On Jan. 23, Albuquerque’s Guild Cinema hosted a showing of Matt Wechsler’s new documentary, “The Jungle,” which dives into the problems within modern meat industry and its history. The title comes from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, which first exposed corruption and contamination in the meat industry.
The free screening was put on by the New Mexico chapter of Food & Water Watch, an organization that pushes for policies to help curb climate change.
“The Jungle” details meat production’s transition from small factory farms to large fields built on colonized land. It also depicts the near-monopolies built first by Iowa Beef Packers in red meat and Tyson in chicken. Tyson would eventually acquire IBP, creating an almost total stranglehold on the industry, according to the documentary.
Factory farming, the documentary explains, worsens climate change. According to the film, one-fifth of carbon emissions are a result of factory farming. Worker abuse is also rampant within the industry, according to the documentary; workers are primarily immigrants who receive little pay and sustain lifelong injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
The film also details potential solutions: trust-busting meat companies, increasing worker protections and creating farming practices that work with the environment instead of against it.
As Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin — author and Indigenous farmer pioneering farming chickens alongside hazelnut trees to simulate a chicken’s natural habitat — says in the documentary, “When you fight nature, you’re never going to win.”
After the showing, Food & Water Watch hosted a panel of various sustainability and farming experts and advocates from around the state. Featured were Helga Garcia-Garza, the executive director of Agri-Cultura Network and La Cosecha CSA, as well as Jorge Garcia, the executive director of the Center for Social Sustainable Systems.
Garcia-Garza described her upbringing and experience with farming with the earth, telling the story of growing up around wild crops as much as agriculture.
“For many years, almost 13 years, I learned and practiced permaculture. Brownsville, Texas during the summer — you cannot grow there. It is just too hot. So we had a lot of bananas, papayas, citrus and wild tobacco,” Garcia-Garza said. “We had many, many different types of herbs, plants, fruit trees, that grew naturally in that tropical environment, and I feel very blessed that I lived that, that I really saw what it means to work with nature and not against nature.”
Garcia added a critique of the government and the wealthy, who he said seem content to widen the gap between humans and nature.
“We're gonna keep fighting nature and losing. Why? Because we are fighting ourselves. We are nature. We are children of nature, and we understand that,” Garcia said. “But reflect on the government that we have, on the way of thinking that there is. We want to go colonize Mars, for God's sake, and we don't even have water to drink, and yet we want to go and colonize Mars. And we’re all happy with that?”
Addison Fulton is the culture editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on X @dailylobo
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