Last week, I was watching the Ellen DeGeneres Show because I knew she would be interviewing Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of “Eating Animals,” a gruesome attack against animal agriculture and a strong testimony for a vegan lifestyle. Recently, the National Pork Board responded to Foer’s statements, especially when he falsely linked H1N1 to a hog farm in North Carolina. Read on to learn more about this ongoing debate. To read the entire article and watch the video, link to the New York Times.

“This swine flu that’s now an epidemic, they’ve been able to trace it back to a farm in North Carolina,” he said. “A hog farm. Nobody knows this. Nobody talks about it. We’ve been told this lie that it came from Mexico.”

But Liz Wagstrom, a staff veterinarian at the National Pork Board, said the claim that the novel 2009 H1N1 virus originally came from swine farms in North Carolina is “patently false.” Researchers at that time did find an H3N2 flu virus in pigs there, she said, but it had a different genetic architecture than the current H1N1 pandemic virus circulating around the world. And those trying to link the H1N1 to factory farming “are using a scare tactic to try to cast a negative light on modern pork production,” Ms. Wagstrom said.