Smithfield has a legacy of family farm destruction, labor abuses and environmental devastation. What's to admire about that?
RICHMOND, Va. — Pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc. is opening a hometown restaurant to showcase its products. The company, still based in Smit...
If I told you that pigs confined in gestation crates -- cages barely larger than the animals' bodies, in which they don't have enough space even to turn around -- were living in "ideal" conditions where their "every need is met," you'd probably have a quarrel with that.
Between 2005 and 2009, I made Pig Business by tracking US pork giant Smithfield Foods, Inc. as it swept into Poland and took advantage of cheap labor, poorly enforced environmental laws, and a government fragile in its post-communist years.
RICHMOND, Va. — The Humane Society of the United States said Wednesday that an undercover worker at a farm owned by the world's largest pork pro...
Pork shoulder at my local supermarket costs 99 cents a pound, but zucchini cost $1.99 a pound. Why? Because American factory farms mass produce swine with such efficiency that the cash value of a pig's life has dwindled downward.
As food issues come out of the foodie fringe and into the mainstream, moneyed special interests are beginning to fear for their bottom lines just a little bit.
The Mexican meat industry generates 130 million tons of fecal and urine matter each year, which often ends up in rivers and on coasts causing terrible environmental damage.
It's entirely possible that the Smithfield facility at La Gloria had nothing to do with this outbreak. But it's not exactly a "wild theory" -- Smithfield pigs are being tested for the new H1N1 strain as I write this.
If a commercial flight is a prime breeding ground for airborne infectious disease, consider the digs of modern hogs: factory farms.
