In a David-versus-Goliath story like this, you can hardly hope for a more ruthless and intimidating giant than Smithfield. The company is not only the world’s largest producer of pork, but also owns the world’s largest slaughterhouse. That slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, NC, disassembles about 32,000 pigs a day. For years, the workers at the Tar Heel factory were treated almost as badly as the pigs: Smithfield harassed unionists, paid workers to spy on colleagues, and hired deputies as company security officers who beat and arrested workers. The company originated in Smithfield, Virginia, in the 1930s and later became a business dynasty, led successively by Joseph W. Luter Sr., Joseph W. Luter Jr. and Joseph W. Luter III. It grew by pioneering industrial methods of pig production and by taking over its competitors one by one. But when the North Carolina lawsuits were filed in 2013, Smithfield Foods was no longer a US company. Shuanghui International Holdings, a Chinese company now known as WH Group, had bought it last year with funding from the government-owned Bank of China. The cost of raising pigs in North Carolina was about half the cost of raising pigs in China — and one reason, Addison explains, is that “the Chinese government doesn’t allow its pig farmers to use lagoons and spray fields.” Instead, Chinese pig operations should invest in “treatment facilities” and “biological odor control systems to protect neighbors.”
“Wastelands” is full of memorable people. An assortment of powerful attorneys agree to take on Smithfield, working for free in exchange for a share of an eventual settlement. They fly private jets, employ focus groups, hire a videographer from National Geographic to convey the fate of the neighbors. Mona Lisa Wallace is the most likeable and compelling member of the legal team, brilliant, tireless, raised in small town North Carolina with a working class background, committed to using the courts to help victims of corporate misconduct. The plaintiffs include Elsie Herring — one of 15 children who left North Carolina for New York City and returned nearly 30 years later to find she was drenched in a misty rain of dung while walking near her childhood home — on. Just like Violet Branch, one of 11 children, who has lived in the house where she was born for more than 70 years, but has to endure the pollution of two adjacent lagoons. Before the trial, Branch had tirelessly reached out to public health officials, journalists and even the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington to seek relief from the stench. “Nothing is being done about this issue – nothing has been done,” she bravely testified in court, “because the power structure in those communities doesn’t allow anything to be done.”
Smithfield unabashedly uses his power to evade responsibility for the legal “nuisance” at stake in the courtroom. It threatens to leave the state if the lawsuits succeed. It spies on the lawyers and hires private investigators to keep an eye on the plaintiffs. It helps to create a front group, ‘NC Farm Families’. It works closely with the State Agriculture Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party, whose members submit bills to the legislature to protect Smithfield from liability. The odors from the company’s pig operations, a Republican lawmaker claims, are the “scent of freedom.” The only major departure from industry-friendly policies by the legislature came in 1997, when it passed a temporary moratorium on new pig operations — just as two were about to be built in Moore County, home of the Pinehurst resort and its legendary golf courses.
I am not vegan or vegetarian. But I think the pig factories described in “Wastelands” and the similar CAFOs in other states are forms of systematic animal cruelty. They are crimes against nature. Pigs are intelligent and sensitive creatures capable of multi-stage reasoning, such as dolphins and monkeys, with a social structure similar to that of elephants. Pigs can recognize themselves in a mirror, distinguish one person from another, remember negative experiences. And they like to be clean. Their lives in pig factories hardly resemble how they were raised for millennia. They arrive as little piglets, live crammed into each other’s filth, and leave for the slaughterhouse a few months later—never had a moment outside during their entire time in the barn. The filth of these places, for the animals that live in them and the people who live near them, really defies words.
Corban Addison has not written a polemic about pig factories, like my paragraph above. He has calmly put together a legal thriller, full of energy and compassion, that addresses issues of real importance, such as the work of John Grisham and Scott Turow. Grisham wrote the foreword to this book† and in it he says: “Beautifully written, impeccably researched and told with the air of suspense few writers can handle, ‘Wastelands’ is a story I wish I had written.” I agree with Grisham. But I wish Wastelands was a work of dystopian science fiction, not a scathing portrait of how we now feed ourselves.