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Community Corner

Is the Coop Caring Enough?

A new committee wants to educate Coop members about animal welfare; I go behind the scenes, even taking a virtual tour of a slaughterhouse, to investigate

In the weeks before the big vote at the Park Slope Food Coop on a new animal welfare committee, stories were circulating in the blogosphere that the Coop, famous for its espousal of sustainability, conducted little assessment of the conditions at the farms where “food animals” were raised.

I vowed to become the next Upton Sinclair and to blow the lid off the Coop, as beloved as it is to me, if any evidence of cruelty surfaced.

I called the organizer of the committee, which was approved overwhelmingly in April. Jesse Oldham – gamine, charmingly tattooed, and supremely competent – is a diehard animal lover who works for the ASPCA. She is concerned that the Coop’s meat and dairy (and products that contain these ingredients) are not held to specific care standards. She also feels the 10-member environmental committee can’t tackle animal welfare, along with all the other issues it addresses.

“There isn’t special attention being given to the entire cycle – from raising the animals to transporting them to having them go to slaughter,” she said.

She said they don’t want to be a “rogue committee,” but rather want to work closely with the buyers for the Coop. While critics fear the committee would remove meat from the Coop shelves, Oldham said the group’s primary purpose is education — about animal testing, and confusing labels and certifications.

“It's the Whole Foods model of getting consumers as much information as we can,” said Oldham.

Surely, this issue is on the radar screen of the progressive-minded Coop? Joe Holtz, the rangy, earnest general coordinator, tells me the Coop is very much concerned about animals and points me to a line in the Coop’s mission statement:  “We strive to reduce the impact of our lifestyles on the world we share with other species and future generations."

He acknowledges that the Coop does not have the resources to conduct farm visits, but said it does plenty of research.

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“We depend on third parties or on reputation,” he said, though he notes that small producers can’t always afford to get expensive certifications.

“We try to be careful,” he says, “and if the new committee helps us to be careful that’s great. Are we 100 percent sure [that animals are treated humanely]? There’s always some doubt."

Holtz says all the beef at the Coop is grass-fed, which means the cows are not confined in feedlots, fattened on grain, then pumped up with antibiotics after the grain makes them sick.

But he says he’s less confident about chickens.

“Are people driving a truck through the loopholes? Yes,” he said, though he explained that the Coop is avoiding “the worst of factory farms.”

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Still, labeling is often misleading. To be called “organic,” for instance, chickens must have some access to outdoor space, though that can mean a tiny enclosed porch. Terms like “free range” or “cage-free,” offer a lot of wiggle room — to farmers, not chickens. “Cage-free” birds do not necessarily sashay around an open field, but in fact can be kept beak to jowl without ever seeing the sky.

But the Coop has formed close relationships with many small producers whose husbandry it respects. Bill Malloy, the bearded, and appropriately beefy, meat buyer, rhapsodizes about Dines Farms' “beautiful” whole chickens, for instance.

The Coop buys a cow a week from Slope Farms, a “hippie doctor” turned gentleman farmer. Another cow comes from McDonald Farm in the Finger Lakes, which is owned by a Queens native with 10 children. It doesn’t seem like nice folks such as these would mistreat animals. But they could always bear closer scrutiny: Dines Farms was asked to leave the farmers' markets several years ago because it was selling "pasture-raised" beef it hadn't raised itself.

And then, there is, you know, that.

Malloy said the slaughtering is as humane as possible, with electricity for the larger animals, for instance, and stun guns. He tells me about a Catskills slaughterhouse preferred by some of his suppliers, and sends me an e-mail: “great videos of local slaughterhouse." Gulp. In the video, a “proud meat cutter” talks about the best way to slaughter (“the animal has to be completely out of it”), while behind him a cow, a sheep, and a pig get offed. He actually cajoles one cow to the slaughtering pen, saying, “That-a-boy, easy now.”

Upsetting stuff, but I think it’s important, if we do eat meat, to really consider, as Oldham says, every part of the process. 

Has the Coop ever dropped a supplier because of inhumane practices? Holtz said that when they found out Horizon, the big dairy company, owns a feedlot, they replaced most of the Horizon products. 

So I’m not the next Upton Sinclair. But writing this article has made me a lot more thoughtful about the food I eat; I hope the new committee will do the same for the community.

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