This Little Piggy Went to Market

After Tuesday night's discussion about meat and farm animals, this story in today's NYT caught my eye:

JBS S.A., the world’s biggest beef producer, agreed on Tuesday to pay $1.27 billion in cash and stock for assets in the United States and Australia, including the beef unit of the pork producer Smithfield Foods. The transactions would make JBS, based in São Paulo, Brazil, the largest American beef processor...

Smithfield. A Proustian moment--the taste of delectable, salty ham. As a small child, one of the delights of the trip with my grandmother to visit her sister in Hampton Roads was a stopover in the village of Smithfield, Virginia, to buy an "authentic" Smithfield ham (defined in Virginia law in 1926). Today, Southern cooking maven Paula Deen is to Smithfield hams what Jimmy Dean is to sausage! The Smithfield Corporation counts on people retaining pleasant associations like these about their company, but as the Yogi said "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be."

In reality, as the news story suggests, Smithfield Foods is the largest vertically integrated pork producer in the United States, and has branched out into other livestock operations, including beef. When you get big, you end up with big profits and big problems to go with them: concerns over pollution, animal welfare, and union-busting, to name just a few.

The corporation is still headquartered in tiny Smithfield, but its former chairman and CEO, Joseph W. Luter III, is at home in his Park Avenue apartment and in Aspen, Colorado. Mr. Luter (who comes across sounding a little like Lionel Barrymore's "Mr. Potter" from “It’s a Wonderful Life,”) is an avid proponent of the “get big, or get out” philosophy of farming:

''The bottom line is the small farmers have been disappearing for 100 years,'' Mr. Luter said. ''If you want to protect the small farmer, you are going to do it on the back of the American consumer.''

Well, Mr. Luter, we consumers have one name for that—it’s called “piggy-back” and lots of children and their parents seem to enjoy it quite a bit—just as they enjoy eating pork and beef raised by small farmers in their local communities. We just hope the small farmer will not vanish anytime soon, because lots of us have lost our taste for factory-farmed meat and the problems that accompany it. For more details on the Smithfield sale of its beef unit, read Tom Philpott's post on the Grist website.