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Last Updated: May 8th, 2008 - 20:33:00
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The movement toward the “100-mile diet” got a boost this week with the release of that sickening video of manure-covered pigs wobbling off a ship after a six-day and 6,000-kilometre journey from southern Alberta to the tropical paradise of Hawaii.
That diet, which began as an experiment by a Vancouver couple and has since turned into a book and a movement, suggests it’s best for both the planet and individual health to eat and drink only what can be grown or produced within a 100-mile radius of home.
Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon took up that challenge in spring 2005. They decided to buck the North American trend that finds, they say, our food typically travelling 2,400 km before it reaches our plates.
The pigs at the centre of an animal abuse allegation by the World Society for the Protection of Animals, representing a number of animal welfare groups, travelled much more than that average. It’s a journey by truck and boat that some 15,000 pigs take each year on their way to slaughter.
Even with food and water, such a journey in a container would be stressful for any living creature. And it defies logic that there’s more money to be made shipping pigs such distances instead of sending them to slaughter closer to home and then selling the value-added product to customers far away.
It’s particularly frustrating for those in the industry in Alberta who raised the animals, sent them to auction, sold them and saw them off on the first leg of this journey. By all accounts, Alberta’s rules for the humane treatment of livestock are stringent and regulatory officials have been known to work closely with those concerned about animal welfare to ensure animals aren’t mistreated on their way into the food chain.
It’s not easy being in the hog business these days. Like other livestock industries, hog producers have had a tough time realizing any profit given high grain prices and the low U.S. dollar. Meanwhile, there’s less processing being done in southern Alberta, where once the industry was huge.
The situation harkens to arguments made during the peak of the mad-cow crisis in the beef industry. It just makes better economic sense for the producers of the raw materials (in this case, livestock) to have the processing capability close to home, keeping jobs in Alberta, rather than shipping animals south of the border for slaughter. But we’ve seen how that passion for a more self-sufficient industry turned out. When the border opened to normalized trade, fledgling packing plants withered and died, and Alberta went back to its place as a provider of the livestock, less so of the finished product that’s found on grocery shelves.
Meanwhile, the World Society for the Protection of Animals is claiming something of a victory in its two-year investigation of the pig shipments. Wednesday, WSPA said it received word from the Hawaiian Department of Agriculture that the hog shipments from Canada ceased in early October. The practice may still resume, though one hopes the island market will realize quality pork slaughtered and frozen closer to the farm would be better quality than the meat off an animal shipped part-way round the globe.
Though it appears blame for the abuse documented by the animal rights groups falls outside of Canada, that doesn’t completely give us the nod to dismiss the matter entirely.
The incident should give us all a bit of pause about what’s on our plates these days, whether it’s fresh fruit and veggies from South America or meat products made in the U.S. that may well have been raised on a farm down the road. The society’s efforts have raised our awareness of the stress and strain on animals during transport. Research also shows produce is less nutritious the longer it has to travel from the field to the consumer. Tack on the environmental legacy of all that shipping when so much good nutritious food can be found closer to home, and one can see what moved folks like Smith and MacKinnon to revisit how and what they eat.
© Copyright by Lethbridge Herald.com
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