MCC-Penn Valley Common Read: The Chain

Economist Rebecca Boehm and Nina Lakhani, journalist at The Guardian, expose the harms of near-monopolistic chicken production practices at Tyson Foods. (i>Got Science? podcast, 7 Sep 2021.

The pandemic has thrown into high relief some of the longstanding issues surrounding working conditions in meatpacking facilities. John Oliver explains why greater oversight is needed, and how we can go about getting it. (February 2021)

In many ways, Kansas City’s early history is that of a stereotypical frontier town. Native Americans, pioneers, and cowboys are indelibly linked to the settlement of the area and the city’s heritage. Cattle and other livestock are crucial. But contrary to popular mythology, the Kansas City Stockyards did not fit the spurs-and-rawhide image of the American West as much as it reflected American industrialization. In a discussion of his essay in the new book Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Pendergast Era, UMKC historian John Herron examines the city’s stockyards industry in the opening decades of the 20th century and explores how the multi-ethnic stockyards workforce gave a young KC a distinctive flavor. Kansas City Library Presentation, 28 Apr 2019. Audio.

This feature-length documentary is an examination of our dietary choices and the food we put in our bodies. Natalie Portman narrates about how agribusiness resorts to ever greater squalor and cruelty. 2017.
*This film is accessible through our Academic Video Online (Alexander Street) database, and may require a student login.

This documentary "exposes a huge health and environmental scandal in our modern industrial system of meat and poultry production...In the U.S. and elsewhere, the industry is dominated by dangerous uses of arsenic, antibiotics and growth hormones and also by the dumping of massive amounts of sewage in fragile waterways affecting the nearby towns and its citizens. This film documents the vast catastrophic impact on the environment and public health, as well as focuses on the individual lives damaged and destroyed." 2009.
*This film is accessible through our library catalog and will require a student login to check out.