The Fight Over Transparency in the Meat Industry

Exposing the industry’s standard practices, Wolf argues, generates a demand for change from legislators and, perhaps more significant, from major restaurant chains. In 2012, for instance, after the Humane Society of the United States released undercover footage of pregnant sows immobilized for months in narrow “gestation crates” at a Smithfield Foods subsidiary, McDonald’s announced that its breakfast sausage would no longer be made from pork bred in gestation crates — and Smithfield, along with other major pork producers, raced to announce that it was phasing the devices out. The industry opposes undercover investigations, Wolf says, precisely because they work.

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