By M. Grace Grzanek, Founder and executive director, The Just Food Initiative of the Fox Valley
In a letter to The Voice in the February 18 edition, thevoice.us/public-funds-would-help-cultured-meat, Jon Hochschartner of Granby, Conn. wants you and me to encourage senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to support the payment, through public tax funds, for the development of “cultured-meat research” as an alternative to eating real meat.
Why?
These phony, food-like, substances, made of chemicals, full of unknown ingredients, are not food, they are not a product of nature, and are manufactured by meat monopolies looking to make another easy buck from consumers who are either uninformed or who simply don’t care. Five men own more than 80% of the meat sold to us Americans. With their get-big, or get-out philosophy and their vertically-integrated business models, they have forced almost nine out of 10 small, local, and family meat producers of beef, pork, veal, lamb, and poultry out of business, out of a financial livelihood for their families, and out of a spiritual option to choose a lifestyle these families preferred.
These conglomerates abuse their animals by locking them in constricting pens rather than allowing them to graze naturally. They feed the animals grain, an unnatural food for cattle, whose natural food is grass. This unnaturally-hybridized grain feed is a menace to us humans. In its hybridized form, it is causing those of us who eat this grain-fed meat to develop chronic diseases and disorders such as celiac disease, dementia, and obesity.
Due to the densely-populated-pen lifestyle inflicted upon them, the animals might, such as in the current COVID-19 pandemic, make each other sick. The monopolies solve it with unnecessary preventive antibiotics, which are passed on to us humans in their meat. Because we consistently eat this adulterated meat, the constant presence of unseen and unwanted antibiotics makes us immune to the antibiotics we may need in our human health emergencies. So, when it is our turn to truly need it, the human antibiotic may no longer work. Through the animal abuse by the five meat monopolies, our lives may be threatened. In order to force these animals to grow faster, the five men feed their animals hormones and steroids. We meat-eaters develop, from their products, endocrine imbalances and cancers which disrupt our lifestyles and sometimes our lives.
These conglomerates steal land from indigenous peoples, often burn up the precious rain forest of the Amazon, create an imbalance in nature’s ability to maintain a clean environment, create climate change, all in order to make room for more cattle to make more burgers for the already sick Americans, physically, psychologically, and spiritually, who are addicted to consuming more burgers and animal meat.
One of these conglomerates, a pork producer owned by a conglomerate in China, known to us as “Smithfield”, recently killed an Aurora woman ready for retirement, by its corporate COVID-19 policy: “You show up daily at your production line in the Saint Charles factory, COVID-19, or,or lose your job.” She showed up and still lost, not only her job, but her life, to COVID-19, and to injustice. Then, when monopolies encounter fewer competitors, these meat producers are free to charge consumers higher meat prices. Unless we are alert, we have little recourse.
You and I should, as taxpayers, support more of this immorality? That would be insane.
If we choose to eat meat, we have several small, ethical meat producers of beef, pork, goat, lamb, poultry, in our counties. These families, not the conglomerates, desperately need our support and our dollars. These food producers get no tax dollars from Washington, D.C. or, Springfield.
If we choose to eat vegan, several national companies already produce veggie burgers. At least these companies, and their consumers, are honest.
Meat conglomerates do inflict violence on animals. It is a moral crime. It is a bigger moral crime to solicit public funds to pay the conglomerates more money to continue through the development of phony meat.
Mr. Hochschartner’s suggestion is simply another example of the tendency of persons practicing and promoting food injustice to treat the symptom, such creating phony meat, instead of the cause: America’s unjust and immoral meat monopolies.
Our country has on our books a number of anti-trust laws to prohibit this style of stealth and abuse. I learned about this in 1949, when I was a high-school freshman. Leaders in Washington, D.C. have chosen, in my ensuing 73 years, not to enforce these laws. Lobbyists pay them well not to do so. The growth of this cancer called monopolies simply gets worse. The monopolies get away with literal murder.
It’s the trusts, the meat monopolies that need to be addressed. I would be delighted to see my tax dollars working toward such food justice. I would be outraged to be forced to fork over more tax dollars to support their phony cultured-meat research. Compassionate legislators should not advance the cost of phony meat, but the cost of not destroying the health of our citizenry and of our animals and the precious lands of our planet Earth.
As a taxpayer I do not want to pay for any more of this injustice and immorality. Mr. Hochschartner, whomever he is, simply is a contributor to an already unjust and immoral system.