They Banned This Pig Drug in 160 Countries. America Said “Pass the Bacon.”

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Bacon, sausage, ham, and hot dogs — the World Health Organization, the most authoritative health body on the planet, classifies all of them in the same cancer group as cigarettes, and that ain’t no fringe study buried in a corner of the internet, that’s the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the WHO’s own arm, telling y’all back in 2015 that processed meat is a Group 1 carcinogen, sitting in the same evidence category as tobacco and asbestos. Now let me sprinkle context, because Research over MeSearch, and the science has to be clean: that Group 1 label is a statement about how SURE the evidence is that something causes cancer, not a claim that one hot dog hits your body exactly like a Marlboro. Two things can be true. The certainty is real, and the industry has spent decades making sure you never sit with that certainty long enough to change what’s in your cart.Then comes the part they REALLY ain’t trying to tell you, because the problem starts before the meat is ever processed. American pork producers use beta-agonist drugs like ractopamine to make pigs grow faster and leaner, and those drugs are banned in more than 160 countries — not restricted, banned — by the European Union, by China, by Russia, places that will not let American pork cross the border with that chemistry still in the animal. People in the back, sit with that. You got animals raised on drugs the rest of the world won’t even allow, getting processed into products the WHO says cause cancer, and that whole chain don’t end in some abstract “marketplace.” It runs straight through communities that look like mine.Before the Label, There Was the LagoonBefore any of this showed up as a sticker in your grocery store, it showed up as a lagoon behind somebody’s house. Let me take you to eastern North Carolina, the second-biggest hog state in the country behind Iowa, where roughly nine million hogs live in about twenty-three hundred industrial swine operations that generate something like ten billion gallons of liquid waste a year, most of it stored in around thirty-three hundred open-air pits the industry politely calls “lagoons,” where the feces and the urine sit and ferment until the company sprays it across the fields as fertilizer, and the mist drifts onto the porches, the clotheslines, the schoolyards, and the lungs of the people who live downwind. Crazy how the people downwind keep being the same people.That ain’t a feeling, that’s a finding. A 2014 study out of UNC by the epidemiologist Steve Wing and his colleague Jill Johnston mapped these operations and concluded that the proportion of people of color living within three miles of an industrial hog operation was more than one and a half times higher than the proportion of white folks, with Black communities and especially American Indian communities carrying more than twice the burden in some measures. Bullard told us this would happen. In Dumping in Dixie, Robert Bullard — a Houston man, a Texan like me — showed all the way back in 1990 that the question of where the waste goes is never random, it tracks the color line as faithfully as a deed restriction, and when the industry says siting is just about “cheap rural land,” that claim of neutrality IS the position. The view from nowhere is a position. Cheap land is just a polite map of who the country decided it could afford to poison.Gilmore gives us the sharpest word for what that does to a body. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the state-sanctioned production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, and once you have that frame, the health record around these operations stops reading like a coincidence and starts reading like a policy: researchers have documented elevated rates of anemia, kidney disease, infant deaths, and septicemia in the surrounding communities, and Wing himself documented the headaches, the coughing, the nausea, the respiratory distress among the neighbors before he died of cancer in 2016, before the trials even started. A lagoon of hog waste behind a Black grandmother’s house is not a smell. It’s a vulnerability, manufactured and maintained.And those neighbors fought. In 2014, an eighty-year-old Black woman named Joyce McKiver became the lead plaintiff in McKiver v. Murphy-Brown, one of more than two dozen federal nuisance suits brought by over five hundred plaintiffs, the majority of them Black, against Murphy-Brown, the hog-production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods — which is itself owned by the Chinese conglomerate WH Group. Across five trials in 2018 and 2019, juries awarded thirty-six plaintiffs almost $550 million. Then North Carolina’s punitive-damages cap shrank that to roughly $98 million. Read the choreography again: the people won in front of juries, and the LAW reached in to make the win smaller.They were warned, too. Folks built waste pits in a floodplain, and when Hurricane Floyd came through in 1999, the lagoons breached and turned whole rural communities into seas of dead hogs and toxic slurry. So the legislature did what legislatures do for the people who fund them: Right to Farm laws now exist in all fifty states, and North Carolina passed HB 467 — carried by a longtime farmer-legislator who took hog-industry money — to gut the very nuisance suits the neighbors were winning. Here’s the part that should stop you cold. Defending the industry, that same legislator told people to close their eyes and imagine how ham and sausage smell, and called the residents’ complaints exaggerations and outright lies. Read that back slow. The man waved bacon in your face to dismiss the people choking on its byproduct. Every accusation is a confession. This is the historical context that label will never carry.Sneaky, Sneaky: How Big Pork Redraws the MapSo now you understand the stakes, watch the move. When voters in California passed Proposition 12 in 2018 — nearly 63 percent of them, more than seven and a half million people — and Massachusetts passed Question 3 back in 2016 with two and a half million votes, all they were saying, at minimum, is that a breeding pig should have enough room to turn around and lie down before it ends up on your plate. That’s the floor. That’s the whole radical demand. The National Pork Producers Council sued anyway, dragged it all the way to the Supreme Court in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross in 2023, and LOST — a conservative court upheld Prop 12 and rejected their main claim. That should have been the end of it. That means the industry’s legal argument is wrong, on the merits, by their own preferred referees.When they couldn’t win in court and couldn’t win at the ballot box, they went to Congress. The thing they used to call the EATS Act got a new costume and a friendlier name — the “Save Our Bacon Act” — introduced in 2025 and then buried as Section 12006 inside the 2026 farm bill, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act, which the House passed 224 to 200 at the end of April 2026. The Pork Council celebrated that the bill gave them one hundred percent of their policy requests. One hundred percent. And the provision doesn’t just touch Prop 12; an analysis out of Harvard Law found it threatens hundreds of state and local laws, including disease-prevention and public-health rules. As of this summer the Senate draft left the language out because it can’t find sixty votes — but it’s up for negotiation, which means the fight ain’t over, it’s just moved rooms.Now here’s the contradiction I want to let hang in the air. These are the same people who built whole careers on states’ rights, right up until seven and a half million Californians USED states’ rights to regulate a pig crate. States’ rights when it’s a book ban or a bathroom; sudden, urgent federal supremacy when voters protect an animal, a worker, or a watershed. What they SAY is “protect interstate commerce.” What the position structurally DOES is hand a trade group that lost in court and lost at the ballot box a federal eraser for any democratic decision it finds inconvenient. The principle was never the principle. The principle was the profit. And the name is the tell — it ain’t saving your bacon, it’s saving the industry from having to answer to you.This also proves something bigger about where the money actually goes. The same farm-bill politics that hands concentrated operations bigger checks is the politics that comes for SNAP and food assistance with a knife. Gil Scott-Heron gave us the structure for this kind of receipt, so let me borrow the frame, not his lines:A child got asthma from the spray field — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.Grandma’s well ran foul from the lagoon — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.Food assistance got cut by the billions — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.That’s not a budget. That’s a value statement with a dollar sign attached.Humane Washing Is a FinesseWhen they can’t kill the regulation, they trick you with the marketing. The group Farm Forward gave the practice a name — “humane washing” — and on my mama, I know a finesse when I see it. Humane washing is when companies sell animal products to conscientious consumers using deceptive packaging and labeling that manufactures the illusion of good welfare, and the labels doing the heavy lifting — “cage-free,” “humanely raised,” “natural” — are far from neutral, far from sloppy accidents of regulation. They are engineered.Here’s where the scholarship sharpens it. Farr and Mills both teach us that ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge that nobody got around to filling in; ignorance gets PRODUCED, manufactured, and actively maintained because somebody benefits from your not-knowing. Mills calls one version of it white ignorance — a way of not-seeing that does real work for power. A label like “natural,” which means almost nothing legally, is a perfect little engine of manufactured ignorance: it exists to let a caring shopper feel resolved at the shelf so they’ll stop asking the next question — about the drug, the lagoon, the worker, the vote. The sticker isn’t there to inform your conscience. It’s there to retire it.And when documentation threatens the finesse, the industry reaches for the law again. Ag-gag statutes criminalize the act of going undercover to film what happens inside these operations — the state literally outlawing the lesson, criminalizing the camera. Just admit what that confesses. You do not make it illegal to record something you’re proud of. Brother Malcolm’s words, the ones Spike Lee put in Denzel’s mouth, fit too clean here: you been hoodwinked, you been bamboozled, led astray. The meat industry manufactured these terms to trick us, the same way every system of extraction manufactures a comfortable story for the people it’s extracting from, and then pisses on us and tells us it’s raining.Click Here to Learn More about Big BaconThe Hidden Curriculum of the Meat AisleFreire taught us the difference between a banking education — where knowledge gets deposited into you and you’re expected to accept the balance — and a problem-posing education, where you learn to read the word and the world together. Most of us were handed the banking version of the grocery store: deposit the label, accept it, push the cart, move on. The hidden curriculum of the meat aisle — the thing it teaches without ever printing it — is that some lives are inputs and some communities are sacrifice zones, and you will never read THAT on the package. The package is designed to graduate you ignorant.This is why ag-gag laws and book bans rhyme. The same political machinery that criminalizes the camera at the CAFO is the machinery that pulls the lesson on Tulsa or Rosewood out of a classroom: in both cases, somebody made a curriculum decision that the public must not be allowed to learn how the harm actually works. Different aisle, same store. And the antidote is the same skill I teach with the debate frameworks — trace the chain. The label is the link. The lobbying is the internal link. The lagoon is the impact. Teach a person to follow link to internal link to impact, at the grocery store or in the farm bill, and you have given them a literacy no sticker can survive. The grocery aisle is one of the most honest civics classrooms we’ve got, IF somebody’s willing to teach the syllabus they tried to bury. That’s the whole thesis. Who Lives Downwind: The Material ReceiptsCrenshaw built intersectionality precisely so we’d stop running single-axis analysis that loses the people standing where the harms cross, and the Combahee River Collective grounded Black feminist politics in material conditions, not slogans — so let’s do the material. Who lives downwind, specifically? Start with Black women’s bodies, because that’s where the receipts land first. The infant deaths and the birth-weight problems documented near these operations are not abstract “community health” — they are reproductive harm written onto Black women, and then the unpaid second shift of caretaking a child with asthma lands on those same women, the ones who already can’t hang the laundry, can’t crack the window, can’t let the grandkids play in the yard. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir is the machinery that makes that suffering simultaneously hyper-exposed and unheard.It is not an accident that the lead plaintiff against the world’s largest hog producer was an eighty-year-old Black woman. Black women have always been the frontline litigators and organizers of environmental justice — the very tradition Ella Baker built, the foot-soldier, group-centered leadership the coastal left keeps forgetting was Southern first. Read disability justice in too: those courtrooms had plaintiffs on portable oxygen, because respiratory disease is the body keeping score of the air. And read the labor line, because the harm doesn’t stop at the fence. The kill floor and the packing plant are staffed disproportionately by Black, Latino, and immigrant workers, sped up to dangerous line speeds, and the COVID outbreaks that tore through those plants happened because the workers were treated as fungible — interchangeable, replaceable, disposable, exactly the condition Spillers and the Afropessimists name when they talk about the captive body. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle about the white immigrant on the line a century ago; the Black and brown worker on today’s kill floor is still waiting on his muckraker.Then widen the lens. Karen Washington reframed the “food desert” — which sounds natural, like weather — as food APARTHEID, which names it as designed, and the cruel symmetry is that the same processed meat the WHO flagged gets marketed hardest in the very neighborhoods stripped of full grocery stores. Williams-Forson reminds us not to pathologize the foodways that scarcity and survival created; the problem was never the people’s plates, it was the political economy that engineered the plate. And you cannot read this land honestly without reading Black and Indigenous analysis together: Native communities in eastern North Carolina carry more than double the proximity burden in places, and Wolfe’s point that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, lands here — the same logic that took the territory now poisons what’s left of it. Davis would tell you the plantation, the prison, and the factory farm share an architecture of confinement and extraction. Don’t let a “humanely raised” sticker distract you from the material body count.Trace the Link. Ask Where the Smoke Is.So loop it back. The WHO put the product in the cancer column, the industry buried the fix in a farm bill, and the lagoon ended up behind a Black grandmother’s house — and the “humanely raised” label exists to keep those three facts from ever shaking hands in your mind. When you reach for that sticker so you can stop thinking, understand that the reach itself makes the whole machine visible; it shows you EXACTLY where the comfort gets manufactured. So don’t stop at the sticker. Trace the link to the internal link to the impact. And ask the question the marketing was built to suppress: where is the smoke for the kid in Duplin County with asthma from the spray field, the way there’s smoke for a stolen catalytic converter? Whose harm gets a headline tells you whose harm the country decided counts.This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the people downwind have been telling the truth the entire time, the science is peer-reviewed, the verdicts are on the docket, the lobbying disclosures are public record, and the votes were counted twice before anybody went crying to Congress. The receipts were always there. Somebody just has to teach the syllabus. Education is elevation.5 Key Takeaways* The Group 1 label is about certainty, not equivalence. Processed meat’s 2015 WHO/IARC classification means the evidence that it causes cancer is strong — the same evidence tier as tobacco — not that a hot dog equals a cigarette in risk. The industry profits from you never learning that distinction.* The harm starts upstream and runs along the color line. U.S. pork is commonly raised with ractopamine, a growth drug banned or restricted in 160-plus countries; the product the rest of the world rejects gets routed into American — and disproportionately Black, Latino, and Native — communities.* CAFO siting is a map, not a coincidence. UNC research shows people of color are far more likely to live within three miles of an industrial hog operation, and the lagoon-and-sprayfield system has a paper trail of documented illness and a $550 million jury record (McKiver v. Murphy-Brown) that a state damages cap then slashed.* “Save Our Bacon” is the EATS Act in a new costume. After losing at the Supreme Court (NPPC v. Ross, 2023) and at the ballot box (Prop 12, Question 3), Big Pork went to Congress to nullify voter-passed laws — federal preemption dressed up as states’ rights.* Humane washing is manufactured ignorance. “Natural,” “cage-free,” and “humanely raised” are engineered to resolve your conscience, not inform it — and ag-gag laws criminalize the documentation that would teach you otherwise.Click Here to Learn MoreBecome a Paid SubscriberWhen the World Health Organization flags the product, the industry buries the fix in a farm bill, and the lagoon ends up behind a Black grandmother’s house, somebody has to do the unglamorous work of tracing the link to the internal link to the impact — and putting it in plain language y’all can actually use. That tracing is exactly what Education Is Elevation exists to do, and it’s the very work that “humane washing,” ag-gag laws, and corporate-funded silence are built to keep you from ever seeing.I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Related ReadingsName the scholar, paraphrase the move, put it to work. Research over MeSearch.* Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition — racial capitalism as the foundation, not the aberration; the engine, not the glitch.* Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag — racism as the production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death; the lens for reading CAFO health data.* Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality — the founding text of environmental justice; where the waste goes is never neutral.* Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste and Medical Apartheid — environmental racism and the long medical record of treating Black bodies as expendable.* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” — intersectionality; why single-axis analysis loses the people standing where the harms cross.* The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” — politics rooted in material conditions, not symbolism.* Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed — the specific machinery aimed at Black women, hyper-exposed and unheard at once.* Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” — flesh, captivity, and fungibility, for reading the kill-floor worker.* Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection — the afterlife of slavery and the long present tense of dispossession.* Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle — the shared architecture of confinement and extraction across plantation, prison, and farm.* Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed — banking vs. problem-posing education; reading the word and the world.* Charles W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” with Arnold Farr on the epistemology of ignorance — ignorance as produced and maintained, not merely absent.* Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers — Black agrarian resistance, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm, and the praxis answer to despair.* Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs — Black women, food, and meaning; don’t pathologize the plate scarcity built.* Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” — invasion as structure; land as accumulation.* Steve Wing & Jill Johnston (2014), peer-reviewed work on CAFO proximity and race in North Carolina — the empirical map under the moral argument.* Farm Forward, reporting on “humane washing” — the field guide to the label finesse.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe