THE PORTLAND DAILY SUN, Thursday, July 7, 2011— Page 5
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– OPINION –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Banned from the Barn Iowa’s ag-gag law failed to pass before summer recess last week: a good thing. The ridiculous proposition, which died along with similar ones in Minnesota, Florida and New York, would have made it illegal to videotape or photograph in the agricultural facilities that house almost all of our chickens and pigs. Sadly, a lack of idiocy is not the same thing as a presence of wisdom, and the demise of ag-gag won’t give us a clearer view of food production. We need more visibility, not less. But when I visited Iowa in May, I appealed to producers of eggs, chickens, pork and even cooking oil to let me visit their facilities. In general, I was ignored, politely refused or told something like “it’s a bad week.” (I made standing offers to return at any time; no one has taken me up on that.) When a journalist can’t see how the food we eat is produced, you don’t need ag-gag laws. The system’s already gagged. The videographers that have made it into closed barns have revealed that eggs are laid and chickens are born and raised in closed barns containing (literally) hundreds of thousands of birds; an outsider wouldn’t even know what those barns were. Pigs are housed cheek-to-jowl, by the many thousands, in what are called concentrated animal feeding operations,
Mark Bittman ––––– The New York Times where feeding, watering and monitoring are largely mechanized. Pregnant sows are confined in small concrete cells. Iowa is industrial agriculture’s ground zero. But when it comes to producing animals, zero is pretty much what you’re going to see. One medium-size pig-raising operation did offer me a tour, and we drove to a site where they ran four barns, each of which normally housed around 1,200 pigs. But the one we explored held only 200 pigs and reeked of deodorant. The animals had plenty of room, and they were calm and clean, as were the floors. Not at all what I expected. Except I’d been expected, and a cleanup must have preceded me by, I’d guess, no more than two hours. (Either that or these were magic, non-defecating pigs.) “Where are the other thousand pigs?” I asked. “We’ve shipped a whole bunch recently.” “How about the other three barns?
Are they full?” “Nope. We don’t have many pigs here right now.” Some tour. But I’d seen other pig barns during the course of the week because whenever I saw one that appeared unattended (it’s easy enough to tell; there’s no car), I checked it out as best I could. On some roads, there are almost as many pig barns as farmhouses, which may not be a coincidence: If you were an older farmer and your neighbor put 1,200 pigs in a barn, you’d probably move to Florida, too. The smell can be overwhelming. Most have a small enclosure by the road, usually with a Dumpster. That’s where dead pigs are tossed until the next garbage collection. (Yes, I saw this, several times.) Many of the barns are open on the sides so you can see how crowded the pigs are. (Videos of gestation barns — virtually impossible for an outsider to see — show that the sows can’t even turn around.) The pigs were visibly upset when I approached the outside of the barn. That was the best I could do, and it wasn’t much. I could’ve been arrested for trespassing; extreme versions of ag-gag would make it illegal for me to write about it, or at least publish pictures. Which would bring us a step closer to China, whose Health Ministry is trying to clamp down on news media
outlets that “mislead” the public about food safety issues. (It’s worth noting, on the other hand, that the Chinese Supreme Court has called for the death penalty in cases of fatal food poisoning.) “Mislead” apparently means reporting about pork tainted with the banned drug clenbuterol, which sent a couple hundred wedding guests to the hospital; watermelons exploding from the overuse of chemicals; pork disguised as beef, or glowing blue; and — my favorite — cooking oil dredged from sewers. (Check my blog for the details.) Our watermelons don’t explode and, for now, I can write about it. Yet when a heroic videographer breaks a horror story about animal cruelty, as happens every month or so, the industry writes off the offense as an isolated incident, and the perpetrators — usually the workers, who are “just following orders” — are fired or given wrist slaps. Business continues as usual, and it will until the public better understands industrial animalrearing techniques. “When I grew up here,” said an Iowan I spent some time with, “people were proud of their animals. They’d have signs with their breeds, or their names, and they’d offer to show you around.” That’s no longer the case with most animal operations in Iowa. Next week I’ll write about some of those that give us reason to hope.
The Twilight Zone, Serling’s memorable show, is as relevant as ever DOWD from page 4
benign in another. (Just like in life.) No doubt some characters would have been saved and others destroyed by Twitter, Facebook and Google. “When you look at ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes, everything is ambivalent,” said Serling’s friend Doug Brode, who, along with Serling’s widow, Carol, wrote “Rod Serling and ‘The Twilight Zone:’ The 50th Anniversary Tribute,” published in 2009. “Rod had an open mind to the good, the bad and the in-between of technology. He was a guarded optimist until the Kennedy assassination. After that, his work reflected his sense of hopelessness.” He said that Serling’s father, a middle-class grocer, lost his business in the Depression, so Rod had an early lesson in reversals. Serling also had a devastating experience while serving in World War II. During a lull at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific, he was standing with his arm around
a good friend and they were having their picture taken. At that moment, an Air Force plane dropped a box of extra ammunition that landed on Serling’s friend and flattened him so fatally that he couldn’t even be seen under the box. “Many ‘Zone’ episodes are about that split-second of fate where somebody arbitrarily gets spared or, absurdly, does not,” Brode said. Serling himself lived a reversal, going from a trailer park after the war and 40 rejection slips in a row to having a big Hollywood house and a pool. But he grew disdainful of Babylon’s corrupting materialism and moved back to a cottage on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York. Serling fought furiously against censorship and ads, asking how you could write meaningful drama when it was interrupted every 15 minutes by “12 dancing rabbits with toilet paper?” In one “Twilight Zone,” an inept screenwriter conjures up Shakespeare
to help him. The Bard produces a dazzling screenplay but then storms out when the sponsor demands a lot of revisions. Did Serling, who had a searing sense of social and racial justice, believe in God? “Not Charlton Heston sitting on a cloud with the Ten Commandments, but absolutely, as a force in the universe, he did,” Brode said. “Nearly 35 years ago, George Lucas told me that the whole concept of the Force comes from Rod Serling.” It’s impossible not to watch a stretch of the endlessly inventive Serling and not notice how many of his plots have been ripped off for movies, and how ahead of his time he was. In a popular new Samsung ad, a young woman jumps up from the lunch table and begins screaming because the tarantula screensaver on her colleague’s 4G phone is so lifelike; another guy at the table takes off his shoe and smashes it. There’s a “Twilight Zone” episode
where a Western gunfighter time travels forward and goes into a bar, where he sees a TV with a cowboy coming toward him. Thinking it’s real, he pulls out his pistol and shoots the screen. Looking at this summer’s lame crop of movies and previews you can appreciate Serling’s upbraiding of the entertainment industry for “our mediocrity, our imitativeness, our commercialism and, all too frequently, our deadening and deadly lack of creativity and courage.” “The Twilight Zone” was never gangbusters in the ratings, and Serling — who smoked on screen — died at 50 from the ravages of six packs a day. He felt like a sellout and failure. He had sold syndication rights for his show to CBS for a few million, thinking he had not written anything of lasting value. Sadly, he gave himself a trick ending. He died never realizing how influential he would be. “Everything today is Rod Serling,” said Brode. “Everything.”
Closing of shuttle program is the end of an era and a turning point HIGGINS from page 4
over the radio about Columbia breaking up on approach. We both headed for the nearest TV to catch the details, again chilled. I watched as Storey Musgrave did the final repair to the myopic Hubble Space Telescope. I watched astronauts on multiple missions
assemble the three times redesigned International Space Station. We all watched missions succeed and fail. After Friday, assuming the launch goes off without a hitch, there will be nothing left to watch. Sure, we can all go outside on a warm summer night and watch the ISS float by, but it just won’t be the same.
In closing the shuttle program without designating a replacement, we’ve not just coming to the end of an era. We’ve now come to a turning point as a country. Floor needs to be swept, let the robot do it. Cars need to be assembled, the robots can do it cheaper and faster. Data needs to be entered, the computer can just scan the form and do the job itself.
The great unknown needs to be explored, screw it; let the robot do that too. If we give up the last thing weas a country are good at, designing new technology to exploit the rest of the world, then what was the point? (Bob Higgins is a regular contributor to The Portland Daily Sun.)