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“Pork: Be Inspired” (to change)
March 7, 2011
By thewellnesswarrior
The pork industry has just announced their latest marketing strategy. They are going to spend millions of dollars to get people to move away from referring to pork as “the other white meat” and now brand pork as “Pork: be inspired”. The only thing that this statement inspires me to do is vomit.
In 2008 I was part of a team of animal rescuers who responded to massive flooding in the state of Iowa. After days and day of heavy rain, the Mississippi river broke through a heavily reinforced levee and spilled into thousands of acres of corn fields and pig factory farms. We were called to action because the floods had done devastating damage to pig factory farms in the area. This part of Iowa is home to hundreds of factory farms which housed tens of thousands of pigs before the flooding. The few pigs who survived only did so by swimming for their lives. They went from the terror of life in a factory farm to the ominous challenge of survival. The surviving pigs made it to the levee, a 25 foot wide river bank which was doing it’s best to hold back the Mississippi river from completely flowing free onto the land. The initial reaction by the local authorities was to shoot the pigs out of fear that they would damage the levee. CNN was there to cover some of this story and after footage was aired showing the sheriff’s department shooting the pigs on the levee a backlash ensued. My team from the International Fund for Animal Welfare was called in to help rescue the 60 or so surviving pigs that were now living on the levee. It was probably one of the hardest two-week periods of my life as I helped round-up these amazing creatures who had never been treated as more than a commodity, had never been outside of their filthy prisons and had certainly never exercised.
Four days after the rescue when I was back home and able to comprehend what I had witnessed, I wrote about the experience. I want to share an excerpt of those thoughts with you because I want people to know the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might make them. Life for factory farmed animals is a horror show and anything but comfortable or inspiring.
“I have been home for 4 days now and I am just starting to process the horrors of the hog farming in the mid-west USA. I feel angry and traumatized and sleepy and depressed. I miss the pigs we rescued and the people I rescued them with. I have never worked as hard through such demanding and grueling circumstances for two weeks straight and my body feels like I’ve run several marathons back to back”.
“I was feeling good when I left Iowa, we had a lot of success and pulled 68 pigs off the levee. I was happy when I got home, happy to be back with my loving family, happy to share my stories and day by day I’ve become more miserable and tired. The reality is setting in. The reality of pigs as commodities and bullets as solutions. The reality of human life being valued so much more highly than animals that they cannot even stand on the same scale together”.
“The one thing that bothers me the most is the idea that when farmers were faced with the imminent flooding they had a choice to make. Save the corn in the silos or save the pigs. The corn was worth more and the corn won. There were thousands of pigs trucked away before the flooding and straight to the slaughterhouse but many thousands left to suffer and die because corn was worth more on the market. As my boss at the time, Barb Cartwright put it, “this is not an economic decision, this is a moral decision”. Corn vs living beings should never be a difficult concept. The pigs are seen as a commodity that bring in money only and their active minds and curious hearts are ignored”.
“There was one day my team and I sat on the levee with a group of 12 pigs for 6 hours. We were moving the pigs from one area to another and took a long rest in the afternoon where we just tried to keep them in one group and keep them hydrated and fed. They went from being very scared of us to curious and playful even. Near the end of the day they were eating treats like cookies and apples from our hands. I sat near them and they moved closer, burrowing in the dirt with their noses. At one point a group of 4 of them lay down with their heads against my legs and went to sleep. These are incredible animals that displayed lots of emotion and intelligence”.
So there is a sample of my experience. To end things I want to add that I saw many horrible things in those two weeks including hundreds and hundreds of dead pigs that had washed up on the shore of the levee. By boat I saw many haunting images as factory farms either submerged in water or empty because the cleaning crews had removed the thousands of dead pigs. By far, one of the worst thing I saw was an operational factory farm. I was not supposed to see this and I only had a few moments to look around before being told to leave by the farmer. The chance came only because I was left alone as the farmer went to retrieve a trailer we were going to use for the rescue. It is very very rare to get a chance to actually see what goes on inside the walls of a factory farm. As far as the pork industry is concerned they will keep it that way because if the average person saw what I saw that day they would never have bacon and eggs again. What I saw in those few moments were hundreds of grossly disfigured pigs that could not even stand up in their tiny metal pens languishing in their own filth and sorrow. After seeing hundreds of dead pigs over the previous days this site was by far the hardest and most haunting for me because this was where it all started. These animals were clearly suffering and they were clearly ill and this would be the way their lives played out until the day they were cruelly slaughtered.
This is the furthest from inspired I have ever been.
Comforting Roasted Cauliflower Soup
March 5, 2011
By thewellnesswarrior
In a recent edition of Veg News magazine there was an outstanding recipe for Roasted Cauliflower soup with cashew cream. I modified the recipe somewhat and dropped the cashew creme and I was amazed at how delicious this soup turned out to be. Warning, it is hard to eat just one bowl.
Roasted Cauliflower Soup
1 head of cauliflower cut into florets
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 onion, chopped
3 potatoes, cubed
3 cups of vegetable broth
1 cup rice milk
2 TBSP olive oil
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp sea salt
pepper to taste
Preheat over to 425 degrees.
Place cauliflower, potatoes, garlic and onions in a roasting pan and drizzle olive oil over top. Stir until all the vegetables are nicely coated in olive oil.
Roast for 30 minutes in the oven
Place roasted veggies into large soup pot and add the vegetable stock, salt, pepper and garam masala and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the rice milk and pour soup into a blender and carefully blend until smooth. Serve hot.
Enjoy this heart healthy, nourishing and delicious soup!