Oregon Country Natural Beef is a cooperative of cattle farms that raise grass-fed beef. However, all the cattle these local farms raise goes through the Beef Northwest feedlot in Boardman for final processing. The cattle spend an average of 89 days there before they are slaughtered and distributed. Employees work in conditions of extreme heat and cold with no shelter for rest, lack ready access to water, breathe in dust and fecal matter from the cattle, and report being forced to continue working even when injured.

Injuries are not uncommon in these settings, but workers are eligible for only three days of paid sick leave per year. Beef Northwest’s employee protections are minimal when compared to those of unionized farms; Threemile Canyon Farms, another Boardman farm, signed a collective bargaining agreement with United Farm Workers earlier this summer. This agreement improved farm worker benefits and protections and helped make the lives of the people who produce our food better. Len Bergstein, a spokesperson for Threemile Canyon Farms, described the change as working very well for the company, adding that it is in everybody’s interests for Oregon to develop clear state guidelines governing how employees go about deciding on union representation.

Such guidelines could help the current situation with Beef Northwest. Beef Northwest employees have so far been unsuccessful in their negotiations for representation with United Farm Workers. Beef Northwest, while claiming neutrality, has, according to employees, engaged in anti-union tactics. Negotiations broke down in mid-August, and workers were unable to enlist the support of Whole Foods and Oregon Country Natural Beef, both of whom are in a great place to use their influence on the workers’ behalf.

What about New Seasons, our favorite grocery store? Claudia Knotek of New Seasons Market described their current position on this matter as one of respect for both sides; “We hope that the differences will be resolved,” she said. Additional comments from Brian Rohter, New Seasons CEO, are pending.

For consumers who care more about their beef than the people who grew it, there’s more. During the three-month holding time at Beef Northwest, the grass-fed cattle switch to a diet of cooked potatoes, corn, and alfalfa [see Oregon Country Natural Beef's site here and here]. From OCNB’s website:

Cooked waste potatoes from nearby food processing plants which would probably go into a landfill without a ruminant to eat them make up over half the ration for the 89 day average stay in the lot.

Information from workers suggests that cows are also being fed used vegetable oil from a processing plant, which raises the possibility that these cattle essentially survive on the equivalent of French fries for the last few months of their bovine lives.

This is not the diet that comes to mind when beef is described as “grass fed.”

I support local and family business for a number of reasons: I think it makes better economic and environmental sense for our communities, and I hope that it supports my values related to worker rights and to corporate transparency. I also value being informed as a consumer. In convoluted situations such as these, there are key players who should be using their influence to make things right, and Oregon Country Natural Beef is one of them; Whole Foods is another. I support workers rights and would like to see these businesses (and others) take the opportunity to rally behind the people who do the hardest physical work to get our food to us, for the fewest benefits, and support them in their just requests.

Definitions of what life is form the assumptions behind any stance on abortion and euthanasia. Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut way to prove that a certain definition of what it means to be alive is correct. Does life begin at a certain point for a fetus? Is brain activity constitute an essential component of life? We want easy answers and definitions, scientific guidelines to follow, a test by a machine that can somehow absolve us of thinking for ourselves. I don’t know that there can be an absolute answer. That is, after all, the starting point for ethical debates: the possibility of multiple good answers and even more bad ones.

Do people who support abortion support murder or the detruction of life? I don’t believe they do in the least, since their stance is not about killing babies but rather about women being able to control their reproductive processes. If a fetus is not considered viable and human, then it is not being murdered.

Are people who oppose abortion irrational? In some cases, yes. But for the average ones, not the fringe lunatics that bomb clinics and kill people, it is their belief that the fetus is indeed alive and human that demands that they advocate life. To do otherwise would be a drastic violation of conscience.

John Paul II has a broad conception of what human beings are, believes that their life is sacred, and does not believe that life should be taken for any reason. The Vatican, under his papacy, has consistently advocated for its understanding of life, in the case of abortion and in euthanasia. Those who disagree with him on the exact issues should at least be able to respect that he has firmly articulated and turned his beliefs in the sanctity of life into action. This is in somewhat marked contrast to George Bush, who pays lip service to the “culture of life” and yet quite clearly does not value life, as evidenced by his foreign policy, if it may be diginified by that term.

What criteria we use to demarcate the boundaries of life determine our stance on many issues and enable paradoxical positions. A person who self-identifies as “pro-life” may support the death penalty; a person who does not believe the fetus is a human may devote her or his life to working with the poor because of their respect for humanity. Anyone who thinks hard enough about justice is going to find that there are some questions that have no clear answers. What is most important is being able to engage in dialogue and rational exchange of ideas rather than simply hating and vilifying anyone who has a different perspective.

Identifying the assumptions that underlie ethical positions is work that many of us are unwilling to do, but I think that if we are to live with respect and tolerance, we must be able to interact on more than the superficial level of reactionary attacks. These solve nothing.

I myself am in favor of abortion being legal and accessible, although having an abortion myself would be an extremely unlikely possibility. Why? For no other reason than that I think people should be treated justly, and I’d be worried that I were harming someone who is possibly as fully human as I.

I have believed that Schiavo died in 1990 and that her body has been kept alive all this time purely through medical intervention, but I also worry that I am being heartless and unjust toward a fellow human.

Next time: Towards better critical theories