When you’re pushing a shopping cart through the chilled air of the Whole Foods Market meat department, past rows of neatly packaged poultry and a glass case of butchered pork chops, the supermarket wants you to imagine the idyllic pastures on a place such as Sweet Stem Farm.
Nestled on a handful of acres in scenic Lancaster County, Pa., the farm is run by a young couple who set out to create a grass-fed “farming oasis” for chickens, turkeys, lambs, cattle and heritage-breed pigs, according to a video on the website of Whole Foods, which the farm supplies. “I want to see confinement farms be a thing of the past really,” Philip Horst-Landis, co-owner of Sweet Stem, says in the video.
But growing demand for sustainably raised pork challenged those ideals. The couple decided to ditch cattle and poultry in order to focus on pigs, constructing four greenhouse-style barns that allowed the operation to grow from 80 pigs a year to roughly 3,000.
In the process, Sweet Stem stopped raising animals in pasture as shown in the Whole Foods video.
The farm sought more help, too, hiring a “pig-care trainee” in June. Unbeknown to Horst-Landis, however, the new farmhand also worked for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The activists at PETA advocate a vegan lifestyle and do their best to convert the meat-eating masses, often by filming grisly undercover videos at industrial-scale livestock farms. The footage from Sweet Stem is mild compared with the animal-rights group’s usual undercover capers. Large pigs are shown crowded into pens with little room to roam and open wounds left untreated.
Conditions shown in the video appear to violate some specific requirements of the Whole Foods animal-welfare program, for which Sweet Stem Farm gets a favorable ranking.
Horst-Landis insists the images of overcrowded pig pens have been manipulated by PETA undercover and that other allegations, such as the untreated wounds, are mostly false.
Whole Foods officials visited Sweet Stem on Wednesday and say they found no problems.
The conflicting videos of Sweet Stem Farm highlight the challenges of meeting the soaring demand for meat and dairy products raised in a humane and sustainable manner, even as the definition for those terms remains open to interpretation.
“We’re way past the point of confusion,” says Bob Goldin, executive vice president of Technomic, a Chicago-based market research firm. “There’s a lot of skepticism about those labels. They are just overused.”
Whole Foods puts a lot of information on the shelves for customers.
“They want to know more than anyone about what they’re purchasing and how it’s raised,” says Becky Faudree, global meat buyer at the grocery chain. “Labeling and signage is kind of how we can tell that story.”
Demand is growing for food that is organic, natural and humanely raised, whether for cage-free eggs or pasture-raised beef. U.S. sales of organic products grew 11 percent last year alone, according to figures from the Organic Trade Association.
McDonald’s announced earlier this month that it will shift to cage-free eggs in the U.S. and Canada. Changing dietary trends are putting new pressure on farmers who want to keep up with consumer interest in feel-good meat.
“The more consumers who demand all of this, the more difficult it is going to be to deliver,” says Janice Swanson, chairwoman of animal behavior and welfare at Michigan State University. “That’s one of the discussions about sustainable food: What is really sustainable, especially for feeding large numbers of people?”
The clash between idealism and demand played out recently at Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill, which has struggled to keep up with demand for sustainably raised pork. An audit uncovered housing violations at one of Chipotle’s pig suppliers, and rather than serve pork from conventional sources, the chain pulled “carnitas” off the menu.
Chipotle has since moved to add a British pork supplier and expects to have pork at all its locations by the end of the year. “The vast majority of pork raised in the U.S. — more than 95 percent based on our estimates — is not raised to our standards,” co-CEO Steve Ells said in July.
The organic milk business went through its own growing pains, after complaints emerged that large-scale organic dairies were providing cows with minimal access to pasture. A rule introduced in 2010 requires that dairy cows actively graze on pasture during the grazing season.
The success of Whole Foods has been predicated on the idea of making consumers feel good about what they eat.
The grocer now markets its animal welfare scoring system, introduced in 2009, prominently at meat counters inside its stores. The U.S. Department of Agriculture evaluates animal-welfare claims on meat packaging to make sure they are not inaccurate or misleading.
Whole Foods has struggled to source enough ethical meat to satisfy its discerning customers. “It’s doable, but it takes a lot,” Faudree says. “We can get cheaper supply every day, all day, but in doing that, we would have to sacrifice our standards.”
Some experts see nothing inherently wrong with raising animals in confinement instead of an open pasture. Temple Grandin, a professor of livestock behavior and welfare at Colorado State University, believes it is possible to create humane conditions indoors.
But food marketers have seized on popular notions of free-range animals as a way to motivate and sometimes deceive consumers.
A few years ago, Grandin recalls, she challenged an egg producer whose cartons included a picture of a hen pecking in a pasture when she knew the egg-laying birds had been raised indoors.
“It gets down to: You need to be doing what you say you are doing,” she says.
Organic product sales soaring
