Boss Hog

The gorging that is Thanksgiving that made me think of this...

When I last wrote about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I neglected to mention Jeff Tietz's horrifying article about modern pork production, "Boss Hog" posted December 2006 on Rolling Stone online.

I won't go into details but trust me when I say that after reading this article I could not eat pork for weeks.

Okay I'll post just the first paragraph:

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

That's just the start. It gets much worse. Very eye-opening.