Meat Unhappy

Nestled on a handful of acres in scenic Lancaster County, Pa., the farm is run by a young couple who set out to create a grass-fed “farming oasis” for chickens, turkeys, lambs, cattle, and heritage-breed pigs, according to a video on the website of Whole Foods, which the farm supplies. “I want to see confinement farms be a thing of the past, really,” Philip Horst-Landis, co-owner of Sweet Stem, says in the video. But growing demand for sustainably raised pork challenged those ideals. The couple decided to ditch cattle and poultry to focus on pigs, constructing four greenhouse-style barns that allowed the operation to expand from 80 pigs a year to roughly 3,000. In the process, Sweet Stem stopped raising animals in pasture as shown in the Whole Foods video.

… “The more consumers who demand all of this, the more difficult it is going to be to deliver,” says Janice Swanson, chair of animal behavior and welfare at Michigan State University. “That’s one of the discussions about sustainable food: What is really sustainable, especially for feeding large numbers of people?”

You mean that it is not economical or even possible to produce enough “feel-good meat” — which was always a remarkably wobbly ethical crutch for propping up one’s personal desire to eat animals — to satisfy the demands of hundreds of millions of modern meat eaters? Well I never.

Photo by Farm Watch