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The Fate of Denver’s Last Slaughterhouse Is on the Ballot
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BY RAKSHA VASUDEVAN • October 23, 2024
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With her silver rings and turquoise bracelets, Mercedes Ortiz Gutierrez cuts a stylish figure. Her black cane with golden finishes could be mistaken for another accessory if she didn’t lean so heavily on it. Gingerly, she shuffles to the gray couch in her one-bedroom apartment in Thornton, Colorado, just outside Denver and five miles from the slaughterhouse where her life irrevocably changed.
After a fall on the job broke her ankle and gave her a condition of chronic pain, Gutierrez settled a workers’ compensation claim with Superior for $77,000. To Gutierrez, the compensation she received was not nearly enough. “It’s not the same anymore with the
pain,” she said.
This November, Denver voters will decide on Initiated Ordinance 309, a ballot initiative banning all commercial slaughter in the city. If it passes, Superior—the city’s only remaining slaughterhouse—will shutter. This would eliminate at least 160 jobs but, according to animal rights activists, also stop the suffering of the 300,000 lambs slaughtered there every year.
But what might appear as a choice between animal welfare and workers’ livelihoods is actually more complicated: Stories like Gutierrez’s suggest some workers might also suffer at Superior, while several experts believe closing one slaughterhouse could worsen conditions—for animals, workers, local economies, and the environment—in and around other meat processing plants. It's now up to voters to decide: Will getting rid of their city’s last slaughterhouse do more harm than good? Read the full story.
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Report Casts Doubt on Safety of New Roundup Products
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BY LISA HELD • October 22, 2024
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Last week, an aisle display in the Garden Center at a Maryland Lowe’s featured three tiers of the most widely used weedkiller ever created: Roundup. From afar, the white bottles with bright red caps looked identical.
Upon closer inspection, however, despite having the same name, there were two distinct products intermingled on the shelves. One contained glyphosate, the chemical that’s become synonymous with the brand name—like tissue is to Kleenex. The other contained three completely different herbicides most people have never heard of.
The display was one manifestation of a promise that agrichemical giant Bayer made in 2021 to stop selling glyphosate for use on lawns and gardens starting in 2023.
Roundup is ubiquitous across agriculture. But Bayer decided to pull the chemical from home retailers because the costly lawsuits claiming the product has caused cancers came primarily from people fighting weeds in lawns, garden beds, and sidewalk cracks. Many outlets reported then that the company would stop selling Roundup for residential use.
Now that glyphosate is being phased out, however, Roundup remains—as an updated line of multiple weedkillers for home gardeners. And yesterday, environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth (FOE) released a report calling into question the company’s new ingredients, claiming the reformulated products are even more toxic than the old. Read the full story.
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If Restaurants Serve Up Climate Education, Will Diners Pay Attention?
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BY JAYA SAXENA • October 21, 2024
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The PLNT Impact Tracker on PLNT Burger’s website wants you to think about what you’re eating. The tracker, which appears on the website of this East Coast vegan chain and on its ordering app, estimates the amounts of water, land, CO2, and oil saved by eating vegan burgers. The numbers—14.4 kg of CO2 saved per burger, for
instance—are derived from the 2022 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report of the vegan brand Beyond Meat, from which PLNT Burger gets its patties.
These numbers are largely hypothetical. The most accurate measure of land or CO2 “saved” by ordering a PLNT Burger is only attained if you’d originally planned to order a fast-food beef burger instead. And of course, it’s not like for every PLNT Burger sold, a factory farm gives up five acres of land, or releases a cow from the slaughter line—actually meaningful solutions to the factory meat problem. Nor has eating plant-based meat made a significant impact on beef production, according to a 2023 report.
But the numbers still count for something: They provide a tangible incentive to address an oft-intangible problem. “In the app, we calculate your resource savings as an individual consumer, and then we share that with our community as encouragement,” says PLNT Burger co-founder Jonah Goldman. This ideally reinforces the connection in the customer’s brain between their everyday choices and the resulting impacts on the environment.
However, if you were to walk into one of PLNT Burger’s dozen-plus locations, you won’t find a deluge of information about the environmental impact of eating meat. Instead, you’ll see signage about the health benefits of plant-based eating—the “primary drivers of consumer choice are
personal benefit,” says Goldman—and the menu board, designed like any one in other fast-food chains. Goldman says that though employees are trained to speak on the environmental benefits of plant-based eating, “it’s not as embedded in our cashier training or our interactions with consumers, because we really are focused on positive guest experience.” The environmental mission can come later. Read the full story.
This is the fifth article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration
with Eater.
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