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Tuesday, June 24th, 2014

The Food Industry’s Hiding Something: How to Expose America’s Most Secretive Industry

Author:     Lindsay Abrams
Source:     Salon
Publication Date:     http://www.salon.com/2014/06/22/the_food_industrys_hiding_something_how_to_expose_americas_most_secr
 Link: The Food Industry’s Hiding Something: How to Expose America’s Most Secretive Industry
Stephan:   Here is the nasty truth about the American food industry. I am amazed this gets so little attention from corporate media. The behavior of this industry is so blatantly obvious, yet few in media seem to care. No one goes to the lengths described here unless they have something embarrassing they are trying to hide. That we tolerate, even encourage this is a measure of how corrupt our government has become. Here is the story of one man and his colleagues using Kickstarter to fight back against this corruption. Reminds my of Upton Sinclair who exposed the meat industry back in the early decades of the last century.

In 2008, the Humane Society released a shocking video taken in a Southern California slaughterhouse. The footage depicted workers using chains and forklifts to drag cows that were too sick to stand across the floor. The abuse was appalling; the cows’ condition, which indicated a food safety risk, led the USDA to order a recall of 143 million pounds of beef. It was the largest meat recall in U.S. history – and it was all brought about by the work of an undercover whistleblower.

Since then, Big Ag has been hard at work preventing this sort of thing from happening again, but not by actually working to stop abuse – at least, not completely. Instead, the industry’s been pushing states to implement laws, known collectively as ‘ag-gag,” aimed at silencing activists.

Nine states currently have ag-gag laws on the books, the most recent of which, in Idaho, takes anti-whistleblower legislation to a worrisome new extreme. Under the law, signed by Gov. C . L. ‘Butch” Otter, it is illegal for anyone not employed on the farms – and undercover activists don’t count – to make recordings of what goes on there without the owner’s explicit consent. In practice, that means videos taken […]

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