Free Range

The final leg of a long road trip west to enjoy my distant family is winding down. Now, about one hundred miles from home, the sun is fading in my rear view mirror. A huge three-level livestock truck speeds past going the opposite direction. It is empty but I instantly recognize it because some of my family members contract with the owner, a regional packing company. The brand name would be instantly recognizable to anyone who shops chain grocery stores in Eastern Pennsylvania. I know that tonight this truck will be rapidly loaded with hogs from a contract “factory” farm and returned back east for slaughter first thing in the morning.



The hogs are special hybrids bred to produce huge succulent hams by the time they are just shy of six months old. They are highly regulated and regimented from their artificial inception to slaughter and processing. They are not your average “hog.” In fact, they are such highly specialized hybrids that any accidental natural breeding would produce a frightful genetic mutation. I have toured one of the contract facilities where piglets rapidly mature into foodstuffs that will grace your plate. Everything is precisely calculated and metered scientifically for optimum production. There is even a small percentage of loss figured into the yields for hogs that inadvertently experience a rupture or sustain other injuries. Nothing is left to chance or nature that could be regulated and optimized.


Our modern food production is a marvel. I think of the egg production in Lancaster County or the broiler “factory farms” up and down the Delmarva Peninsula. I remember riding the mail boat loaded with cases of fresh “newly soft-shelled” crabs from Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. They had recently come out of their “holding pens” on the island to be marketed to a hungry population up and down the eastern seaboard and beyond.


My wife and I were introduced to steak house management training forty years ago. An unforgettable part of our orientation (right after our breakfast) consisted of going to a northern Colorado feedlot containing a quarter of a million cattle. We were then introduced to the facility that with unbelievable efficiency processed over two thousand of them a day. Even the byproducts were exported to France where they are considered a delicacy. For those of you who are jumping ahead of me and drawing premature conclusions; no, this isn’t why I am a vegetarian!


In fact, my thoughts shift to my fellow human beings. I see evidence that we try to “process” human beings with the same cold efficiency. Oh, we perhaps correctly rationalize that “it is for their own good” and “we are making better, more productive people out of them.” However, I question our “factory farm” approach to life. No, we don’t rely on artificial insemination with hybrid genes but almost everything else is designed to produce our idea of what folks should be from the womb to our departure from life. We take on the responsibility of providing “everything needed” for the nurturing and perfecting of another human being—physically, mentally, financially, and even spiritually. Sometimes in our eagerness to produce and “assist” in the development of “super humans,” we inadvertently weaken the individual immunity and ability to forage and survive. Perhaps, it’s time to conceptually swing back to “free range” and away from “factory farms” at least as far as human beings are concerned.