Danish Crown

My first official class started on Tuesday, entitled "The Food Industry". Those who know me know I'm beyond obsessed with eating food and thinking about food and wondering about the environmental impact of my food. Thus, this class was made for me. On Thursday, we drove all the way to Jutland (the part of Denmark attached to Germany, 3 1/2 hours to the other side of the country from Copenhagen) to visit a pig slaughterhouse run by the company Danish Crown.

I apologize for the following gruesomeness, but I assure you it is worse in real life. The pigs come from all over Denmark, and are killed by first being knocked unconscious in CO2 chambers. Then a worker jabs their neck with a knife and blood runs down into a tube, so the pigs die of bloodloss. After being cleaned, robots suck away what is inside their intestines, and other robots cut away their organs and intestines (called pluck). Another machine cuts off their heads. Yes I saw all of this in full detail from a window. The rest of the process is not so disturbing, because the pigs then are frozen before being cut up for shipping, and once frozen, they look unreal. The entire pig is used, as different cuts are sent to different countries, pluck is turned into cat food (can I make my cat vegetarian?), and leftover pig fat is turned into biomass to run the factory.

Ok, so why have I spoiled your dinner? Because we need to know where our food comes from and what is its impact on the environment. I am not a semi vegetarian because I believe animals shouldn't die, though I think way more die than need be (a pointed glare at people who eat meat at least once a day). I want to know about what happens before the pigs enter the slaughterhouse. Is their effluence contaminating the drinking water? Where does their feedstuff come from? What is the impact of growing and processing the feedstuff? And why must everything be transported everywhere? Some farmers ship their pigs to Germany to feed only to return to Denmark, only to be shipped somewhere else in the world, as 90% of the pigs that are slaughtered are exported.

Aside from the usual bs of "data and knowledge are lacking" and putting focus on other parts of the food chain, the website admits to some important things:
-"Greenhouse gas emissions are generally lower for the production of 1 kg of vegetables in comparison with 1 kg of meat." (any environmentalist worth their weight in kale knows this)
-a majority of ghg (greenhouse gas) emissions come from feedstuffs production and manure, NOT transportation and electricity
-the amount of ghg emissions from producing one pork chop equals drinking 4 cups of coffee
-many other tidbits defending Danish Crown's production of meat

However energy efficient Danish Crown claims to be, what if we just didn't eat meat? What if the energy and resources invested into producing animal feed went into feeding humans? What if slaughterhouses just didn't exist? What if meat was raised locally and fed from food scraps and compost, converting unusable biomass into biomass we could eat, and thereby not wasting biomass we can eat? One may argue that then there wouldn't be any jobs, and, I kid you not, our tour guide said, "The U.S. doesn't need robots. They have Mexicans." But in Denmark, most of the jobs are done by robots, and the jobs that are done by humans, technology is researching how to replace them anyway. So, jobs wouldn't exactly be lost.

As much as I would love those reading this to severely reduce their consumption of meat (I can't ask you to completely abandon it), at the very least, I encourage you to peruse the Danish Crown website.
For climate change "policy": http://www.danishcrown.com/page21810.aspx
To visit the "virtual slaughterhouse": http://www.danishcrown.com/page22686.aspx
And of course, the Danish Crown main webpage: www.danishcrown.com