Special thanks to Israel Arriola from Anima Naturalis, who singlehandedly gave the presentation eight times, and to Justice Without Boundaries presenters Gerardo and Lalo.

Volunteers tabled at Earth Day events in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento.

Presenters spoke to high school and college classes, and community organizations about the impacts of animal agriculture on animals, workers, the environment, and our health.

Thank you to all of our incredible volunteers who made this unprecedented outreach possible! If you would like to get involved, or if you know of any venues that would like to host presentations, please e-mail info@ffacoalition.org.

As activists, the work that we do is at once personal and global. The mindsets that lay the foundation for oppression begin on an individual level and are expressed on a systemic scale. Likewise, the solution to these problems starts within ourselves; by addressing these issues internally, our compassion can resonate around the world. This has never been more obvious to me than while on the Justice Without Boundaries tour.

The Beginning

Justice Without Boundaries was primarily organized by a single activist, Gerardo Alvarado, who was raised in Mexico and now lives in the United States. He brought together a coalition of organizations and individuals to form the first ever Justice Without Boundaries tour.

Gerardo originally contacted FFAC to translate our presentation into Spanish for use with Latino communities in the United States, and for the Justice Without Boundaries tour in Mexico. I was thrilled when I heard about the project, and wanted to be personally involved in the tour. Thus, six months later, I found myself on a plane to Mexico City.

The Issues

Much like FFAC, Justice Without Boundaries strives to highlight the intersection of many different justice issues. There are very direct connections between factory farming in the U.S. and Mexico:

• Smithfield Foods, a U.S. company and the world’s largest pork producer, has expanded its operations into Mexico. This has profound consequences for local communities, driving small-scale farmers out of business, causing severe health problems, and polluting and depleting local resources. Humane Society International details Smithfield’s effects on Mexico.
• Free-trade agreements like NAFTA have resulted in a flood of cheap products into Mexican markets, driving local producers out of business and shifting the food system from its traditional base. U.S. corporations further exploit this situation by recruiting unemployed Mexican farmers and workers to work in U.S. slaughterhouses. The Nation has a wonderful article on this topic.

Other connections are slightly more abstract. Neo-colonialism is in effect in Mexico, where U.S. corporations like McDonalds and KFC spread conceptions that traditional Mexican foods are inferior. As a result of cultural and economic imperialism, healthier, local staples are becoming increasingly more expensive and difficult to find. To make matters worse, they’re being replaced by products that cause the same health crises we are seeing in the United States: heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.

The Goals

Tour member Eduardo Siller giving the FFAC presentation in Guadalajara.

Justice Without Boundaries seeks to educate people about the impacts of animal agriculture, while also providing tools to address these issues. Activists presented a Spanish-language version of the FFAC presentation, vegan cooking demos using traditional regional ingredients, and workshops on effective activism skills like public speaking and organizing.

The education is not just unidirectional. Tour members were encouraged to spend as much time as possible talking with local residents and activists to hear their stories and learn about their work, their passions, their challenges, and their perspectives. Mexican voices are often so marginalized in the U.S. that gaining a firsthand understanding (or rather, a first step towards understanding) was one of the most valuable outcomes of the tour for me.

The People

For the week I was there, the tour crew consisted of 6 members from Mexico and 7 members from the United States. Together we had quite a range of activism experience. There were several members from animal activism groups, two members who came directly from the Tar Sands Blockade in Texas, and two others from an organization they started in Guadalajara that provides bicycles to the Huichol people of Central Mexico.

JWB crew at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Cuernavaca campus.

Israel Arriola, a member of Anima Naturalis, a Spanish animal activism group that now has a large presence in Mexico, was the Mexican tour coordinator for the week that I was there. He graciously hosted us in Texcoco, a town 45-minutes outside of Mexico City, and organized many of the speaking events.

The Challenges

One of the most difficult elements was group dynamics. We were a group of a dozen people who share the same passions, but come from varying ideological and experiential backgrounds. Establishing a common understanding of how to organize our daily activities and create accountability was difficult but essential.

We knew that in order for our work to have any credibility or viability, we had to begin by honoring our ideals within ourselves. The anti-oppression nature of our work had to begin by ensuring that the group followed a consensus process and created a safe space for all voices to be heard. Even the smallest details, like what hand signals to use during meetings, were important for establishing a sustainable foundation for our activism.

The Lessons

I could probably write another blog post of equal length with the many things I learned while in Mexico, but these are a few of the most relevant points:

• Activism is thriving in Mexico.
  • One common misperception I’ve encountered since returning to the United States is that Mexico doesn’t have much activism. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
  • The activism training I led was attended by over 30 people, of all ages and backrounds. Every single one volunteered to practice speaking in front of the group, which is a feat I’m not sure I would have encountered in the U.S.
  • There are at least two large organizations working on animal issues in Mexico City.
  • There is also a good deal of direct action. While we were there, one of the tour members participated in a protest in which people chained themselves to trees in a park that was going to be demolished. The mayor later agreed to save the park.

• Vegetarianism is popular and easy in Mexico City
  • The term “vegan” isn’t widely known, but “vegetarian” is used to represent both vegetarian and vegan. People didn’t give us strange looks or snarky comments for requesting food sin queso or sin crema.
  • There are many vegetarian restaurants.
  • With delicious fillings like potato, nopales (cactus), black beans, and avocado, it’s easy to get vegetarian options from street vendors.
  • In certain parts of Mexico, fruits and vegetables are much more abundant and affordable than in the United States
    • In Texcoco, we could walk 50 feet from our hotel to a small mercado that sold fresh-squeezed orange juice, a wide variety of vegetables, and all the mango and avocado we could eat.
    • Street vendors sell flavored nuts and dried fruit.
    • However, as mentioned under the “issues” section, in other parts of Mexico fresh fruits and vegetables are becoming increasingly harder to find and more expensive.
• People are eager for cross-movement collaboration
  • Through events and discussions, we made connections to a huge variety of people. Everyone from environmental activists to vegan pop-up restaurant chefs wanted to talk about these issues and collaborate.
  • In fact, there were so many offers to have us come speak that if we had accepted them all we would have had over 100 events in less than 50 days.
  • There was such a strong positive response that the plan is to make JWB an annual event.

The Results

There will be a write-up of the whole six-week long tour soon, but for now you can view this post that summarizes the events we led and attended during our week with the tour. You can also view photos from the tour on our Facebook.

This groundbreaking project seeks to spread awareness about the intersection of food justice, environmental, and animal rights issues in Mexico, while building a sense of unity between United States and Mexican activists.

As a partner of the tour, FFAC provided a specialized presentation that will be used in 12 cities throughout Mexico. It presents factory farming in a broader context, examining the effects on both local and global communities. Based on a Humane Society International report, FFAC’s presentation for JWB addresses the severe environmental and social tolls of Smithfield Food’s expansion into Mexico.

FFAC’s first bilingual speaker training

In addition to providing the presentation, two FFAC members traveled to Mexico City for the first week of the tour. They led FFAC’s first bilingual speaker training for the 10 members of the tour, and attended the week’s events.

Members of Anima Naturalis, a Spanish animal protection organization and JWB tour partner, tabled outside of the talk at ITESM.

The first event was held at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) campus in Cuernavaca, where FFAC’s executive director spoke to an audience of students. ITESM’s Cuernavaca campus recently became the first major Mexican university to adopt Meatless Mondays, so students were excited to learn more about the cause.

The next event was held at the Casa de Cultura de India en Mexico. Katie led a bilingual effective activism training that included basic public speaking tips, and information on how to best approach people about this challenging topic.

Following the training, tour members Mike and Nancy provided a cooking demo on how to make seitan out of plain bread flour. While wheat gluten is not widely available in Mexico, bread flour is cheap and abundant, and yields a high-protein food that’s easy to substitute for meat in traditional dishes.

Attendees of the training and cooking demo in Mexico City.

And this was just the first of the six-week-long tour! Check back soon for more tour updates, and a detailed personal reflection on Katie’s experience in Mexico.

The first stop was in New Haven, at Yale University. FFAC’s executive director spoke to the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The audience consisted of graduate students who are working in the fields of sustainability and food justice, many of whom were relatively unfamiliar with the scope of CAFOs in our food system. The talk was catered by Thali Too, a delicious vegetarian Indian restaurant in New Haven.

The next presentation was at the Lucy Parsons Center, a collectively-run bookstore in Boston. Local activists arranged this presentation, which attracted a wide variety of community members.

There was a lively debate at the end when a local dairy farmer weighed in that his farm does not use the practices discussed in the presentation, such as forcibly removing the day-old calves from their mothers. Katie pointed out that such milk is a miniscule percentage of the market, and he admitted that it’s only available through CSA boxes. It’s not possible for dairy companies, even ones that brand themselves as “humane” ones such as Straus and Clover, to remain financially competitive on a large scale without using these controversial practices.

After Boston, Katie traveled to New York City to speak at New York University. On Wednesday, she presented to the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund (SALDF) at NYU’s School of Law. SALDF knows how to host a good presentation; they provided wine and vegan donuts.

SALDF’s president, Liz Hallinan, provided legal context for several of the sections of the presentation, such as the lawsuit brought against the farmer who abandoned 50,000 chickens in Turlock, CA.

The culmination of the tour was a symposium hosted by Cruelty-Free NYU, an undergraduate student group at New York University. The event attracted 50 students who came to learn about the role of animal agriculture in our food system.

Katie spoke first to a rapt and often disturbed audience. After an intermission for gourmet plant-based food, Animal Studies professor Jeff Sebo led a discussion about moral frameworks and the ethics of food choices. He presented a series of thought experiments that prompted students to reframe their perception of whether farming animals for food is acceptable or justifiable. Subsequently, students discussed the ethics of everything from dumpster diving to animal abolitionism.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this tour possible!

FFAC is partnering with Oakland Veg Week to bring the veg message into local Oakland schools, and yesterday was the first of our Oakland Veg Week talks. We spoke to three 11th grade English classes at Oakland Technical High School. Our presentation was timed to coincide with their unit on the food system.

The students at Oakland Tech were a rapt and vocal audience. The presentation was punctuated with yells of, “That’s messed up!” and “Eww, gross!” They were horrified to learn about the conditions in which animals are kept, and thoroughly disgusted by the manure lagoons adjacent to factory farms.

Many students also drew their own unprompted connections between factory farming and slavery. Several of the students exclaimed that the intensive confinement of battery-caged hens resembled conditions on the deadly Middle Passage used to transport slaves from Africa to America. While we do not usually discuss the connections between human and animal oppression, this provided space to consider the underlying mindsets that lead to exploitation, such as one group deeming itself superior and devaluing the life of another group.

Thanks to a grant from VegFund, we were able to win over students’ stomachs with samples of vanilla almond milk and chocolate soy milk, as well as vegan chocolate chip cookies. Many students were excited to finally be able to drink milk without feeling sick because they are lactose intolerant.

We concluded the momentous day with a talk hosted by the Santa Clara County Animal Activists at San Jose State University. Although many people in the audience were already activists, they were grateful to learn new facts about facets of factory farming that typically receive less attention, such as worker treatment.

The first stop on the tour was an event organized by the Eugene Vegetarian Education Network. We received an incredibly kind welcome from EVEN’s founder, Lin, and from their volunteer Monica, who took Katie out to dinner at the delicious Cornbread Cafe. After dinner, Katie spoke to a diverse crowd of Eugenians. Two of the audience members expressed interest in becoming FFAC presenters, and will continue to spread our message throughout Eugene.

Next up was Lewis and Clark College. Katie presented to two classes, Environmental Sociology and Animal Studies.

In the environmental sociology class, Katie gave a specialized version of the presentation that highlighted the intersection of technology and food production, such as the antibiotics, light and air filtration systems, and caging systems upon which factory farming relies.

Katie also spoke to members of two Lewis and Clark student groups, Animal Defense and Students Engaged in Eco Defense (SEED). She answered a variety of questions about her personal journey, the most effective ways to communicate with people about factory farming, and how to overcome common obstacles that activists encounter.

The final presentation was organized by Greenboard, a coalition of sustainability-related student groups at Reed College.

In addition to educating people about factory farming and recruiting new presenters, the trip also served as a means to deliver copies of Watershed Media’s book CAFO: the Tragedy of Animal Factories. Watershed Media donated 20 copies of the book to FFAC to disseminate, and we were able to donate copies to EVEN, Lewis and Clark College, Reed College, Action for Animals, and In Defense of Animals.

Thank you so much to Lin from EVEN, Beau Broughton from Lewis and Clark College, Austin Weisgrau from Reed College, and to everyone who helped make this trip possible.

The FDA and Center for Veterinary Medicine have affirmed the safety of GE salmon (2). The problem is that the FDA is regulating GE salmon as an “animal drug” rather than a new food product, drastically limiting the safety tests it must undergo (3). GE salmon have increased levels of IGF-1, which is a known carcinogen (4).

Equally disturbing, the FDA report does not assess how the salmon would affect the environment in which it is raised, because the actual farming will take place in Canada and Panama (5). The GE salmon grow twice as fast as wild salmon, and eat five times as much food (6). If the GE salmon were to escape, they would lead to the complete extinction of wild salmon within 40 fish generations. AquaAdvantage has sterilized the fish to try to prevent this, but 5-10% of sterilized fish are still fertile (7).

The FDA is now allowing a 60-day public comment period on GMO salmon. Please submit your comment to the FDA, and urge all of your family and friends to do the same. This is a watershed moment that could set a disastrous precedent.

On February 9th, FFAC Director Katie Cantrell spoke at a rally against GMO salmon in San Francisco. You can listen to KPFA’s coverage of the event starting at 11:03, and Katie’s commentary at 14:05.

1. Center for Veterinary Medicine, US Food and Drug Administration. Environmental Assessment for AquaAdvantage Salmon. August 25, 2010.

2. Mestel, Rosie. Genetically Engineered Salmon Moves Closer to FDA Approval. Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2012. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/21/science/la-sci-genetically-engineered-salmon-fda-20121222

3. LeVaux, Ari. Genetically modified super salmon tries to swim through a hole in the regulatory net. Monterey County Weekly, January 17, 2013. http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/2013/jan/17/health-fitness-2013-fish-drugs/

4. Rosenberg, Martha. Is the Fast-Growing AquaAdvantage Salmon Safe to Eat? Foodconsumer, December 6, 2012. http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Safety/gmo/aquadvantage_salmon_1205120942.html

5. Pollack, Andrew. Engineered Fish Moves a Step Closer to Approval. New York Times, December 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/business/gene-altered-fish-moves-closer-to-federal-approval.html

6. Sesana, Laura. Frankenfish: Genetically Engineered Salmon Close to FDA Approval. Washington Times, February 2, 2013. http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/world-our-backyard/2013/feb/2/frankenfish-genetically-engineered-salmon-close-wi/

7. Genetically Engineered Salmon. Ocean Conservancy, http://www.oceanconservancy.org/our-work/aquaculture/aquaculture-genetically.html

After providing shoppers with samples of a variety of plant-based milks, we explain that they have as much calcium as cow milk without any of the cholesterol, environmental degradation, or animal suffering. It’s a win-win!

Last week, Jessica and Kitty sampled soy, almond, and rice milk in front of a popular grocery store. They were overwhelmed by the positive response.  Many people exclaimed, “I’ve been meaning to try this!” Four people came back on their way out of the store to show Jess and Kitty their newly-purchased cartons of almond or soy milk.

This week, Katherine, Katie, Jessica, and Kitty sampled flax, almond, and coconut milk. The flax milk was a surprise favorite; people hadn’t seen the product before, and were pleasantly surprised by the taste. Plus, with the ideal omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, flax milk is one of the healthiest options.

Next week we’ll be back with coupons!

Thank you to VegFund for sponsoring the printing of our milk infographic, and the product sampling. If you would like to arrange an event at your local supermarket, please e-mail info@ffacoalition.org.

 Josephine Bellaccomo led our third speaker training, following the same model as the previous two: a description of common public speaking pitfalls that distract from the message, and personalized exercises and feedback.

We are thrilled to welcome these talented new speakers to our organization, and happy to have more people benefit from Jo’s coaching. Participants called the training “a real gift,” “the most informative four hours I’ve ever had (really!),” and described it as “positively transformative.”

The next step is scheduling presentations for everyone to practice their newfound skills. To schedule a presentation for your class, organization, church, or business, please e-mail info@ffacoalition.org.

In case you’re wondering about the industrial-looking background, the training was held at the headquarters and food laboratory of Beyond Eggs in San Francisco.