WHAT HAS HAPPENED to us that we think it’s all right to throw live chicks into a mincing machine just because they’re male, that piglets’ tails are chopped off and their front teeth broken to prevent ‘stress-induced cannibalism’ and chunks of their ears cut out for identification, all without painkillers; and that cows are milked to the breaking point so they live out just a third of their natural lives? This is how you get your food. This is how I get my food. This is where pretty much all of us get our food because what we typically eat today has been farmed in factories and manufactured in factories.
It’s the ‘farmed’ part that’s truly indefensible. The fake food concocted from artificial ingredients by vast industrial machines, food production that’s just another branch of chemistry—well, it may be disgusting and make you unhealthy, but in the end it’s a question of taste. (Although, as we’ll see, it’s not quite as simple as a question of consumer choice.) The way we treat animals, though? That’s a question of ethics. Farmer and poet Wendell Berry describes eating as ‘farming by proxy.’ In the case of eating factory-farmed animals, it’s cruelty by proxy. If we don’t care about the sickening things I’ve just described, we’ve lost one of the qualities that is essential to human beings: the capacity to be empathetic. More animal cruelty = less human.
Of course none of us is deliberately choosing to torture a pig when we buy a hot dog. But as we’ve seen in other contexts, people are often made to behave in inhuman ways by the systems and structures around them. When it comes to factory food and cruelty to animals, our shopping and eating habits make us complicit in horrific acts. But it’s simplistic just to blame consumers. That allows the real culprits off the hook: the politicians, regulators, and business executives of the culinary-industrial complex, whose grotesque practices are encouraged through subsidy and permitted through inadequate regulation. The resulting pervasiveness of factory food in our society makes it hard for even the most conscientious consumer to avoid propping up this rotten, inhuman system. It is a structural problem. That’s why, if we’re going to do anything about it, we need to go deeper than participating in campaigns to shop differently or supporting animal-welfare charities. We need to dismantle and reconstruct the entire food industry.
FACTORY FARMS
Most summers when I was young we would visit my family in Hungary. My grandmother grew most of her fruit and vegetables in the garden, and there were chickens running around the place. On the other side of town, with the other side of the family, it was pigs: my family owned a small salami factory. My cousin and I would help out, and that included killing pigs. And I mean really killing them—by hand. Lots of blood. But I was pretty young then, and anyway, over there they were . . . you know, Communist. A bit backward. Actually, as I now know, the way we treated and killed pigs in our small local meat-processing business was much more humane than the horrors taking place in the big, industrialized plants in the more ‘advanced’ UK where we lived.
For most of my life I—like most people, I suspect—never gave much thought to the origins of my food. I began to develop a greater understanding while working on these issues with some of our clients during my time running Good Business, the corporate-responsibility firm I started with Giles Gibbons in 1997. But then, in 2013, at Rohan’s suggestion, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. I know there are other books like it, but that’s the book I read, and it influenced me hugely, opening my eyes to the sickening world of filth, pollution, and abuse that is responsible for the food we consume.
Factory farms are disgusting places. A quick YouTube search for one of the many undercover activist videos shot at chicken, egg, beef, milk, veal, or pork factories will suppress even the most robust appetite. But the point is this: it took reading a book for me to understand the unconscionable origins of much of the food I ate and prepared for family and friends. Reading a food label in the supermarket would have been useless. When I buy a burger for my children at the zoo café or eat in a restaurant, there isn’t a label, not even a company website I can check. The vast majority of fast-food places have neither a brand to protect nor an incentive to respond to animal-welfare concerns. I’d love to know how many of the ‘conservationists’ at the San Diego Zoo, for example, who prattle on with tediously gushing self-righteousness about ‘Asiatic lions’ or ‘Phillippine seahorses’ or whatever, have the first idea about the lives of the chickens, pigs, and cows they serve up for lunch?
No one has the first idea, not the people at the zoo, not the shelf stacker at your supermarket, not the waiter in your restaurant. Of course, that’s just how the Big Food industry likes it, going to aggressive lengths to stop activists from documenting what happens in factory farms. Keeping us in the dark makes the ethical issues abstract, not something that busy practical people trying to live their lives can spend time or energy on. There’s no individual animal for us to picture in our mind’s eye, looking back at us, suffering. Over the last two decades the factory farming industry in the United States has worked tirelessly in American state legislatures to make the documentation of factory farms unlawful. In some states such ‘ag-gag’ laws literally prohibit taking pictures or video of where the meat we feed ourselves and our children comes from. Laws in Kansas (on the books since 1990) and Montana (since 1991) make it illegal to enter any farm facility to take pictures.1 In March 2015 Wyoming governor Matt Mead signed into law legislation making it illegal to gather any information on private property without permission.2 Missouri exempts activists from prosecution . . . but only if they turn over any evidence they collect within twenty-four hours, thereby making it impossible to build a solid case of systematic abuse without alerting abusers to the investigation.3 A bill passed last June in North Carolina—over the governor’s veto, no less—doesn’t make it illegal for employees to take photos or video, but they can be held liable for damages to the business that any whistleblowing incurs, including punitive damages of up to $5,000 for each day information was collected.4
Thanks to the work of some exceptionally brave campaigners, who pose undercover, sneak around at night, and risk harsh penalties, we know the abuse that goes on. Do not be in any doubt: the meat we eat relies on systematic cruelty that is documented, widespread, and beyond the most sadistic thoughts you can imagine. It’s not a question of whether animals are being tortured for our food; it’s a question of whether we care enough to stop it.
FOR ME, THIS is very personal. I love food. I love cooking. When we moved to California, Rachel and I decided to raise chickens with our sons, Ben and Sonny. It is one of the most pleasing things you can imagine—seeing your children run outside in the morning to let the chickens out of their coop, fascinated as the birds peck around, excited to collect the eggs. Of course, I see that this is the stuff of parody, that the first thing defenders of our inhuman, industrial food system will say is that objecting to it is all very well, but all very elitist. Big Food is cheap food, and most normal people can’t keep chickens, can’t afford your free-range, hand-reared, artisanal, grass-fed whatnots. Big Food and its lobbyists claim that intensive, ‘efficient’ production of food is the only way to feed the world’s growing population affordably. This is false, as we shall see, but those who want to see food produced through more human, less barbaric means are often dismissed as being out of touch. You know: ‘Let them eat seasonal, organic, locally sourced, fair-trade cake.’
This caricature of ‘bad but cheap’ versus ‘good but expensive’ misses the fundamental point: Why do you think factory food is cheap? It’s not because it’s inherently cheaper or more ‘efficient’ to farm animals and process them in a highly mechanized way. We’ve chosen to make it cheaper as a deliberate act of policy, through direct and indirect corporate subsidies, regulations, and laws designed to protect Big Food and crush any challenge to it from those who want to do things differently. “Most people have little idea just how much they are paying for food in hidden ways,” says Patrick Holden, founding director of the UK-based Sustainable Food Trust and one of the world’s most thoughtful food activists. “The failure to introduce true cost accounting into food and agricultural policy is the biggest single impediment to the wider uptake of more sustainable farming.”5 Humane food appears to be more expensive because all its costs are included in the price. With factory food, we pay its costs in other ways.
THERE IS A growing cost to our health. Our ability to treat infection is slowly coming under attack as a result of the excessive antibiotic use on factory farms. Most antibiotics in the United States—up to 80 percent—are used on farm animals, not people.6 This is considered necessary not only to keep animals from dying—because their quarters are so squalid, overcrowded, and diseased—but also to promote quick growth. Thanks to a combination of aggressive breeding and antibiotics, chickens that would otherwise take fourteen weeks to mature require only six in a factory (according to poultry scientists in a 2013 article, if “humans grew at a similar rate, a 6.6 lb newborn baby would weigh 660 lbs after two months”7). In the last five years doctors have observed an alarming rise in urinary tract infections as well as sepsis, particularly from antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli. This is part of a larger trend: already at least 2 million people annually in the United States acquire serious infections from bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics designed to treat them; twenty-three thousand people die.8
Factory farming isn’t responsible for all resistance to antibiotics; we use them on ourselves and even our pets at levels far higher than we should. But the genes in an increasing number of resistant cases have been found to match bacteria found on ‘conventionally’—that is, industrially—raised meat, specifically those given antibiotics.9 Antibiotics used to promote quick growth in livestock are now doing the same thing to people. According to studies by public-health researchers, ‘chronic mass exposure’ to antibiotic ‘residue’ is now believed to contribute directly to our growth, increasing our propensity to gain weight above and beyond food’s ‘nutrition facts.’10 The World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have both sounded the alarm, yet the reaction from the factory food industry as well as most agricultural regulators has been slow to nonexistent.11
Although antibiotic resistance threatens everyone, including vegetarians and free-range enthusiasts, those of us who eat factory meat—and even crops from nearby fields—are much likelier to get ill directly from it.12 Just as urban slums do among humans, the high density of animal confinement increases the chance of disease. These breeding grounds give us contaminated food: in the United States 69 percent of store-bought pork and beef and 92 percent of poultry are contaminated with E. coli bacteria, more than 85 percent of which is already resistant to antibiotics.13 A salmonella outbreak at Foster Farms that ended in July 2014 spanned seventeen months, twenty-nine states, and 634 illnesses, including over 240 hospitalizations. That one came on the heels of a ‘smaller’ outbreak for which Foster Farms was responsible from 2012 to 2013 that sickened over a hundred people.14 It’s not just Foster Farms: Barber Foods recalled over 1.7 million pounds of chicken, fearing it could be contaminated with salmonella in July 2015.15 Indeed, the FDA reports that salmonella contaminates one-fifth of all retail chicken.16
Factory farms operate out of proportion to nature. Consequently the only thing to do with the excess animal wastewater, feces, feathers, guts, blood, and other detritus is to dump it. According to the US Department of Agriculture, confined animals produce over 330 million tons of waste per year—forty times what’s produced by humans.17 Unlike cities, which have complex systems for the collection and treatment of human waste, animal waste is just dumped into “massive open-air cesspits” that, according to public health expert Dr. Michael Greger, “can leak and contaminate water used to irrigate our crops. That’s how a deadly fecal pathogen like E. coli O157:H7 can end up contaminating our spinach.”18
It’s not just about animal confinement. The problem with our factory system is that food—all of it, not just meat—is combined, mixed, and redistributed so widely that a single sick cow or contaminated batch of vegetables can infect the food supply across the country almost overnight. Consider that tainted beef from just one producer in California, Rancho Feeding Corp., spread to over thirty-five states and one US territory, leading to a 2014 recall of nearly 9 million pounds of meat across thousands of retailers.19 Almost as if to ensure cross-contamination, poultry producers insist on chilling their birds not by air in large refrigerators but by water, which Tom Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project, says “has been aptly named ‘fecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around.”20 Why would producers do this? “Air chilling,” according to Jonathan Safran, “reduces the weight of a bird’s carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as ‘fecal soup’).” In other words, the industry converts wastewater into millions of dollars’ worth of excess poundage—up to an allowable 12 percent to be precise.21
This industrialization of food might look ‘efficient,’ but it creates massive risks that make the whole system inherently vulnerable to devastating and costly outbreaks. This isn’t to say that small-scale farmers aren’t susceptible to animal infections, but at least in those cases meat can be more easily isolated and contained. With a national—international—system of collecting, mixing, and spreading food, one ‘rotten apple’ can cause problems on a vast scale.
“THIS FOOD IS KILLING US”
Factory food goes way beyond meat. Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist at the New York Times, spent over four years researching and reporting on the science behind processed food, talking to hundreds of people in or formerly employed by the food industry as well as combing through thousands of internal documents. In his revealing book, Salt Sugar Fat, he explains how factory food is engineered to be addictive.
Moss tells the story of Howard Moskowitz, one of the food industry’s go-to consultants for fine-tuning its products. A mathematician with a PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard, he got his start in the unlikeliest of places: the US Army, which had called on him to help solve the problem of getting soldiers on the battlefield to eat the food rationed to them. (After a while, soldiers would find their ready-to-eat meals boring and not finish them, creating waste and possible energy deficits.) What would soldiers eat ad infinitum? White bread. Though it would never get them excited, Moskowitz explains, “They could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”22
This is called ‘sensory-specific satiety.’ According to Moss, “It is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more.” Eating bland food (like white bread) might fill you up, but you don’t feel like stopping. This insight would launch Moskowitz’s long career helping food companies make their products more addictive. For over three decades he’s been a paid ‘optimization’ consultant for Big Food companies like General Foods, Campbell Soup, Kraft, and PepsiCo. “I’ve optimized soups,” he says. “I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings and pickles.”
To achieve this, consumers are paid to sit for hours in focus groups, giving their input on every sensory detail you can imagine—taste, touch, the rather creepy-sounding ‘mouth feel,’ packaging, smell, and so forth. The data is then processed using a complex statistical method called conjoint analysis. Moss explains, “It’s not simply a matter of comparing Color 23 with Color 24. In the most complicated projects, Color 23 must be combined with Syrup 11 and Packing 6, and on and on, in seemingly infinite combinations.” The goal: to find consumers’ ‘bliss point.’
How do you attain bliss? In case the title of Moss’s book wasn’t too much of a giveaway, it’s with salt, sugar, and fat. Not necessarily more of all of them—there’s a ‘Goldilocks’ point for each—but certainly nowhere close to moderation. The simple truth is that salt is addictive. Sugar is addictive. Fat is addictive. Who cares if eating too much of them makes people unhealthy? Certainly not Big Food. If you’re running a factory-food company, the whole point is to get people to eat more and more of your product.
Let’s look at sugar in particular. It’s everywhere, and in excess. A typical Yoplait yogurt has more sugar (18 grams) per single-serving container than a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.23 A twelve-ounce can of Coca-Cola contains 39 grams of sugar—that’s nearly ten teaspoons.24 Meanwhile a grande Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino has 64 grams of sugar—sixteen teaspoons. Yes, sixteen teaspoons.25 Disgusting if you actually imagine scooping each one in, but we don’t because they’re easily dissolved (i.e., camouflaged) directly into the food or drink.26 You’ll also find added sugar in your deli meats, bread—even the whole grain ones—frozen dinners, soups, chips . . . the list goes on. Subway’s Meatball Marinara six-inch sub has 12 grams of sugar (three teaspoons).27 Sugar is hidden in just about every processed food, mainly because it is addictive. Even one tablespoon of Heinz ketchup is 1 teaspoon of sugar (leaving just enough room for the actual tomatoes, of course).28
Making consumers physically addicted to their products is a carefully calibrated science into which the Big Food companies put huge effort. According to Moss, five hundred chemists, psychologists, and technicians were put to work at the Frito-Lay (maker of Lay’s chips and other snack foods) research center in Dallas, measuring and optimizing every variable they could. My favorite tool described by him is the company’s $40,000 chewing simulator. They used it to answer questions like how brittle the perfect chip ought to be: “People like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.” Consider Cheetos. With annual worldwide sales of over $4 billion, it’s a big business.29 Its most important feature, according to food scientist Steve Witherly, is “vanishing caloric density”—the cheese puffs’ ability to dissolve instantly on your tongue. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”30
As you might expect, this food is killing us. The rapid rise of heart disease and diabetes in Western society is directly linked to our diet. Obesity and overweight—these conditions’ frequent precursor—account for 21 percent of American healthcare expenditures: $190 billion in 2005.31 That’s over $600 on average that each person pays per year in additional taxes and insurance premiums to subsidize the treatment of diet-related disease. By 2030 economists project these annual costs will have increased by between $48 and $66 billion.32 Meanwhile, according to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, workplace absenteeism from obesity-related diseases (diabetes, heart disease, among others) costs the American economy another $8.65 billion per year.33
The bottom line: factory food is toxic, and the only way to understand how it has become so pervasive is to understand the business of factory farming. Not just factory farms for animals but also the farms growing the crops on which this whole inhuman, industrialized monstrosity is built.
“NO FUTURE IN FARMING”
Matt Rothe always wanted to be a farmer. Raised on a large family farm in Colorado, perhaps the most exciting day in his childhood was the day his father showed him how to use the tractor . . . and let him drive it. “It’s corn as far as you can see in any direction,” Matt explains. “And despite the fact that you’re only going three miles per hour, you’re always making a little progress toward the end of the field, and there’s such a sense of satisfaction when you get to that final row, and you turn around, and the whole thing is done.” By his senior year in college in 1994 Rothe had been doing a lot of thinking about his future. In April he called his father and told him what he’d decided: he wanted to “come home and farm.” He thought his father would be thrilled; instead, his father told him no, there’s just no future in it. What he meant was, no future in farming the way they farmed. No future in a family farm. “It was hard for both of us,” Rothe says. “I can’t imagine being a father and listening to my son and telling him he couldn’t come back and run the business—the business that had been in the family for twelve generations.”
Rothe moved out to California and got a job running one of the best-known suppliers of humanely produced meat in the state.34 After that he went to business school. Just as he was finishing his degree, he found out his dad had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer—a year-long death sentence. Rothe started spending much more time at home, being with his father, helping him manage the farm’s affairs, and getting a glimpse into what the business was really like. “I started taking a look at all the spreadsheets,” he says, “all of the profit-and-loss statements, the balance sheet.” It turned out the farm was close to bankruptcy. After his father passed away, Rothe and his mother had no choice but to sell. “There was this feeling of helplessness, of seeing the farm disappear for good in our family. My dad was the twelfth documented generation of family farmers in our family. And there wasn’t going to be another one.”
Several months before his father died the two had been sitting at the kitchen table, and Rothe’s dad started to tell his son a story, the same story that, many years before, his own father had told him. It was the story of how the tractor ruined farming.
“It used to be that we had horses, and they did all of our work,” he began. “The cycle of the day was that you’d get up in the morning, feed the horses, feed yourself, go out in the barn, saddle all the horses, get them all connected, and you’d go out and work in the field until noon. Then you’d come back, get the horses some water, a little food. You would eat. And you’d take the horses back out in the afternoon to work either until they couldn’t work anymore or you couldn’t work anymore. And at the end of the day you’d put the horses back in the stable. Everyone would go to sleep, and you’d get up the next morning and do it again. Then one day they invented the tractor. And this tractor was going to be the savior for farming. This was going to make farming easier; it was going to make it more profitable. We were all going to get rich: ‘Go buy a tractor!’ Think about it . . . you went from a horse, which is one horsepower, to a tractor, which is scores of horsepower. It was a giant leap forward in terms of technology on the farm.”
But tractors were expensive. Farmers didn’t have a lot of money, so they took out loans to buy them. That wasn’t really a problem—after all, the tractor was going to make them exponentially more productive—but then the tractors broke down a lot and needed lots of fuel, so they had to take out loans to run them, and then they realized that the tractor was so productive, they were no longer limited by hours in the day but by how many acres they had. Except that without enough acres, they couldn’t actually pay off the tractor. So they took out more loans, bought more land, and farmed it like never before.
“Everybody is getting a tractor,” his dad continued. “All the neighbors now have tractors. Everybody is more productive, everybody is buying more land, everybody is producing more food. And because there’s more of it in the market, the prices are declining. The reality is that we’re not really any better off financially because prices have come down as a result of our productivity. And we have all this debt that we have to service. At least with the horse we had the promise of only working a twelve-hour day because that’s all the horse could work. Now we’re working all day every day just to service this tractor.”
At that moment, sitting at the kitchen table, listening to his dad in his bathrobe talking about tractors, it all clicked for Rothe. “My grandfather’s story of the tractor is basically an allegory for every technology that’s been developed since. That includes artificial pesticides, fertilizers, genetically modified organisms. It includes the specialization of farming equipment and technology. It’s all the same story.”35 These technologies we’ve developed—which on the surface have led to highly ‘efficient’ farming of the same crop in huge fields (much easier for the tractor to plow through)—actually mask the decline of productive capacity in our soils. We produce more calories now than we ever have, but it’s an illusion. In reality the underlying asset, the soil, is declining—and not just its fertility: overworked farms leave soil overexposed to wind and water erosion. As Rothe explains, there’s no question that this is a far ‘cheaper’ way to produce food. But that’s only because its costs are borne by future generations of consumers and farmers for whom one day this system of monocultures, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, and soil depletion will collapse.
Consider: as soil health declines, farmers must compensate with more and more nitrogen fertilizer. But not all of it gets taken up by crops; rather, it ends up in the air (fueling climate change as nitrous oxide), in our rivers and oceans (killing off entire marine ecosystems), and in our drinking water. And soil is relatively finite, taking five hundred years to produce just two centimeters.36 There are also the pesticides we have to filter from our water, the flooding precipitated by eroded fields, the loss of habitats for critical species, let alone the species themselves . . . the list goes on. A 2004 Cornell University study estimated the societal costs of pesticides alone to be over $8 billion per year.37 A 2015 study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculates the nitrogen damage to the environment inflicted annually by agriculture to be in excess of $157 billion.38
FARMING NEVER USED to be a depletive act. It was the ultimate symbiotic relationship between man and nature. Though each crop would take something from the soil—how else would it grow?—it would give something back too. Legumes, like clover, would be planted during off-cycles to fix nitrogen in the soil, nitrogen that other crops like vegetables, fruits, and grains need to grow well. This is why for generations farmers would rotate the crops they grew within their fields each season. Meanwhile grazing livestock would create fertilizer—for free—greatly reducing if not eliminating the need to buy artificial inputs as well as making waste management a far easier task. Nitrogen fixation, a natural process, converts nitrogen in the air into ammonium in the soil, which can then be picked up by all other plant types and converted to plant protein. Simplistically: no nitrogen, no crops, no food.
The availability of food is obviously a basic requirement for humans, and until the mid-nineteenth century, population growth in Europe was largely constrained by the amount of reactive nitrogen in the food supply. To keep up with demand, reactive nitrogen was mined directly from coal, saltpeter, and guano. But then, at the start of the twentieth century, Fritz Haber, a German chemist, worked out how to convert natural gas into nitrogen fertilizer. It was considered nothing short of alchemy. Managing multiple crops on a farm, rotating them so that soil nutrients can be properly restored, isn’t conducive to industrial techniques. But the availability of industrial fertilizer made possible the introduction of vast, tractor-able expanses of single crops like corn, wheat, soy, and sugar that can be farmed in massive volumes. Now these are the basic ingredients of the factory food—junk food—that has come to dominate our diet.
As technology like fertilizers, engineered seeds, and machinery made industrial farming possible, traditional family farms have been swallowed up into the giant factory farming corporations that dominate our food supply today. Industrialized feed production led to industrialized animal production, and the factory farm was born. As big companies tend to do, these giant agri-businesses—companies like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Monsanto, Tyson, and Smithfield—have turned their market power into political power, successfully lobbying for the things that would make their life easier and the life of the ever-shrinking number of family farms harder.
NOWHERE IS THIS more egregious than in chicken farming, an industry that, for all intents and purposes, is nothing short of modern-day indentured servitude. Tyson, the nation’s largest chicken producer, doesn’t “produce” many chickens itself; rather, it uses its market power to insist farmers raise its chickens according to strict “take it or leave it” contracts.
Under such arrangements Tyson hatches chickens, which are then sent to contract farmers to raise. While there, they are fed with Tyson feed and monitored by Tyson technicians before being collected, six weeks later, by Tyson trucks. Farmers are then paid according to how well the chickens have grown—not according to a fair and competitive market but as compared to other farmers in the area, in a so-called tournament system. This means that no matter how well the group does, half the farmers by definition fall below average and are accordingly paid a lower price per bird (not that all the chickens won’t be sold at high profit anyway).39 Meanwhile, if the Tyson hatcher provides a bad batch of chickens or poorer quality feed, it’s the farmer’s loss. Tyson controls the whole process except the risky part, which it outsources to its farmers, many of whom are already impoverished.
Tyson has responded to criticism of its business model: “We want and need each of [our contract farmers] to succeed. We depend on them to supply livestock and raise our chickens. . . . [T]here are contract farmers who have successfully raised chickens for us for decades.”40 But according to journalist Christopher Leonard, who painstakingly investigated the meat industry in his book The Meat Racket, those farmers who fall behind in the tournament might find their contracts terminated. Tyson might offer them another chance if they take on loans to upgrade their facilities. Many farmers do. But as other farmers with newer and more modern facilities enter the system, the cycle inevitably starts again. Once more the choice is clear: take on more debt to keep up or declare bankruptcy. Many choose the former.41
You might ask: Why sign the contract in the first place? With no other buyers to turn to, there really is no choice. Aided and abetted by subsidies, legal loopholes, and a lack of proper antitrust enforcement (for more on this, see Chapter 6), Tyson and its peers use their oligopoly power to make the entire market extraordinarily uncompetitive. Their use of contracts has all but destroyed the open market.
The same practices have spread to the beef and pork industries. Until the 1990s all were traded on the market as commodities, with prices rising and falling as demand and supply fluctuated. It was far from a perfect system, but it was fair, and farmers could maintain their independence. But as mergers and consolidation proliferated, large meatpackers eventually gained enough market power to create whatever market worked best for them, regardless of the harm it did to others. Consider beef: “In the face of increasingly volatile prices and depressed profits, most cattle producers have opted to abandon the free market altogether,” Leonard explains. Instead, like so many chicken farmers, they sell under exclusive contract to one producer, locking in a low but guaranteed price. “The remaining minority of cattle producers who sell their animals on the open market find that they must often take the price that is dictated to them by Tyson, Cargill, or JBS,” who, along with National Beef, control 76 percent of beef in the United States.42 After all, Leonard says, “It’s hard to get a better price when the buyers refuse to bid against one another.”43
WHEN PEOPLE SAY it’s elitist to want a more human food system because factory food at least delivers cheap food for hard-pressed families, tell them about the subsidies. Factory food is ‘cheap’ because it’s subsidized in multiple ways. Through a variety of programs, American growers of commodities crops—namely corn and soy, which are the primary ingredients for both factory livestock feed as well as processed junk foods—will receive $134.3 billion of federal government support from 2014 to 2023.44 Meanwhile on specialty crops—like vegetables, fruits, and nuts—through a variety of small programs, research grants, export enhancements, and other provisions, the government will spend just $4 billion.45
As eye-watering as those figures are, it’s not simply a question of money. Tamar Haspel, a farmer and Washington Post journalist explains,
What’s important about how we subsidize farms isn’t necessarily the overall dollar amount—it comes to 5 percent to 10 percent of the market price of most of the subsidized crops—it’s that it takes some of the risk out of farming grains and oil seeds, but not fruits and vegetables. . . . For farmers, crops that are given guaranteed protection from both losses and price drops are lower-risk propositions. . . . That’s one of the reasons that, of the 300-million-plus acres planted with food (other than grass, hay and forage for animals) in this country, half are corn and soy. Another 50 million are wheat. Only 14 million are devoted to fruits and vegetables, from peas (1.2 million acres) to mangosteens (1 acre, which I’d dearly love to visit).46
In many ways the subsidies that really matter are implicit: the indirect subsidies that are multiple orders of magnitude bigger: we pay the financial costs of the health and environmental damage that the Big Food companies cause—costs that they avoid. This means we first pay for factory food when we buy it, then we pay taxes and higher insurance premiums to counter its negative impact on our health and environment, and then again we pay through our taxes that subsidize the Big Food companies. Taxes are supposed to pay for things that are good for society but wouldn’t happen otherwise. And yet here we are, subsidizing commercial activity that harms the public. It’s nuts.
We can change this. We can design a food system that’s better for our health, better for the environment, better for animals. We can design a food system that is more human.
THE NIMAN RANCH PORK COMPANY
When I worked in the British government we tried to reduce the harm done by Big Food through voluntary agreements—what we called “Responsibility Deals”—through which the companies would make their food less toxic. The idea was that this would actually be a quicker way to achieve concrete outcomes like reductions in salt, fat, and sugar than going through a process of regulation. These efforts were ultimately superficial because they didn’t address the deep structural forces at play. The key to making food more human on a mass scale lies in new business models that can produce better, healthier food systematically. In this respect entrepreneurs—big and small—are leading the way.
In 2015, Chipotle, the US-based seventeen-hundred-branch chain (with locations now in Europe and Canada) serving custom-built tacos and burritos made from freshly prepared, recognizable ingredients, was hit by a series of food-related sickness outbreaks that called into question the chain’s food safety practices, which are still under investigation at the time of this writing. Any flaws in Chipotle’s food safety standards, however, do not detract from its leadership on animal welfare, where it still ranks among the best in the industry. Case in point: when one supplier failed animal welfare inspections, Chipotle temporarily stopped serving pork at over a third of its restaurants rather than continue buying and selling the inhumanely raised meat.47 Chipotle’s commitment to food that’s produced in a more human way is a key part of its brand. They’re proving that fast food can be made at scale using humane, sustainable meat. What’s less well known is that much of Chipotle’s ability to buy humane pork at the scale it does rests on the ingenuity of one man determined to prove it is possible.
A little over a decade ago Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder, read an article called “The Lost Taste of Pork” in an obscure food magazine called the Art of Eating. In it writer Edward Behr describes the “best pork” he had ever eaten and details the old-fashioned practices of the farm it came from, run by a man named Paul Willis. After ordering some to try for himself, Ells was hooked. He was determined to make his burritos with meat from farms like Willis’s.48 But how could one small farm supply thousands of restaurants around the world?
A down-to-earth, fourth-generation farmer from Iowa, Willis has been raising pigs—all free-range—since the mid-1970s. “I learned to do this when I grew up, and it was common,” he explains. “I liked the idea of the animals being out on the pasture. Pigs were part of your crop rotation—we were growing corn, soybeans, oats, and hay—and one of the things you had were pigs.” Over time Willis was able to grow the farm to over a thousand pigs. Like many other pig farmers around the country, he had built a sustainable, profitable livelihood for himself, one that respected the land, the animals, and the community.
Then at some point in the 1980s Willis started to notice confinement buildings popping up, buildings designed to house tens of thousands of livestock packed together as closely as possible. They started out small—individual buildings on farmers’ land—but by the 1990s, when factory farms had infiltrated the pig industry, buyers no longer wanted to deal with small farms like his. “They started to squeeze us out of the marketplace. They would bid us a lesser price or rate our meat poorer quality, since it yielded less.” (Pigs raised outdoors have bigger lungs and hearts because they use them running around and doing what pigs naturally do.) But Willis refused to change. “Going in one of those buildings convinced me that I just never wanted to raise animals like that.” The sound, the crowded conditions, the concrete, the palpable misery—all have an overwhelming effect on anyone who sets foot in a modern factory farm. “I think the thing that really knocks me over is the odor—the hydrogen sulfide and ammonia. You can’t take enough showers to get rid of it, even if you’re in there only a minute. I lived on a farm, grew up with farms—my grandparents, my parents and so forth. And this was a brand-new smell, something we had never experienced before.”
Willis makes sure his “pigs can be pigs.” Recognizing that they, like humans, require companionship, he never introduces one animal into a social group that’s already established. He’ll also make “retreat areas” with straw bales to give timid animals a place to get away from their aggressive peers. (Contrast this with the 80 percent of pregnant sows in factory farms, churning out piglets with little respite their entire lives, raised in steel-and-concrete pens that prohibit them from turning around, a practice defended on the grounds that it prevents the cruelly stressed pigs from injuring each other.49)
As farms consolidated around him, Willis looked for a way to keep farming the way he knew was right. His answer was also consolidation—but on farmers’ terms, not industry’s. He started reaching out to other local-farmer networks, finding people who raised pigs in a similar way and paying them a premium price. Little by little, welfare standards were established, and with fellow humane livestock pioneer Bill Niman as a partner, the Niman Ranch Pork Company was established. Today it comprises five hundred farmers and can’t increase supply fast enough.50
In addition to a price premium, the pork company members receive a guaranteed price floor, to protect against unexpected drops in the market, and are able to use their scale to economize on processing, distribution, and marketing. Willis and Niman created a business model that would allow farmers to confidently stick to a more human approach even in the face of their industrialized, mechanized competitors. Now, thanks to Paul Willis, you can buy humane pork not just at high-end restaurants and grocery stores but also in the mass marketplace.
A different but equally promising challenge to the industrialized food system is being pioneered by Belcampo Meat Company, based in Oakland. Its business model focuses on just one ranch, owning some twenty thousand acres in northern California as well as the entire supply chain needed to support it. For its two thousand cattle and thirteen thousand other animals such as quail, sheep, goats, rabbits, and chickens, that means one slaughterhouse and a handful of retail butcher shops (there are seven already in California). The farm, the processing, the retail—all in one business. According to founder Anya Fernald, bringing it all together isn’t only more profitable; it also assures that standards are upheld. Raising the animals is really only half the battle, after all. You could be the most caring, humane rancher in the world but still have to use a third-party slaughterhouse who doesn’t share your values. This leaves far too many questions unanswered. Fernald wants to know: “How was it actually killed? How was the handling leading up to the kill? How long was it sitting on the truck?51 She designed Belcampo to make sure there were no missing links in the supply chain.
The key for Belcampo is bringing everyone together, from the rancher and slaughterhouse cutter to the butcher and customer, such that where your food comes from is no longer some black box—in fact, every single piece of meat is completely traceable, as the system is so straightforward and transparent. It’s human scaled. Fernald acknowledges that Belcampo can’t sustainably grow beyond eight or nine stores, but this doesn’t mean the model can’t. She envisages a multiplicity of Belcampos, each with its own management team, butcher shops, slaughterhouse, and ranch. “When businesses that are producing food get to a large scale, quality takes a nosedive and communication breaks down.” For a meat model that’s focused on health and husbandry to work profitably, she insists, the supporting business structure must be large enough to turn a profit but not so large that it becomes out of touch.
JAMIE AND THE FOOD REVOLUTION
So yes, a more human approach to food is emerging. How can we encourage it? Some have argued that consumer information and education—changing our food culture—holds the key. Ending bad food starts with an appreciation of good food—not just how to eat it but knowing where it comes from and how to cook it. A good place to start? Our children. If you think food marketing to adults is deceptive, what the food industry does to children is far worse, with a combination of cartoon characters, prizes, online games, and social pressure used to full effect (more on this in Chapter 7). But even if parents guard against the insidious influence of food media, schools can often let them down.
No one has done more to shine a spotlight on this over the years than the heroic Jamie Oliver. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, a TV show he produced with Ryan Seacrest in 2010 and 2011 revealed not only the lack of food education for children in some of America’s most overweight communities (a group of whom had trouble identifying fruits and vegetables in one now-famous clip) but also on school board officials’ attempts in places like Los Angeles to obscure the heavily processed junk food they serve their students several times each day. Most notably, his efforts to show how ‘pink slime,’ a beef byproduct made by combining inedible parts of the cow carcass with ammonium hydroxide or citric acid and often found in school and fast-food burgers, prompted a national consumer revolt. His success was bittersweet though: pink slime is still served up across the country—including in schools—and as drought drives beef prices up, producers are turning back to pink slime to keep prices down. But without any mandatory labeling (pink slime can legally make up 15 percent of a burger’s content while still being called 100 percent ‘ground beef’), how can parents—or anyone—know?52
A wonderful counterpoint to the world of pink slime is provided by Alice Waters, the visionary pioneer from Berkeley, California, whose Chez Panisse restaurant helped bring healthy, sustainable food to the height of global popularity (at least among elites and hipsters) that it now enjoys. Waters’s mission is to take her food revolution mainstream. After she started a garden and teaching kitchen at a nearby middle school some twenty years ago, her Edible Schoolyard project has grown into a fully fledged educational resource center. Its in-person seminars and online network provide curricula and practical resources for educators who not only see the vital connection between well-nourished children and their educational outcomes but also understand the need to teach students about the food they eat and where it comes from.
But as Jamie Oliver and others have found, the culinary-industrial complex doesn’t want you to know about the food you eat and where it comes from.
Upset by a planned McDonald’s restaurant near the Spanish Steps in Rome, Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist from Piedmont, founded an organization called Slow Food. Since its founding in 1986, Slow Food has become a global movement, coming to represent much more than an opposition to fast food. Its motto, “Good, clean and fair,” captures precisely the opposite of what our food system has become. Its conference in Turin every two years brings together thousands of farmers, fishers, ranchers, food artisans—and, of course, eaters—from every corner of the earth to share each other’s cultures and, most importantly, put a face—a story—behind what’s being enjoyed. One of Slow Food’s most compelling proposals is a “narrative label” for foods, with details like animal breeds, types of feed, pasture type and location, and animal welfare all clearly spelled out.
Why focus on the narrative? What about all those certification schemes you see everywhere? Standards, labels, different terms approved by governments and regulators—isn’t that the way to inform consumers and thereby change behavior? The problem is, these bureaucratic schemes are just another black box that consumers don’t really understand and can’t see into; they’re not human, just like PISA scores in education. With a few exceptions, they can be easily gamed, obscuring the truth so that a carefully crafted facade can be more easily believed.
THERE’S A TV AD (for Geico insurance, as it happens) about a chicken traveling across the country. Wherever it goes—along train tracks, into a diner—it sends selfies back to the farmers who raised it. As the camera pans out from the farmers sitting on their veranda, we see hundreds of chickens roaming freely across the countryside to the narrator’s message: “If you’re a free-range chicken, you roam free. It’s what you do.”53 This is what you might imagine when you see ‘free range’ on meat you buy in the supermarket. It’s what you’re supposed to imagine. It’s what the words ‘free range’ literally mean: freedom. Rolling outdoor pastures, animals able to behave naturally, roaming about, eating grass, little bugs, whatever they want.
Well, roaming free may be what you do if you’re a chicken in an insurance ad, but it’s highly unlikely to be what you do if you’re an actual free-range chicken in the real world. It is perfectly permissible, within the relevant USDA labeling rules, for “free-range” chickens to spend most of their lives cramped inside huge indoor barns. What about “cage free”? Sounds good, no? Although cage-free chickens are literally not housed in cages, farmers can get away with providing them as little space as they want (the industry “cage-free” average is about one square foot per bird, with no outdoor access).54 And within both free-range and cage-free labeling schemes, it is perfectly acceptable to treat animals with antibiotics and to carry out cruel and disgusting practices like throwing live chicks into mincing machines.
The truly depressing fact is that this is what passes for good in our current system. Most of these ‘humane’ free-range and cage-free producers are slightly better than the vast majority of meat and dairy products with no animal welfare claims at all. (Caged hens, which lay more than 95 percent of eggs sold in the United States, are typically confined to less space than a sheet of letter-sized paper.55) But nothing is worse than the use of humane-sounding terms that have no specific standards associated with them at all, terms like ‘100% natural,’ ‘farm fresh,’ ‘high animal welfare,’ ‘corn fed,’ or ‘no added hormones.’ (These last two are particularly egregious, as you will often see them on the menus of smart restaurants trying to give themselves an aura of quality. All chickens are ‘corn fed,’ and it is illegal to inject any poultry with hormones; saying so doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not they were raised in horrific conditions.) The use of these terms amounts to deliberate lying by the culinary-industrial complex to cover up factory farming’s grotesque cruelty to animals. It is a scandal.
This kind of jaw-dropping hypocrisy is everywhere in the food industry. Here’s Jim Perdue, chairman of Perdue Chicken, one of the world’s largest producers, in a 2011 promotional video: “Doing the right thing is things like treating your chickens humanely.”56 To prove it, the company prints “raised cage free” on its packages. Until late 2014 it even claimed its chickens were “humanely raised.” Craig Watts, a Perdue producer, disagrees. He has produced 720,000 birds per year for the company since 1992. “It couldn’t get any further from the truth,” he says. Watts, whose family has owned their farm since the 1700s, has followed Perdue’s guidelines to the letter. His chickens are anything but humanely raised. When he invited Compassion in World Farming to look at his four barns, they videoed oversized chickens scraping by, with bellies rubbed free of feathers—red and raw. Cage free? Certainly, though this is totally misleading, as chickens grown for meat have never been raised in cages. “Humanely raised”? Absolutely not.57 And although they admitted no wrongdoing, Perdue settled in 2014 with the Humane Society of the United States, who sued for its use of the phrase. The company has now agreed to remove it from some of its packaging.58
Information is a vital part of making markets work properly, but in the food market today the information that’s supposed to efficiently connect buyers and sellers is not information at all. Despite all the controls and specifications that govern food labeling and advertising, consumers are misled and lied to on a daily basis. Why is it acceptable for my milk carton to feature images of cows strolling around on grassy hills when they’re actually confined inside and fed unhealthy diets of corn and soy, not the grass their digestive systems were designed to eat? Why is it acceptable for chickens to be called “free range” when they’re captive indoors for half their lives? Why don’t I have a right to know what kinds of antibiotics were pumped into the bacon I’m about to serve my family at breakfast? What about the TV ad for pasta sauce that suggests it was cooked in some home-style kitchen? How can the Big Food company responsible give that impression when it was actually made in some giant gray industrial vat with a whole slew of chemicals that wouldn’t be out of place in a science lab?
As we are misled on animal welfare, so too are we misled about our food’s nutritional value. The latest marketing gimmick from Big Food is to trumpet the vitamins their food contains. But this is a con. In order to cut costs and increase shelf life, natural nutrients are removed during processing. Then, to be able to tout their products’ nutritional benefits, factory food companies add artificial nutrients back to replace what their own machines have stripped bare. The result is a total deception; food brands advertise the vitamins they’ve added, signaling to the consumer that no matter how much salt, fat, or sugar is present, it has nutritional value and is ‘healthy.’ Even commercial “whole wheat” is often just white flour to which bran and germ are added back in.59 Meanwhile we lose the benefits of nutrients that work better in their natural forms. In addition, although the advertised vitamins and nutrients might be good for us, they don’t help with diet-related diseases like heart disease and obesity. Processed ‘health’ food is healthy in all the wrong ways. Westerners are really not at risk from vitamin deficiency (compared to the 2 billion in poor countries who are), and yet we eat this ‘healthy’ processed food that actually makes us obese and diabetic.60
It’s not just that loosely regulated claims, certification schemes, packaging, and advertising misrepresent what’s gone into the food we buy. In many cases it really is outright lying. One study in Leicester, England, found that over 40 percent of meat products collected from butchers, retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, fast-food outlets, and caterers contained other species of meat than those that appeared on the labels. In 17 percent of samples meat of the undeclared species was the primary ingredient.61 Fish in the United States are so regularly mislabeled that the government actually has a task force devoted to fighting “seafood fraud.”62 Whereas 74 percent of sushi bars were found to mislabel their seafood, 94 percent of random samples of red snapper taken from retailers across the United States were found to not actually be red snapper.63
Carlo Petrini’s idea of narrative labeling takes us toward a more human—and more effective—answer: just let people see what’s going on. In 1906 journalist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, which exposed the dreadful conditions in the American meatpacking industry. The public uproar that ensued led to one of the most significant consumer protection laws ever passed: the Pure Food and Drug Act. I think it’s time for another uproar.
There’s a simple rule we should introduce that would start to address Big Food’s lying and misrepresentation. Any food product must have a reasonable proportion of its packaging and any promotional materials, such as TV ads, devoted to showing the precise conditions it was made in. A pack of frozen chicken nuggets would have a photo of the actual farm the chicken came from. A TV ad for hot dogs . . . a video of the pig pen. That ‘homemade’ pasta sauce? Let’s see a picture of the factory, steel vats and all, not some fake pastiche Italian country kitchen constructed in a studio. Look, I’m not saying all of the packaging and promotion of food products should be truthful, just a reasonable amount—say, 20 percent. That still leaves 80 percent for lies and deception. To make sure it’s all real and above board, there should be a requirement that every part of every facility of every factory farm and every food factory be live-streamed on the Internet so people can see exactly what’s going on and track their food if they want to. In a world of cameras in every smartphone, the cost for producers would be negligible—and radical transparency of this kind would be more effective than any number of regulations and certifications. Who could object to it?
Well, people who get cross about ‘the nanny state,’ I guess. Hmm. “It’s curious that we’re open to social engineering when it’s being done by corporations,” says the food writer and activist Michael Pollan. “You’re socially engineered every time you walk through the cereal aisle in the supermarket. The healthy stuff is down at your feet and the stuff with the most sugar and chocolate is at your eye level—or your child’s eye level. That doesn’t seem to bother us. But as soon as it’s done by elected officials on our behalf, it’s anathema.”64 Kelly Brownell, a professor of psychology and public health at Yale University, argues, “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.”65 Perhaps the best advice is in fact Michael Pollan’s: never eat food that has been advertised.
BEATING BIG FOOD
But in the end, changing our food culture, consumer pressure, more transparency . . . it’s not enough. Despite all the campaigns and heightened awareness, the problem is getting worse, not better. As chef and author Dan Barber wrote in 2014:
Big Food is getting bigger, not smaller. In the last five years, we’ve lost nearly 100,000 farms (mostly midsize ones). Today, 1.1 percent of farms in the United States account for nearly 45 percent of farm revenues. Despite being farm-to-table’s favorite targets, corn and soy account for more than 50 percent of our harvested acres for the first time ever. Between 2006 and 2011, over a million acres of native prairie were plowed up in the so-called Western Corn Belt to make way for these two crops, the most rapid loss of grasslands since we started using tractors to bust sod on the Great Plains in the 1920s.66
In any case it’s not fair to put the burden for change on consumers when the Big Food producers have all their structural advantages: the subsidies, the lax regulation. To say that people should care more, that they really should shop differently, misses the point. They already care. But it’s such an effort to shop differently. Hardly anyone has the time or inclination to investigate their poultry producer or get up early on Sunday morning for the local farmers’ market. People are busy trying to earn a living, raise children, take care of their families. Food may be of great concern to some—as a hobby, as a way of life. But for those whose interests lie elsewhere, for whom grocery shopping happens online between paying the bills and replying to e-mails, for whom dinner is squeezed between two part-time shifts—why should good food be an out-of-reach privilege? How civilized can a society really call itself if humane, healthy, wholesome food is a luxury for those with the time and money to look for it? We need to make food that is produced in a more human way the norm. That will take much more aggressive action than fiddling around with labels or even TV ads, welcome as that would be.
STEP ONE: WE MUST account for the true cost of our factory food and adjust our tax, subsidy, and regulatory regimes accordingly. Just as we have applied the ‘polluter pays’ principle to companies that damage the environment, we should require food companies to pay for their negative impact on the environment and public health. We already do this for ships responsible for oil spills off the coast. Extending a similar ‘price correcting’ penalty mechanism to food would finally set the true costs of factory food straight. These penalties would apply at several levels. For, say, livestock waste dumped from animal factories or soil erosion from vast, homogenous fields of corn, it would be applied to the whole operation or farm. But many of these penalties could be much more precise. For example, we should introduce a Nitrogen Tax to discourage the use of depletive artificial fertilizers and to encourage positive alternatives like crop rotation. This would make it feasible to introduce an outright ban on the most dangerous synthetic pesticides, since a more natural system of land husbandry would require less of their use. We also need to challenge the relentless march of genetic modification in our agriculture. This is not progress as some assert but a reckless interference with nature’s finely balanced ecosystems, and it’s time to call a halt.
True-cost accounting also means looking at harm that happens off the farm. For example, we know that added sugar in processed food creates extra health costs. Just as we apply taxes to cigarettes and alcohol, we could (and should) do the same to sugar. But a Sugar Tax should not just apply to sodas and artificially sweetened beverages alone (as advocated by Mike Bloomberg and Jamie Oliver); it should apply across the board, to sugary candies, cereals, and even that Subway Meatball Marinara sandwich. This was the recommendation the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee made to the USDA and Department of Health and Human Services last year.67 In such a system, industrial agriculture businesses would be free to exist, but they would have to pay for the costs of the harm they inflict. Any profits, then, would come from the real value they offer consumers and producers, not from the exploitation of animals, farmers, taxpayers, or the environment.
But a true-cost system can’t work if enforcement authorities like the USDA and EPA are incapable of supervising even existing laws and regulations. We’ve seen how hamstrung the USDA is in enforcing food safety (the USDA wasn’t just unable to legally force Foster Farms to recall its contaminated poultry; its methods of inspection were so inadequate that it wasn’t until people were getting sick that it acknowledged a salmonella outbreak had even occurred).68 We have to fix this—with better funding (paid for by Big Food itself), tighter supervision, and less of a revolving door with industry (for more on this, see Chapter 6).
WE CAN’T JUST focus on the bad, though. We have to support the good. So we should redirect taxpayer subsidies to farmers and producers who are doing the right thing. By ‘redirect,’ I mean, of course, taking them away from Big Food.
Now, if government tried to end the factory-food companies’ subsidies and make them pay the true costs of their operations, here’s what would happen. The bosses of the big food corporations would take to the airwaves and say the price of food would go up. Politicians, terrified of doing anything that raises “the cost of living,” would back off. But the “cost of living” as measured by food prices doesn’t include the cost of dying—the cost of us dying of heart disease and diabetes, of local habitats dying around us, of animals dying in disgusting circumstances that spread disease. None of that—nor other associated costs—is included in the price of factory food, in the cost-of-living figures. That’s why nothing gets done.
If we redirect the subsidies while holding Big Food corporations financially responsible for the pollution (of all kinds) they get away with, the price of bad food will go up, but the price of good food—more human food—will go down. If we stopped subsidizing industrial food—instead letting a fair, competitive, and properly priced and regulated market take its place—and chose to lower the costs of fresh fruits and vegetables and humanely raised meat, we would save money for the taxpayer and lead happier, healthier, longer lives. (By the way, there is no excuse for good food to be expensive: farms and retailers throw away 12 percent of fresh produce; overall, we discard 29 percent of food unnecessarily—worth well over $165 billion per year.69)
IT HAS TO be said, though, that there is little chance of seeing the kind of political leadership we need in order to impose these measures. So here’s option two: beat Big Food at its own game. There is an exciting approach being pioneered by the prominent London-based investor Jeremy Coller. He argues that factory farms pose an increasing threat to companies’—and their investors’—financial returns, that they create risks for the industry as a whole but that the markets ignore these risks.70 So Coller and his foundation argue that the directors of any company in the food industry should assess and report these risks so their share prices accurately reflect the financial implications of the factory model. This would have the indirect effect of incentivizing a more human, more sustainable model. But as an investor himself, Coller takes a more active stance and promotes the same to his peers. Coller Capital insists that all its own investments take animal welfare into account. This not only allows Coller to avoid companies that refuse to improve their abusive business model but also to argue directly for change in the practices of companies they’re already invested in.
A MORAL IMPERATIVE
I think we should go much further, though. I believe that animal cruelty is an absolute moral outrage: there really is no incremental improvement, no optimal compromise to be had. So I think it’s reasonable to take an absolutist policy position, as we do in defense of other moral principles. We don’t tolerate a moderate view on rape or torture, nor should we. Over time our progress as a civilized species has been defined by what is added to this list of ‘moral universalisms.’ One of the most profound was on the subject of slavery, which used to be ubiquitous. Now, of course, it is accepted that slavery is morally wrong. Our norms, along with our economy (as profoundly tied to slavery as it was), adjusted, and we adapted. I think it’s time we consider factory farms the same way.
In the introduction to this book I spoke of the empathy evolution: we have increasingly expanded our moral consciousness to include others less like us. Our ability to empathize is fundamental, its expression recognized in infants as young as one day old.71 Every time we extend empathy, society moves forward. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that if slavery is tyranny and people shouldn’t be treated differently by race, why should animals be mistreated simply because they have a different number of legs or the inability to converse? In his mind difference created a slippery slope that allowed the cruel and tyrannical domination of one group over another. Who—or what—made up that ‘other’ group was immaterial: “The question,” he wrote, “is not, Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”72
As proud as we are of our history, we also reflect with shame on atrocities committed by our great-grandfathers—and gratitude that we’ve come as far as we have in our moral evolution. When our great-grandchildren look back on today, they’ll shake their heads at our gross abuse of animals. So the right policy response to factory farms is clear. We shouldn’t just ‘not subsidize’ them. We shouldn’t just regulate them better or make them more transparent. We should ban them.
To decide how a ban would be applied, we should look to existing definitions, like the practices itemized in the Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare: close confinement, nontherapeutic use of antibiotics and other growth-promoting drugs, routine mutilation (like tail docking and breaking beaks), partially conscious slaughter, and long-distance transport.73 Compassion in World Farming argues that animals ought to be free from thirst and hunger, discomfort, pain and disease, fear and distress and should be able to behave in a natural way.74 Their goal is to eliminate factory farming by 2050.75 And, of course, in our open, interconnected global economy, it must happen around the world, not just in one country. But someone has to take the lead, just as Britain did in banning slavery.
When he saw the subtitle of this book (“Designing a World Where People Come First”), my then seven-year-old son Ben said, “for the next version, Dad, I think you should change it to make animals come first, and that’s fair to everyone because humans are animals too.” Banning factory farms won’t just be better for animals; it will make us better humans. In Eating Animals Jonathan Safran Foer notes, “Factory Farm—This is a term sure to fall out of use in the next generation or so, either because there will be no more factory farms, or because there will be no more family farms to compare them to.”76 It’s up to us.