How Our Food System Impacts the Environment
Factory farming has dire environmental consequences. It isn't too late to turn things around.
When it comes to climate change, we’re inching dangerously close to the point of no return. This is what the world’s climate scientists have been saying for more than a few years. But since the problem is so vast, it’s easy to blow it off, burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away on its own. So we wanted to offer some helpful tips on what you can do in your daily lives to put a dent in the climate change crisis. We hope to shed some light on the urgency of the problem through thoughtful deep dives that explore the systems and industry practices that exacerbate the problem and explore their social and ecological impacts. Within the series, you might also find some inspiring ways you can start to help make Earth more green and, hopefully, begin to turn back the clock on climate change.
As the pandemic hit the United States, refrigerated meat cases sat empty in chain grocery stores all across the country. At the same time, many farmers were left to slaughter their own animals, unable to sell their product due to backlogs at large processing plants operating at a 40 percent diminished capacity. The waste due to bottlenecking has extended to dairy and produce, as well.
Our most vulnerable have suffered the most as a result. Low-income families can’t afford to buy higher-priced meat and 44 percent of meat plant workers are Latino and 25 percent are Black. Tyson Foods, the country’s largest poultry producer, has over 4,500 confirmed cases of COVID-19, yet doesn’t offer their workers paid sick leave. This forces them to make the inhumane choice of risking not only their health but their families’ health in order to earn a living wage from a company that doesn’t support them.
It’s not as if the government didn’t have Big Ag’s back, with Trump issuing an executive order that meat plants stay open despite coronavirus outbreaks within them, and the USDA spending hundreds of millions buying up surplus meat, dairy, and produce. These proved to be mere band-aids on insurmountable, systemic issues that reach all the way to the core of our country’s brittle food systems — issues that start at its core.