Dive Brief:
- Food Lion wants its suppliers to stop confining hogs to gestation crates. Delhaize America, parent of the supermarket chain, has sent a letter to its suppliers asking for details on how they plan to shift hogs to open-pen living.
- Gestation crates are small enclosures that prevent breeding sows from being able to move freely or turn around.
- Delhaize joins some 60 other major food companies that are looking to distance themselves from gestation crates — including the giant of the pork industry, Tyson.
Dive Insight:
Some day, when we're older than we already are, we'll sit down with the great-grandkids and ask them how things went at school. And they will glare at us and say, "We put on our virtual-reality headsets and entered a simulation about life back in the old days and we saw how old people like you used to treat the animals and we were all crying because the animals were sad and we hate you."
And there will be nothing — nothing — we can say in our defense..