As public health authorities around the world began to sound the alarm about the swine flu I was busy convincing myself I didn't have, so too did the crowd I'd been rubbing shoulders with in California, issuing forth a flurry of emails with links to evidence that pointed to industrial pork production practices as the likely cause of the outbreak. Tom Philpott of Grist cites the Mexican newspaper La Marcha, which in an April 15th article names a likely suspect in the hog farms run by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Smithfield, the largest pork processor in the world and the subject of the 2006 Rolling Stone article Boss Hog (which points to Smithfield, among other things, as one of the worst polluters on the globe.)

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