have gone through and affected supplies the speed of the line is been adjusted but at peak times its running over 1300 our. And so that is really the intention intention, to try to move the line just that much faster. And as much as an increase that is i have been amazed talking to some of the people who work at all know for decades you can remember when they were processing fewer than 500 now. And so the increase in speed is hard to fathom. And tragically you. Out as someone works of the plant like this for years theres a 5050 chance they we will be injured. You injured. You interview a woman who lost a finger injuries like that. And this is where everyone we will lose their appetite. About 20 minutes and just as i said. Lets talk about the brain machine. You uncovered that uncovered that when you ramp up line speed like this you have some unexpected effects and consequences. What happened to mac. Okay. So and chris has already warned you good yourself a little bit there is a section of the production line that is called the head table which is where the heads of the hogs are processed. Its where the user moves the snout the cheek meat is removed the times are removed, they even scraped the pilot meet out from all of that sort of thing. And some of this is done with straight knives some with what are called wizard knives which are these power knives that are circular blades and so everything is moving very fast. And also everything in that area is is powered by a pneumatic system. So there is lot of airflow. At the at the end of the head table, the very last spot is where the denuded school lines up. And at the time where the book is set at the beginning or mel was harvesting the brains from the hogs and selling them to the korean market as a thickener for stirfry. And the way that they collected them at the plant in austin the qb p plan there was by inserting a brass nozzle into the opening at the back of the school where the spinal column was going and there was a pen on the nozzle that would trigger automatically and release a blast of pressurized air which was enough to liquefy the brain inside which would then be poured into a catch pocket and the skull was then dropped down the chute where the bones were taken and ground for bone marrow. They discovered that just enough of the brain matter the worker works inhaling the brain matter. And so because of the air currents through the plan it was not just affecting the person who ran the brain machine the drifting down the head table and actually drifting in other directions as well to the supervisors who regularly came through the area were affected and they did not no what was happening really until the 1st worker started complaining about extreme pain in their extremities hands and feet, and then people actually collapsing on the plant floor. And what they eventually figured out the 1st clinic was involved in the Minnesota Department of health as they inhale the brain matter what triggered an autoimmune response. In the workers bodies were not only killing the neural tissue that they had mailed from the pigs within their bodies started attacking their own neural tissue. It started with protecting 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 they were people who had permanent spinal damage and even brain damage you know the brain machine is running at full speed, so their are more and more harris lies brain in the atmosphere. Breathing in a lot more than they used to. What what really bothered me about this passage in the book and what chief of the story was to the whole book is that these employees are discovering to follow the want to say that they are guinea pigs in a lab that they are discovering it by accident, being challenged in the authenticity of what they are saying. As you say i dont think that this is something that could have been for scene in particular but the reaction to it the initial reaction is sort of denial that there is anything going on. A lot of active effort to separate the workers so that they did not give up most of them did not no that anyone else in the plan had been affected until they started seeing each other at the dr. s office. And the way that it was actually eventually pieced together was by a translator and the 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 there was something going on. And so and then once there was concern from the mayo clinic and in the department of health there was this kind of public reaction of saying where going to do everything we can. We want to take care of our workers, but behind the scenes qb p is a company was engaged in a squabble with aig over who would have to pay for the medical bills and denying workers comp. Claims and eventually they were a number of workers who were called in and an immigration status was questioned almost all of the workers affected for undocumented workers, and the number of them fearing that they were facing deportation simply fled. And so many of them even the people that i interviewed for the book many of them are simply gone because they were working under false identities in the 1st place you know its its not a matter of tracking them down someplace else. Wherever they are their almost certainly still suffering from the symptoms but they are someplace where they have no way to get medical assistance. And were going to save the talk about undocumented workers for a little bit later, but it was infuriating to read these passages about these this post just trying to basic workmans coverage for these terrible injuries that they did not get. I would like to talk a little bit about the Safety Inspection element of this and whether or not the food we are eating from the implant is safe. There is a great line from the jungle. Interviewing a food safety inspector and did not want to. Out that their were dozens of carcasses running behind them that were not even inspected. The inspector was perfectly happy to support talk to him. Yeah. And so you. Out the usda itself did a large survey study of these plants. Plants. An oig report. The results were not encouraging. Tell us a little bit about what this longterm study showed about the efficacy of an implant. So the office of Inspector General report looked at the food safety records for the five plants that were brought into the program. And the mean yardstick that was used was with the industry referred to as noncompliance records. Places where there has 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 the three of them are among the ten worst food safety violators in the country plan including the plan that is the worst. And the and the obvious question that the report raises is if this is supposed to be a Pilot Program this is is testing a knew model of inspection why would we possibly say we have run this for over a decade. The food the food safety implications seem to be terrible all by themselves, not even looking at the impact on the workers in the plants, but just looking at food safety why would we make it as the model for all of the pork packing plants in the country back but talk talking to people my sense is that is exactly where the momentum is headed that hemp we will be expanded. The massive amounts of violations that are found this is a disconnect that i just dont understand. I dont either. I dont have a good a good explanation for this because the only thing that i can say is that i understand perfectly well how this benefits the packers but i dont understand how it benefits anyone else. And lets. Out that hemp is not likely to be just constrained to the pork industry. The the big Poultry Companies are pushing correct me they are pushing a hemp like rule, if if you will to speed up line speed change the inspection regime. They face tremendous blowback from that of the last year and have this hybrid right here. I speed up the line. Collectors collectors were no room. And i think even the sort of compromised position i think it is still clear that things are headed in the direction of benefiting the industry. I i was talking to the usda economist at couple of weeks ago. Much more like a trade association than a regulator i think that this drives that. Home pretty well. I i want to move on because theres so much to cover in the book. Just for a few minutes i want to touch on what the system is done to farms as we think about them. And you have got a lot of really powerful powerful stuff in here. Lets start quickly. You profile this farm for new fashion. The the numbers of page top facilities like this is incredible. Thousands in a single born. You know a standard sized for some of the larger producers are 6,000. New fashion has interestingly settled on a size that is about 2200 dogs has been chosen for a very specific reason. In order to face Environmental Review within the state of iowa you have to have a facility that is over a thousand animals except it is not actually animals for but livestock is calculated by what percentage of a cow the animal is. The calculation is august 4. 2200 dogs is just under a thousand animal units and you can build a barn that is a size without facing Environmental Review. And you. Out environmentally page of big animals, and the waste they ways they produce when highly concentrated as a serious pollutant. In high concentrations of the terrible pollutant, and pollutant and you. Out that it has completely overwhelmed the Public Infrastructure for cleaning the water that is running off of these forms. Absolutely. I talked to the people at the des moines waterworks which is the largest of the Water Treatment facilities and ill. They have monitoring stations that are positioned up river 40 river 40 different points along the rivers that they are drawing from. And so they can see what happens when they get a heavy rain they can see everything spikes and they no they have to bring equipment to remove through some of those talent and bring online Emergency Water reserves so that they can delude delete and get down below certain levels. But they said that the contaminant levels are now so hard sometimes especially in the spring after there is lot of manure that has been injected at it is difficult even with everything that they have in place to get below the ten 10 milligrams per liter but they are required especially on nitrate because what is coming and is in is often three and four times the allowable levels under the clean water act. The industry add in the pork producers and large respond that this is coming from human sources. The absurdity of that is not really take hold. A place like Greene County or Jefferson County mayor talking about places that have fewer than 10,000 people in the. Spread across an entire county that has hundreds of thousands of dollars. Theres also the fact that arch produce almost eight times as much waste is a human. So the people said to me when you have 22 million hearts producing eight times as much waste is human do you think that is the points worse or do you think it is the 3 million humans . And that doesnt even take into account the feedlots, the chicken barns, all of those sorts of things. To say that this is a nine and cultural source to me just seems absurd. How do you know . Exactly. There is actually a very simple test that we will tell you that this is coming from humans or animals. I love this. It is a caffeine test. Because just about every human is taking in caffeine and they dont feed caffeine dogs. Not yet. But you can do a caffeine test. When i talked to the microbiologist of the des moines waterworks they got lots of pushback from State Government. We have to move forward here a little bit too. The animals themselves. You have some incredible reporting in here about some of these undercover operations. Really got some explosive video that change the conversation around this whole topic. I have taken a lot of heat about the chicken as an animal. I just think a lot. I guess there is this full body of evidence that shows they can do math and stuff like that. Im still not impressed, frankly. But they really are a different matter to me honestly. Very intelligent. You can look into their eyes and see this consciousness. They are raised now in the same kind of factory model the chickens have been for decades. I just want to start this 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 plan we have in fremont, nebraska . I dont know on an industrial scale. I know lots of smallscale farmers called farmers who continue to raise their hearts more traditionally. I think that that seems perfectly sustainable, as it was for a very long time in this country . Talking talking about exactly. This is not nostalgic. But there was a farmer a farmer in the basket is said to me not long ago that what he saw as the difference in philosophy was that the larger industry is aiming at a global market, trying to be able to take over and feed the whole world where he says that his objective is to be able to feed his neighbors. Now, if you are going to take that strategy, what that means is that you need as you know a lot less farm consolidation, more farmers more people engaged in farming which is just not the direction of things are currently going. And it is not the way that any of the economic incentives are set. So if we were to try to meet the current demand while raising homes with dirt under their feet and the solider backs we would need a lot more hard farms and a lot more hard farmers. And for that to be possible means big changes that are really going to have to be topdown. Somethings radical as the change we saw in the 80s and the consolidation to cold. And right now we are at this very contentious status quo while we are not moving in that direction you just described but instead we have an industry that seems intent on doing things the way they are and yet consumers are troubled by it and in the middle you have these kind of folks you interviewed who are activists who think animal should be treated differently and are going in with hidden cameras. It is a contentious situation. Some of the nicest people you will ever meet in your life. They are really feeling embattled right now. The response of policymakers of course has been to outlaw videotaping. What else would you do. So they have these loans. Tell us a little bit a little bit about what it is and what makes it illegal so ill is actually kind of a perfect case study for what the act gag laws and how they mutate. The case that you were talking about occurred in 2,008 that was supplying all know. And there were two different investigators who spent months there documenting abuses especially if they were being moved from gestation to travel installs and so these videos come out the response is initially we are going to being able to shoot these videos. It will make it so that you have to have the permission of the owner in order to be able to shoot video all the sorts of things. When there are concerns that were raised by the attorney general and other lawyers who look at this that this this was not going to pass the muster constitutionally the eventual version that goes through allows employers instead to ask certain questions and deny employment on that basis. Now at the very least you are likely to see a question, have you ever been a member of peter or hs us the Humane Society of the United States. More extreme instances you may see question such as art are you intending during the course of your employment to record what you see here and anyway video documentation, written documentation from any of the sorts of things. And if you answer yes they can deny your employment on that basis. If you answer no and you have lied java application and you are guilty of entering a filing a false document. And so the situation as it stands is quite complex and a place like iowa. The Supreme Court will take up this issue because of the different versions that have proliferated, but in the most extreme cases there was one person who was arrested and eventually not charged but arrested in utah for shooting iphone footage from the public road of the crime that was occurring. The police the police came out and took her away. Wow. Well, i think we have to switch at this. Back to the people even other is lot that we could talk about. Again you really covered the system from beginning to end. Talk to her the effects of the recession on this. The Meat Industry as we no it i think i think was born in the 1990s which was a toddler general Economic Growth and everyone in the midwest, i wouldnt even call it an open secret. Big companies were built on immigrant labor in the slaughter houses. Not the vast majority great deal of undocumented workers because we decided not to enforce our federal immigration laws during that time. It is just a fact. A wink and a nod. When i was in order to father a porter and arkansas i was struck by how harmonious frankly, the situation was. You would see townsend went from 5 hispanic 5 percent hispanic to 30 to 40 percent hispanic. I thought the new populations were really welcome, and i was surprised at how harmonious the whole situation was. You paint a very different picture of what life was like in fremont nebraska in 2,008 when things started to go bad and i think that really exposed fisher in this industry and in rural america. So talk a little bit about this sort of campaign that started out. So that whole movement to my mind kind of starts in two places. The 1st is that in 2,006 what are known as the swift rates were immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up, up seal the doors although everyone away and Homeland Security buses and then there was a similar raid at Agro Processors in iowa. And this gave the immigration and customs area kind of blackeyed 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 to parents who were working in the same plan they rounded up people who had children who were in school at that time he suddenly had no parents and had no idea how to contact him. And in many cases were born in the us and therefore were legal citizens. So there was this decision to change that strategy by immigration and customs and not do that sort of thing but for the people who were hardliners on immigration immigration, that is suddenly what everyone wanted to see in the town the people who are really, as i say, sort of sort of ruthless in their approach to immigration enforcement. Why do i have a plan on the edge of town not showing up in allowing everyone away. And when you combine that, that as you say, with the economic hard times that were starting to the fall the small towns that starts to get wrapped up in the jobless rate in the sense of all those sorts of things. And so in a town like fremont the conditions are sort of right. I think it is also a factor of the geography of the number of these plants the industry made a decision a decision along time ago to move outside of urban centers because that is where labor unions are. And it was much harder to organize and unionized workforce in this small town but what that has created over time is a proximity to town often growing in the direction of the meatpacking plant in town where if you are a young person who has big ambitions what your left with is the hardliners of the community, the people committed to a certain version of the town and they very often terrified of the city that seems to be creeping toward the door. Inevitably the inevitably the turns and the anger toward minorities and outsiders. Ted, you documented a site happening in fremont where his local coalition of citizens get together and want to pass the towns on immigration form. Which would require companies to verify immigration status of employees which would also very importantly require homeowners to verify the status of people that they were in homes to. Lots of little instances across the midwestern towns trying to pass laws like this. A big ugly legal site. The cultural spillover of this legal site. It is important to note that when we Start Talking about these ordinances that pop up around the country the local level, the laws that were passed in arizona and alabama this can seem from the outside like a movement of some kind. It is actually the work of one person chris cobalt with the secretary of state in kansas and now facing a kind of serious reelection challenge there. The the person who has authored all of those ordinances and laws. And so it is now a case where you have a community that is looking to do Something Like this, they reach out in order to get language that will hold up in court. So there is this kind of outside element that exists in creating all these things but at the same time it taps into this what i can only describe as sort of 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 sort of terrible negative reaction toward anything that does not look familiar. What is strange about this to me and utterly long headed about this to me is that fremont the rural town in nebraska 20,000 people are so we will my dad grew up in western nebraska, a tiny town of about thousand people. And he remembers vividly from his childhood 1st of all when he was very young all of the field labor especially with the sugarbeet harvest was japaneseamerican immigration. The interment camps opened fdr approved bringing in hispanic labor, bringing in labor from mexico and not only was the mexican labor that was brought in but they also are using pow from germany, italy. My dads recollection of growing up in a Rural Community outside of a Rural Community in nebraska and the 40s was of a Farming Community made up of people from all over the world. And this notion that these are white small towns that have never had this kind of influx of immigrants, its just a falsehood. So the version of smalltown america is being created their in my opinion has much more to do with a the version of america that has been created by the tea party than one that has to do with actual history. While. That has, as you. Out, i just want to emphasize that as this, you know, as you. Out the the nativism the ordinance was approved by voters overwhelmingly twice and yet it was challenged in court. Getting bullets shot through the windows you are seeing growing contention between neighboring neighbor. It is an ugly scene. And i just want to ask you about the architect of a lot of this. I grew up to watch in kansas and he has been in the news a lot lately. Interesting guy. Describing something and he says there is a beautiful vignette. And he says, let me stop and use the english word. Yes, little picture. And no french was spoken either. These laws have been mostly ineffective and actually having any sort of change on immigration patterns. And yet you are selling this court and strife in these towns. Is there a legitimate legal battle . I dont think that this is to thought i certainly dont think this is never to create a larger effect on immigration and emigration policy. He himself is said that this is about what he says is changing the equation you basically make life less comfortable you make the fear of discrimination or deportation or any of these sorts of negative Impact Community make those chances higher. It decreases the likelihood that people we will come to the us in the 1st place it increases the chance that they we will leave. It is deportation, as he describes it. Wwor the meat inspectors sued because they said its privatizing inspection where the Meat Inspection act requires for it to be carried out by government inspectors. It took a while for there to be a settlement and the settlement was reached and then the implementation started at that point. And it was 2003 into 2004 by the time the plans for on line with the discussion model. We have a question in the front row. Thank you. My name is Roberta Stanley and im a publicschool advocate. I work for the child the patrician program actually. I have two quick question. One you glossed over the prospective State Government. Those of us who work for government view minnesota as quote and enlightened state unquote and secondly as alec involved with those laws to the . The second answer is a little easier alec is involved in the writing of especially the ag laws. Alec is not directly related to what koback is doing that im aware of but i think, i think we can see how some of those things work together. The first question on State Government pushback 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 bureaus of various states. They are Huge Campaign donors. They are sort of the guerrilla of state politics. They are the big industry that exists and iowa in particular Terry Branstad the governor there has made it quite clear that whatever the ag industry wants he is there to give it to them. And so you end up with situations where you know, not only is the industry asking for specific things and getting them but anytime theres an opportunity to reduce the regulation of the industry its sort of offered as a matter of course. In the front row. Deadline just wondering if you ran into any of the ag restrictions and the hormel shut down in what was your reporting experience . So i havent run into ag restrictions per se. What i have seen is over the course of the reporting there was a heightened sense of awareness or more places are publishing work that im working on about how the material was gathered how things are described to ensure not only the publication but also the people we are relying on are not running afoul of the law. As far as hormel goes i am fascinated by Hormel Company for a number of reasons but certainly one of them is how incredibly tightlipped they are as a company. I have been writing about them publishing work about them for over three years now. They never issued a statement in response to anything ive written. The strategy seems to be to pretend as if i dont exists. And so i dont know what to make of that. I know that they know i exist because ive seen the letters that they write to my editors. And i dont know how many emails and letters and phonecalls i have sent to various people there and always making the case in no you have got to have a perspective on this. Help me to understand how youre approaching this and there is no reply. The only thing i have 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. Hormel actually gave money for 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 set are these legit, are these real and they wrote back and said yes that is correspondence from us and that was it. The second row here. Tony from food and water watch. Ted, has the United States department of agriculture as a Safety Inspection service ever done a study showing the efficacy of the 10 projects . I love the leadin question. You are going to be shocked. The answer is no. And this is always the issue. Much of what is being argued for his common sense because they say what we are looking at is doing testing for for microbial pathogens and that obviously going to be better than just having some guys who go around and look at things based on their color and poke them to see how they smell. This is more scientific and yet there is very little to do to actually follow up on providing the data to support that. What i would also point out is fsis resources use that Pilot Project to recognize similar privatized inspection systems in australia, canada and new zealand and here they are basing that on a Pilot Project they have never done before. Thats right, its a great point. The study you spoke of earlier that was just on food safety records . The distinction that tony is making is looking at how the particular kinds of tests they are running on the line how well they match up against a lab test where you are doing a tested not just for testing but the larger model of implementing that test in a plant. So what oig was doing was just looking at the cases where the food inspectors had reported on compliance reports. And in some ways the oag stuff is especially troubling to me because most of it because they were specifically studying this is what is referred to a finding which is to say we want actually looking for this particular violation and the one that gets me the most is the report is from an inspector who says i spotted a contaminated carcass when i was on the way to the bathroom for a bathroom break. And if he hadnt spotted it it wouldnt have gone in. Thats correct. So the difference is basically assembling all of these anecdotal evidence as they have been to this report as opposed to doing a fullscale systematic study. Maam, second row in a blue sweater. Thank you. This is sarah from food and water watch and i happen to be from a small town farm in indiana. My question is where you might see any in the armor. Certainly as an organization where do you see the weakness for groups like us . Yeah the thing that i think is problematic is what we really need is federal regulation and enforcement of existing regulation as well because the State Governments were all of this is taking place or just simply too indebted to the farm bureau interest and to the meatpackers as well. And they are willing to really give them anything that they want in the name of trying to bring in more tax revenue and trying also to get their support as they are running for reelection. But one of the things that i wrote about in the book and chris house as well is all of the states used to have laws against vertical integration so there was a protection to keep these full market monopolies from occurring. And now that those vans have been rolled back as possible for a meat packer to not only on the packing plant but to own the fields where the feed is grown to feed them and to consolidate all of that and manipulate 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 owned by money that was provided by the chinese government. And i keep wondering in these intensely red states how its happening that people are perfectly fine with companies, but the company is chinese owned showing up and acquiring everything and site. Ted smithfield only makes one third of all the pork in the United States. In the front row we have a question. Thank you. I was going to rates raise smithfield and asked because the chinese obviously benchmark themselves in many areas. A major problem with safe Food Supplies themselves as almost hysteria about that and china and certainly in the upper classes. Is there any way that we can turn out to our advantage because if what it does is add to the pressures to maintain the status quo we may have a bigger problem changing things here. Is there any way that you can see that we could turn that into a positive force for change . Is a great question. The only way that i can see is essentially by leveraging that concerned to say we cant allow allow its bad enough to allow giant american owned corporations to have this much control over market especially a market that is food. But do we want them to hand that over to not just the Foreign Corporation but an Investigative Reporter did a magnificent piece showing that the funding for that came straight from the chinese government. This is something that and they bought smithfield at almost 150 of the market price. There is a strategic decision being made here and it does seem to me at that point that we should be at least paying closer attention than we have so far to what this means. And so as i say i think the only thing that i can see is asking at that point do we want to continue to keep laws in place that make it not only so that there is so much consolidation but that consolidation can take take be taken advantage by anyone who comes in with enough money. We have a question in the third row grid the gentleman in the blue shirt in the tide. Thanks so much. Washington bureau with the Humane Society of the United States and thanks to the new America Foundation for this great event. Chris and i will be following up on information about the intelligence of chickens. [laughter] they are not bird brains. [laughter] anyway ted thanks for your great book and for your passionate writing about Animal Welfare in the animal cruelty that occurs in factories. As you know a lot of companies in the pork industry including core melt and cargill and others have made announcements in response to public criticism that they are going to move away from practices like gestational crates and im wondering why you think it is that these companies have been so responsive to that criticism over animal cruelty but perhaps not somebody some of the other ones we are talking about today . For one thing gestation crates i think are something that the public was able to 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 and especially when youre talking about heres a space thats essentially the hog sized cage. That the sow was going to be kept in her 114 days while she is pregnant. I think its sort of specific enough for the public to react negatively to it. But at the same time i have been fascinated by the way in which the politics of this shift around. You know Chris Christie is not eager to approve a gestation crate ban and i thought the editorial that bill maher published in the New York Times where he said 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 its fascinating to see on the one hand you have something that the public at large and especially the number of people that support it in new jersey is 93 to see how it would make sense politically to respond to that but you have got the local politics that make it National Politics when youre talking about some place like iowa coming into an election year. And to the other part of your question turning gestation crates into shared spaces shared pens there is a little of retrofitting that has to be done but it primarily involves the same thing which i think is a lot easier to agree to been massively reformulating. In so i think its also something that the industry can offer as a sort of gesture of concern and showing that they are responding without having to move too far. In the aisle with the blue shirt. You have been waiting a long time. Imf Public Health advocate and im wondering about the Health Conditions of the meatpacking chains with respect to osha. Are they doing anything and the other thing would be what is epa doing with respect to the toxic waste from the hog farms . Both Great Questions and really interesting areas for discussion. Osha is involved in looking at how the safety of the workplace is determined but its a loophole in a way that packing plants are designed and because in port hacking plans at least there is no. Its always been an informal cap that its really the usda inspectors and fsi inspectors who set the pace at work so theres a gap in the regulation that exists were the meatpacking workers are concerned. And right now there is a lawsuit pending that has been brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Nebraska Appleseed Center which does fantastic work for advocacy for meatpacking workers at nebraska. They are sitting both osha and the usda for not doing more to address that problem, the regulatory gap. The other question about the epa epa, the epa has been reluctant to get involved especially in iowa where there has been sort of the biggest problem to date. But the epa has been threatening to step in and take control 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 can find concentrated animal feeding operations they have seven inspectors. And those inspectors are the ones who are responsible for going and making sure the Management Plan is being carried out properly. You can imagine with seven people are able to do with 10,000 confinement. Essentially all that they do is a few random checks but mostly they are responding to citizen complaints. If you ever want to see a truly fascinating on line piece, the state of iowa became a database of the animal feed operations and you can pull up the individual histories of any confinement that is there. And you will see that in almost all of these cases there is an inspector that will come out and see there is one problem or another with the Management Plan which generally means the confinement has been cited too close to a well or a waterway or trucked out and spread was exceeding the amount that was allowed and what they get issued is a correctional order. Essentially dont do this again. And so the epa has been talking about expanding its control of those waterways but then the pushback from the farm bureau has been the epa is coming and they want to take control of the pond on your property. And there has been a lot of talk that the epa wants to regulate your horse tank. So that is the message that is being put out that this is a sort of unreasonable environmental overreach but the reality is Something Like the Raccoon River major watershed in iowa, the iowa dnr that does the testing their own estimate is for e. Coli levels have been reduced by 99 to be safe. Its a crisis. I think we have time for two quick questions if they can. I see allies and on the aisle. I wayzata with npr. So the beef industry it seems like its starting to rally around this idea of Sustainable Beef partly because mcdonald said it would buy, wants to buy verified Sustainable Beef by 2015 so who knows what that is doesnt exist so wondered why the pork industry doesnt seem as far as i can tell rallying around this idea of sustainability and may not perhaps because its not being pressured by consumers and why the industry is doing that. I think like you said at the top this is being driven by mcdonalds and what mcdonald says and this has been true for very a very long time, mcdonald says this is what we want to do because that is how a huge number of americans consume their beef. The flipside to that is that the american consumption of pork has been dropping slightly in recent years but were all the growth is for the industry is in the asian markets. So you know there is just not the same pressure. But again to come back to the springfield example i think thats one of the reasons that trying to keep a handle on this now is important because if the market is allowed to expand to the point that American Consumers dont have any pressure to bring on the industry then the majority of the consumers will be outside the United States and the production will be happening here. As bad as the waterways are in iowa now and the working conditions are at the packing plants now i cant even imagine what they will be like if thats allowed to happen. Right on the aisle. My name is rose whales and i grocery shop. [laughing] good for you. I find all this heartbreaking and i would just like to know what i can say to my neighbors and our affluent suburbs that think a 5dollar roasted chicken is a good thing to buy . Yeah so i struggle with this myself because on the one hand i think the very things that consumers can do to make better choices especially where the quality and wholesomeness of their food is concerned. For people who eat meet i dont think there is anything wrong with deciding to find better quality and smaller quantities and if you are in a place that its possible to deal directly with the farmer. Certainly for all of the meat that i eat at home i have seen that animal through the entire process including right up to the slaughtering. To me that is what the animals do. Unfortunately i dont think that is enough. I dont think saying im going to buy animal that is grass better Animal Welfare proved first of all not everybody gets up afford that in the system is designed to make that kind of food affordable to large numbers of people especially people on fixed incomes. Im very wary of a situation where we end up demonizing people who cant afford to buy better food. And thats where pressuring our lawmakers and leaders to do better comes in and saying you know there needs to be regulation. There needs to be a system that favors highquality safe food that is affordable for everybody. Lets wrap it up on that note note. You have written an incredible and important book and i thank you for your hard work. I highly recommend it. We have copies for sale outside. Its really wellwritten so thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] decks her look at the early life and ascendancy