Fair Oaks Farms and Fairlife, your apologies aren’t worth much.
If you are truly sorry for what happened to the calves and cows on your farms, exposed by Animal Recovery Mission, you would get out of the dairy industry completely.
Dairy is synonymous with animal suffering.
Mike McCloskey and Mike Saint John, if you care about animal welfare at all, you would upgrade your business model to producing plant-based milk, which is a booming industry.
I’m pretty certain you are unwilling to do that, so I would hope you would at least make your farms a bit more humane by keeping babies with their mothers and not confining calves to isolated, barren crates. Can you imagine a human baby forced to be all alone without their mother?
At the very least, your companies should install security cameras, so the public can see how your employees handle the animals you profit from and to ensure that this type of disgusting terror never happens again.
If dairies are unwilling to take these proactive steps, their apologies will fall on deaf ears.
Animal abuse is inherent in animal agriculture and happens every single day, despite farms such as Fair Oaks promoting compassionate family farming. It’s just rare that such an in- depth investigation gets such widespread media attention.
Jodie Wiederkehr, Chicago Alliance for Animals
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Food coupon system is discriminatory
Chicago cannot be a thriving city for everyone unless last rites are issued to the discriminatory distinction between the orange and blue WIC food coupons thousands of low-income families depend on for weekly groceries.
Recently, four nonprofits, including the Greater Chicago Food Depository and the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, published the Making WIC Work in Illinois report, on this system that issues either orange or blue coupons to WIC (Women, Infants and Children) families.
The difference in color is more than aesthetic — it highlights an unjust racial classification.
Black and Latino WIC families on the South and West Sides are more likely to be issued orange coupons that can only be redeemed at nutrition centers operated by Catholic Charities.
Yet WIC families on the North Side — who are predominantly white — are more likely issued blue coupons that can be redeemed at any participating retailer, such as Walgreens, Jewel, even high-end Mariano’s.
The Illinois Department of Human Services plans to phase out physical WIC coupons by 2020 and replace them with an electronic system. The state must seize this opportunity to get rid of this unjust distinction.
The orange and blue coupon system reduces the incentive for South and West side Food and Nutrition Centers to improve customer service through innovation.These centers effectively have a fixed customer pool: black and Latino orange coupon recipients.
Without meaningful competition, these centers have a license to forego measures that are normally adopted to attract and retain customers. And South and West Side WIC families do not have the same robust options as their North Side counterparts — such as retailers who might supply fresher produce or provide more pleasant customer interaction — even though they are equally entitled to them.
This unfair system has no place in our fight against food insecurity.
Darrius Atkins, University of Chicago law student, Hyde Park
