No matter how you slice it, industrial meat, egg, and dairy production comes at a heavy cost to society—a price not reflected at our checkout counters. While it can be argued that large-scale industrial animal agriculture has had its successes in boosting world food production, the essays in this section reveal that the hidden costs of that system can no longer be ignored. Like chickens that have flown the coop, many unforeseen consequences of CAFO production are now coming home to roost. These costs enter our lives in unexpected avenues: in waterways, through air particulate pollution, via taxpayer-funded subsidy programs, in the food chain, through underground drainage networks across farm country, or as tears in the very fabric of our democracy.
In CAFOs Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations, Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists attempts to document and quantify these hidden costs, which include (1) a major manure disposal problem unless ample cropland is available nearby; (2) odors that disrupt quality of life and lower property values for nearby homeowners; (3) the loss of independent medium- and small-scale farms; (4) ballooning taxpayer subsidies; and (5) the spread of pathogens and disease.1
At stake are what public interest attorney and conservation crusader Robert Kennedy Jr. has characterized as violations of the commons: not just of common resources, but of our values, natural heritage, and the very process of governance. For over a decade, Kennedy and the activist organization he founded, the Waterkeeper Alliance—comprised of regional Riverkeeper and Baykeeper organizations—have been waging a campaign to hold CAFO operators accountable for their devastating impacts on water quality. This campaign includes the vital commitment to the full enforcement of the U.S. Clean Water Act.
In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser dropped a huge question mark on the wholesomeness of the all-American meat-intensive diet, connecting the dots between food-borne illness and industrial meat production:
The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.2
Indeed, thanks to the presence of feces in the meat supply, outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella are increasingly common, and it seems barely a week or a month goes by in the United States without the news of some massive recall of industrial meat. Each year more transmissible disease agents appear in our industrial animal food production system.3 Pharmaceutical companies invest huge amounts of money developing vaccines against future viral outbreaks potentially originating in CAFOs, while the meat industry resists tighter regulation and testing. As Schlosser points out, although meatpacking companies don’t want to make people sick, they also don’t want to be held liable for contamination. Until significant changes in meatpacking oversight occur, recalls will continue to be an unfortunate part of the business plan.
Hot dogs, apple pie, and democratic freedoms are part of the American way of life that so many of us take for granted. Anthropologist Kendall Thu agrees that there is much to be learned about a society from its food production systems. But what he has learned may not be so appetizing. CAFOs, writes Thu, are threatening our very democratic freedoms. It starts with simple violations in rural communities, where oppressive odors can make being outside unbearable for residents, and where emissions of toxic compounds pollute air and waterways. From there, the CAFO industry has infringed on the right to free speech in many U.S. states with laws that make it illegal to photograph a feedlot or to disparage an agricultural enterprise. In the end, we have an industrial agriculture complex holding hostage the rural communities and some of the very democratic processes we hold dear.
Instead of making the CAFO industry pay the costs of cleaning up its own toxic violations of the air and waterways, many of our public policies are perversely set up to actually “pay the polluters.” By following the trail of taxpayer subsidies, farm bill programs, and government regulations used to prop up the industrial animal production machine, attorney Martha Noble exposes a world of collusion between big government, regulatory agencies, and industrial agribusiness. These government programs include money for subsidized feed production, toxic cleanup, manure lagoon construction, and methane digester technologies, as well as precious research dollars that drive the industry forward rather than develop viable alternative production methods. The real losers are small family farmers and workers, rural communities, consumers, and, of course, taxpayers.
Decades ago, our favorite cuts of meat were processed before our eyes by the local butcher—today, rarely so. Christopher Cook journeys into the modern-day jungle of the meatpacking industry. As the amount of meat Americans consume continues to set records, the consolidation of the processing industry puts increasing pressure on slaughterhouse workers to keep up with the demand on a daily basis. Nearly a century removed from Upton Sinclair’s meatpacking exposé, The Jungle, Cook still finds an industry with a steep human price and a world of cruel cuts. What’s more, the consolidation of the slaughterhouse industry into a smaller number of ever-larger facilities that increasingly favor contract producers to the exclusion of independent farmers makes further cuts at a landscape of diverse and fair markets. Without access to nearby facilities to process their animals, many independent producers have no access to distribution and marketing, even if their products are cost-competitive. Such consolidation can hurt farmers and consumers alike.
Anna Lappé writes about a potentially more illusive but equally concerning hidden cost of CAFO production: the enormous contribution of animal food production to global warming and climate change. More than all transportation impacts combined, the domestic livestock we depend on for food are emitting heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere—through digestion, the decomposition of manure, transportation, crop fertilization, and a global dietary shift to meat and animal product – intensive diets. We are literally heating up the planet by the way we put food on our tables.