ENTER THE CHICKENSHED
(WARNING: MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME READERS)
Enter a typical chicken shed and you will experience a burning feeling in your eyes and your lungs. That’s the ammonia—it comes from the birds’ droppings, which are simply allowed to pile up on the floor without being cleaned out, not merely during the growing period of each flock, but typically for an entire year, and sometimes for several years.15 High ammonia levels give the birds chronic respiratory disease, sores on their feet and hocks, and breast blisters. It makes their eyes water, and when it is really bad, many birds go blind.16 As the birds, bred for extremely rapid growth, get heavier, it hurts them to keep standing up, so they spend much of their time sitting on the excrement-filled litter—hence the breast blisters.
Chickens have been bred over many generations to produce the maximum amount of meat in the least amount of time. They now grow three times as fast as chickens raised in the 1950s while consuming one-third as much feed.17 But this relentless pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost: their bone growth is outpaced by the growth of their muscles and fat. One study found that 90 per cent of broilers had detectable leg problems, while 26 per cent suffered chronic pain as a result of bone disease.18 Professor John Webster of the University of Bristol’s School of Veterinary Science has said: ‘Broilers are the only livestock that are in chronic pain for the last 20 per cent of their lives. They don’t move around, not because they are overstocked, but because it hurts their joints so much.’19 Sometimes vertebrae snap, causing paralysis. Paralysed birds or birds whose legs have collapsed cannot get to food or water, and—because the growers don’t bother to, or don’t have time to, check on individual birds—die of thirst or starvation. Given these and other welfare problems and the vast number of animals involved—nearly 9 billion in the United States and more than 400 million in Australia—Webster regards industrial chicken production as, ‘in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal’.20
Criticise industrial farming, and industry spokespeople are sure to respond that it is in the interests of those who raise animals to keep them healthy and happy so that they will grow well. Commercial chicken-rearing conclusively refutes this claim. Birds who die prematurely may cost the grower money, but it is the total productivity of the shed that matters. G. Tom Tabler, who manages the Applied Broiler Research Unit at the University of Arkansas, and A. M. Mendenhall, of the Department of Poultry Science at the same university, have posed the question: ‘Is it more profitable to grow the biggest bird and have increased mortality due to heart attacks, ascites (another illness caused by fast growth) and leg problems, or should birds be grown slower so that birds are smaller, but have fewer heart, lung, and skeletal problems?’ Once such a question is asked, as the researchers themselves point out, it takes only ‘simple calculations’ to draw the conclusion that, depending on the various costs, often ‘it is better to get the weight and ignore the mortality’.21
Breeding chickens for rapid growth creates a different problem for the breeder birds, the parents of the chickens people eat. The parents have the same genetic characteristics as their offspring—including huge appetites. But the breeder birds must live to maturity and keep on breeding as long as possible. If they were given as much food as their appetites demand, they would grow grotesquely fat and might die before they became sexually mature. If they survived at all, they would be unable to breed. So breeder operators ration the breeder birds to 60 to 80 per cent less than their appetites would lead them to eat if they could.22 The National Chicken Council’s Animal Welfare Guidelines refer to ‘off-feed days’; that is, days on which the hungry birds get no food at all. This is liable to make them drink ‘excessive’ amounts of water, so the water, too, can be restricted on those days. They compulsively peck the ground, even when there is nothing there, either to relieve the stress, or in the vain hope of finding something to eat. As Mr Justice Bell, who examined this practice in the McLibel case, said: ‘My conclusion is that the practice of rearing breeders for appetite, that is to feel especially hungry, and then restricting their feed with the effect of keeping them hungry, is cruel. It is a well-planned device for profit at the expense of suffering of the birds.’
The fast-growing offspring of these breeding birds live for only six weeks. At that age they are caught, put into crates, and trucked to slaughter. A Washington Post journalist observed the catchers at work: ‘They grab birds by their legs, thrusting them like sacks of laundry into the cages, sometimes applying a shove.’ To do their job more quickly, the catchers pick up only one leg of each bird, so that they can hold four or five chickens in each hand. (The National Chicken Council’s Animal Welfare Guidelines, eager to avoid curtailing any practice that may be economically advantageous, states: ‘The maximum number of birds per hand is five.’) Dangling from one leg, the frightened birds flap and writhe and often suffer dislocated and broken hips, broken wings and internal bleeding.23
Crammed into cages, the birds then travel to the slaughterhouse, a journey that can take several hours. When their turn to be removed from the crates finally comes, their feet are snapped into metal shackles hanging from a conveyor belt that moves towards the killing room. Speed is the essence, because the slaughterhouse is paid by the number of pounds of chicken that comes out the end. Today a killing line typically moves at 90 birds a minute, and speeds can go as high as 120 birds a minute, or 7200 an hour. Even the lower rate is twice as fast as the lines moved twenty years ago. At such speeds, even if the handlers want to handle the birds gently and with care, they just can’t.
In the United States, in contrast to other developed nations, the law does not require that chickens (or ducks, or turkeys) be rendered unconscious before they are slaughtered. As the birds move down the killing line, still upside down, their heads are dipped into an electrified water bath, which in the industry is called ‘the stunner’. But this is a misnomer. Dr Mohan Raj, a researcher in the Department of Clinical Veterinary Science at the University of Bristol, in England, has recorded the brain activity of chickens after various forms of stunning and reported his results in such publications as World’s Poultry Science Journal. We asked him: ‘Can the American consumer be confident that broilers he or she buys in a supermarket have been properly stunned so that they are unconscious when they have their throats cut?’ His answer was clear: ‘No. The majority of broilers are likely to be conscious and suffer pain and distress at slaughter under the existing water bath electrical stunning systems.’ He went on to explain that the type of electrical current used in the stunning procedure was not adequate to make the birds immediately unconscious. Using a current that would produce immediate loss of consciousness, however, would risk damage to the quality of the meat. Since there is no legal requirement for stunning, the industry won’t take that risk. Instead, the inadequate current that is used evidently paralyses the birds without rendering them unconscious. From the point of view of the slaughterhouse operator, inducing paralysis is as good as inducing unconsciousness, for it stops the birds from thrashing about and makes it easier to cut their throats.
Because of the fast line speed, even the throat-cutting that follows the electrified water bath misses some birds, and they then go alive and conscious into the next stage of the process, a tank of scalding water. It is difficult to get figures on how many birds are, in effect, boiled alive, but documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act indicate that in the United States alone, it could be as many as three million a year.24 At that rate, 11 chickens would have been scalded to death in the time it takes you to read this page. But the real figure might be much higher. An undercover videotape made at a Tyson slaughterhouse at Heflin, Alabama, shows dozens of birds who have been mutilated by throat-cutting machines that were not working properly. Workers rip the heads off live chickens that have been missed by the cutting blade. Conscious birds go into the scalding tank. A plant worker is recorded as saying that it is acceptable for 40 birds per shift to be missed by the backup killer and scalded alive.25
If you found the last few paragraphs unpleasant reading, Virgil Butler, who spent years working for Tyson Foods in the killing room of a slaughterhouse in Grannis, Arkansas, killing 80,000 chickens a night, mostly for Kentucky Fried Chicken, says that what we have described ‘doesn’t even come close to the horrors I have seen’. On an average night, he says, about one in every three of the chickens was alive when it went into the scalding tank. The missed birds are, according to Butler, ‘scalded alive’. They ‘flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads.’ Often they come out ‘with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they’ve struggled so much in the tank’.26 When there were mechanical failures, the supervisor would refuse to stop the line, even though he knew that chickens were going into the scalding tank alive or were having their legs broken by malfunctioning equipment.
In January 2003, Butler made a public statement describing workers pulling chickens apart, stomping on them, beating them, running over them on purpose with a forklift, and even blowing them up with dry ice ‘bombs’. Tyson dismissed the statement as the ‘outrageous’ inventions of a disgruntled worker who had lost his job. It’s true that Butler has a conviction for burglary and has had other problems with the law. But eighteen months after Butler made these supposedly ‘outrageous’ claims, a videotape secretly filmed at another KFC-supplying slaughterhouse, in Moorefield, West Virginia, made his claims a lot more credible. The slaughterhouse, operated by Pilgrim’s Pride, the second largest chicken producer in the nation, had won KFC’s ‘Supplier of the Year’ Award. The tape, taken by an undercover investigator working for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, showed slaughterhouse workers behaving in ways quite similar to those described by Butler: slamming live chickens into walls, jumping up and down on them, and drop-kicking them as if they were footballs. The undercover investigator said that, beyond what he had been able to catch on camera, he had witnessed ‘hundreds’ of acts of cruelty. Workers had ripped off a bird’s head to write graffiti in blood, plucked feathers off live chickens to ‘make it snow’, suffocated a chicken by tying a latex glove over its head, and squeezed birds like water balloons to spray faeces over other birds. Evidently, their work had desensitised them to animal suffering.
The only significant difference between the behaviour of the workers at Moorefield and that described by Butler at Grannis was that the behaviour at Moorefield was caught on tape. Unable to dismiss the evidence of cruelty, Pilgrim’s Pride said that it was ‘appalled’.27 But neither Pilgrim’s Pride nor Tyson Foods, the two largest suppliers of chicken in America, have done anything to address the root cause of the problem: unskilled, low-paid workers doing dirty, bloody work, often in stifling heat, under constant pressure to keep the killing lines moving no matter what so that they can slaughter up to 90,000 animals every shift.
A Day in the Life of a Turkey Inseminator
The turkey meat in the sandwiches Jake buys at Arby’s would come from factory-farmed turkeys, reared in much the same way as chickens. The main difference is that because turkeys have been bred to have such an oversized breast, they cannot mate naturally. A few years ago we learned that the Butterball Turkey company, a division of the agribusiness giant ConAgra, needed workers for its artificial insemination crews in Carthage, Missouri. Our curiosity piqued, we decided to see for ourselves what this work really involved. The only qualification for the job seemed to be the ability to pass a drug test, so we were hired.
We spent some time on both sides of the job: collecting the semen and getting it into the hen. The semen comes from the ‘tom house’, where the males are housed. Our job was to catch a tom by the legs, hold him upside down, lift him by the legs and one wing, and set him up on the bench on his chest/neck, with the vent sticking up facing the worker who actually collected the semen. He squeezed the tom’s vent until it opened up and the white semen oozed forth. Using a vacuum pump, he sucked it into a syringe. It looked like half-and-half cream, white and thick. We did this over and over, bird by bird, until the syringe was filled to capacity with semen and a sterile extender. The full syringe was then taken over to the hen house.
In the hen house, our job was to ‘break’ the hens. You grab a hen by the legs, trying to cross both ‘ankles’ in order to hold her feet and legs with one hand. The hens weigh 20 to 30 pounds (9–14 kg) and are terrified, beating their wings and struggling in panic. They go through this every week for more than a year, and they don’t like it. Once you have grabbed her with one hand, you flop her down chest first on the edge of the pit with the tail end sticking up. You put your free hand over the vent and tail and pull the rump and tail feathers upward. At the same time, you pull the hand holding the feet downward, thus ‘breaking’ the hen so that her rear is straight up and her vent open. The inseminator sticks his thumb right under the vent and pushes, which opens it further until the end of the oviduct is exposed. Into this, he inserts a straw of semen connected to the end of a tube from an air compressor and pulls a trigger, releasing a shot of compressed air that blows the semen solution from the straw and into the hen’s oviduct. Then you let go of the hen and she flops away.
Routinely, methodically, the breakers and the inseminator did this over and over, bird by bird, 600 hens per hour, or ten a minute. Each breaker ‘breaks’ five hens a minute, or one hen every 12 seconds. At this speed, the handling of birds has to be fast and rough. It was the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work we have ever done. For ten hours we grabbed and wrestled birds, jerking them upside down, facing their pushed-open assholes, dodging their spurting shit, while breathing air filled with dust and feathers stirred up by panicked birds. Through all that, we received a torrent of verbal abuse from the foreman and others on the crew. We lasted one day.
The Cost to the Environment
The Delmarva Peninsula, so called because parts of it belong to Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, has great natural gifts: green rolling countryside, estuaries, beaches, and two great bodies of water, the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the vast Chesapeake Bay on the west. On the surface, some parts of Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding countryside seem to be among the few remaining nearly natural areas on the east coast. Underneath, however, the bay is in serious trouble. When Captain John Smith entered Chesapeake Bay in 1608, it was such a thriving natural environment that he joked you could catch fish with a frying pan. Until well into the twentieth century, the bay was carpeted with beds of clams and oysters—a huge living filter that kept the water clean. Now the few remaining oysters can’t do that.28 Over-harvesting and the growth of human population in the region, with the pollution it brings, are partial reasons for the bay’s problems; but recently attention has been turning to the chicken industry on the peninsula itself.
More than 600 million chickens a year are raised on the Delmarva Peninsula. Those chickens produce more manure than a city of four million people, and instead of getting processed like human waste, chicken manure is spread on fields. But the Delmarva cannot absorb that much nitrogen and phosphorus. Sussex County, Delaware, produces 232 million chickens annually—more than any other county in the nation—but a University of Delaware study found that the county only has enough land to cope with the manure from 64 million chickens. Up to half of the nutrients in the excess manure washes off into the rivers and streams, or gets into the groundwater. A third of the shallow wells in the Delmarva Peninsula, including those going into the underground aquifer used for drinking water, have nitrate levels above the federal safe drinking water standards, according to the US Geological Survey. In the rivers and the bay, these nutrients stimulate too much algae growth. The algae decomposes, sucking oxygen out of the water, and fish and other forms of water life die. The bay now has ‘dead zones’ that cannot support fish, crabs, oysters, or other species of ecological significance. In July 2003, a dead zone stretched for 100 miles down the central portion of the bay.29
In western Kentucky, the masthead of the Messenger, the local newspaper of Madisonville, carries the slogan ‘The Best Town on Earth’. But if you had been in the audience of a hearing at the Madisonville Technology Center on the evening of June 29, 2000, you would have had to wonder about that. The Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet of the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection was listening to public comment on a proposed regulation for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, also known as factory farms. A long procession of citizens came up and made their views known. Here is a selection:30
Since Tyson took over the operation of the growing houses, there is a very offensive odour that at times has taken my breath. There has been a massive invasion of flies. It is hard to perform necessary maintenance on our property.31
Uncovered hills of chicken waste attract hundreds of thousands of flies and mice...People, including school children, cannot enjoy a fresh morning’s air and can’t inhale without gagging or coughing due to the smell. 32
My family lives next to chicken houses. We caught 80 mice in two days in our home. The smell is nauseating…My son and I got stomach cramps, diarrhea, nausea, and we had a sore on our mouths that would not go away. We went to the doctor and my son had parasites in his intestines. Where are the children’s rights? Should families have to sacrifice a safe and healthy environment for the economic benefit of others?33
After the hearings, local western Kentucky residents, supported by the Sierra Club, sued Tyson Foods for failing to report releases of ammonia from four of its chicken factories as it was required by law to do. Tyson claimed that because the factories were owned by growers who only contracted to sell their chickens to Tyson, it was not responsible for reporting the pollution. In 2003, a federal court rejected that argument, holding that since Tyson controlled how the chickens were raised, what they were fed, what medications they were given, and gained most of the profit from raising them, Tyson was also responsible for the pollution.34 Tyson finally settled with the residents in 2005, agreeing to spend $500,000 to study and report on emissions and mitigate ammonia emissions. Tyson also agreed to pay the legal costs of the residents and to plant trees to screen the chicken factories and reduce odours. Sierra Club attorney Barclay Rogers hailed the outcome as a ‘landmark decision’ that has established the responsibility of factory farms to ‘clean up their act and stop putting communities at risk.’35
The Delmarva Peninsula and western Kentucky are examples of a nationwide problem. In Warren County, in northern New Jersey, Michael Patrisko, who lives near an egg factory farm, told a local newspaper that the flies around his neighbourhood are so bad, ‘You literally can look at a house and think it’s a different colour.’36 Buckeye Egg Farm in Ohio was fined $366,000 for failing to handle its manure properly. Nearby residents had complained for years about rats, flies, foul odours and polluted streams from the 14-million-hen complex.37 At the same time, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson was threatening to sue Arkansas poultry producers, including Tyson Foods, saying that waste from the companies’ operations is destroying Oklahoma lakes and streams, especially in the northeast corner of the state.38
Tyson Foods, which the Sierra Club listed as one of the Ten Least Wanted Animal Factory Operators in 2002, has a long history of convictions for pollution.39 After the incidents the Sierra Club listed in its 2002 report, Tyson was again in the news in 2003, when it admitted that it had repeatedly discharged untreated wastewater from its poultry plant in Sedalia, Missouri, into a tributary of the Lamine River. The plant, which covers a thousand acres and processes about a million chickens a week, discharges hundreds of thousands of litres of wastewater every day. State and federal prosecutors alleged that over the previous decade Tyson had repeatedly ignored civil fines, state orders, and other violation notices about its wastewater discharges. Tyson acknowledged that employees at the plant knew about the discharges and agreed to pay a total of $7.5 million in fines.40
Tyson produces chicken cheaply because it passes many costs on to others. Some of the cost is paid by people who can’t enjoy being outside in their yard because of the flies and have to keep their windows shut because of the stench. Some is paid by kids who can’t swim in the local streams. Some is paid by those who have to buy bottled water because their drinking water is polluted. Some is paid by people who want to be able to enjoy a natural environment with all its beauty and rich biological diversity. These costs are, in the terms used by economists, ‘externalities’ because the people who pay them are external to the transaction between the producer and the purchaser.
Consumers may choose to buy Tyson chicken, but those who bear the other, external costs of intensive chicken production do not choose to incur them. Short of moving house—which has its own substantial costs—there is often little they can do about it. Economists—even those who are loudest in extolling the virtues of the free market—agree that the existence of such externalities is a sign of market failure. In theory, to eliminate this market failure, Tyson should fully compensate everyone adversely affected by its pollution. Then its chicken would no longer be so cheap.
The Cost to Workers
Jobs at Tyson Foods are so poorly paid and unpleasant that job turnover in some plants has been reported to be higher than 100 per cent annually, meaning that the average employee lasts less than a year—although Tyson refuses to make the figure public.41 Some of the jobs are also dangerous. In 1999 Tyson Foods was named one of the Ten Worst Corporations of the Year by Corporate Crime Reporter. That year, seven Tyson workers died in industrial accidents. One of them was a 15-year-old boy working as a chicken catcher in Arkansas. In the same year, another 15-year-old was seriously injured in an accident at a Tyson plant in Missouri. As a result of the accidents, two 14-year-olds and another 15-year-old were discovered working at the Missouri plant. Tyson was fined by the Department of Labor for violating the child labour provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.42 The corporation was also fined by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration for violating health and safety laws in several states.43
Tyson has a record of seeking to lower wages and cut health benefits for its workers, even while the corporation has been experiencing unprecedented growth and making billions of dollars in profits. When Tyson took over IBP, a major beef producer, it found that it had acquired a workforce receiving better wages and benefits than its own workers—and it set out to change that. In February 2003, Tyson offered workers at a former IBP plant in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a new contract that included pay cuts, no pensions for new workers and frozen pensions for existing workers, cuts in vacation time, and higher health insurance co-payments for an inferior health care package. The plant had been profitable when run by IBP and was continuing to make a profit for Tyson—but not as big a profit as Tyson thought it could make. A company manager said that the workers’ pay of $25,000 to $30,000 a year, plus benefits, made the plant an ‘outlier’ and put its workers ‘in a luxurious position from our perspective’.44 A long, bitter strike ensued, but after Tyson brought in new workers willing to cross the picket lines, strikers eventually had to accept virtually the same deal that they had been offered before the strike began.
The contractors who are responsible for rearing the chickens, known in the industry as ‘growers’, may seem to be more independent than employees, but once they have signed on, they have little choice but to take the terms Tyson offers them. Growers have to invest their own money in the sheds and equipment and often go heavily into debt to do so. They then become dependent on constantly renewing their contract with a corporation like Tyson to get their money back—for without a new contract, no more chicks will arrive in their sheds. Since the sheds are useless for anything but growing chickens, the growers can lose not only their investment, but their land as well. Usually only one corporation operates within a 40-kilometre radius, and even if two corporations are operating in the same area, there is often an unwritten rule that one company will not pick up a grower who has worked for another company. So if a grower does not like the contract that Tyson offers, there is nowhere else to go. Their independence gone, the growers are, as one of them put it, ‘serfs at the mercy of the companies that make a fortune on their backs’.45
Corporations often defend their low wages by saying that if people don’t like the pay they are offering, they don’t have to take it. Employees in poultry slaughterhouses can, they say, seek work elsewhere, and growers are free to grow chickens and sell them themselves, if they can—or not get into chicken growing in the first place. In a free market, that’s how things work, and the consumers benefit in terms of lower prices. However, the job options available to many low-skilled chicken growers may be limited. In any case, this argument doesn’t excuse the mistreatment of chickens which, unlike workers, have no choice at all. In the end, consumers, too, are free to choose. If they don’t like the way a corporation treats its workers and contractors, or the environment, or the animals it uses, they can take their money elsewhere.
The Greatest Cost of All?
In 2005, the world began to face the serious possibility that the cheap chicken produced by factory farming could be far more costly to all of us than even the most radical animal rights advocates had ever dreamt it might be. Scientists began to warn leaders to prepare against the possibility of an epidemic of avian influenza—popularly known as bird flu—that could spread to human beings and take tens, or even hundreds, of millions of lives. Supporters of factory farming have used the threat of bird flu to make a case against having chickens outdoors, claiming that the virus can be spread by migrating birds to free-range flocks.46 But the real danger, as scientists now recognise, is intensive chicken production.
In October 2005, a United Nations task force identified as one of the root causes of the bird flu epidemic, ‘farming methods which crowd huge numbers of animals into small spaces’.47 Other experts agree, among them University of Ottawa virologist Earl Brown, who said after a Canadian outbreak of avian influenza, ‘high intensity chicken rearing is a perfect environment for generating virulent avian flu virus’.48 Although transmission through wild birds to chickens kept outdoors is a possibility, as Dr Brown has pointed out, viruses found in wild birds are generally not very dangerous. It is when they get into a high-density poultry operation that they mutate into something much more virulent. Traditionally reared birds, moreover, are likely to have more resistance than the stressed, genetically similar birds kept in intensive confinement systems. And in any case, even if there were no chickens kept outside, factory farms are not biologically secure. They are frequently infested with mice, rats and small birds, which can bring in diseases.
As of this writing, the number of human beings who have died from the current strain of avian influenza, known as H5N1, is relatively small, and it appears that they have all been in contact with infected birds. But if the virus mutates into some form that is transmissible from human to human, as experts say it might, the number of deaths could outstrip the estimated 20 million victims of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Governments are, rightly, taking action to prepare for this threat. In 2005, the United States Senate approved the spending of $8 billion to stockpile vaccines and other drugs to help prevent a possible bird flu epidemic. Other governments have already spent tens of millions for that and other preventive measures.
Such government spending is really a kind of subsidy to the poultry industry and, like most subsidies, it is bad economics. Factory farming spread because it seemed to be cheaper than more traditional forms of farming. We have seen that it was cheaper to the consumer, but only because it was passing some of its costs on to others—for example, to people who lived downstream or downwind from the factory farms and could no longer enjoy clean water and air and to workers who were injured by unsafe conditions. Now we can see that this was only the small stuff. Factory farming is passing far bigger costs—and risks—on to all of us. If chicken were taxed to raise enough revenue to pay for the precautions that governments now have to take against avian influenza, again we might find that factory farm chicken isn’t really so cheap after all.
A Clear-Cut Conclusion
Gandhi remarked that the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals. If we apply that standard to industrial chicken producers, they don’t come off well. Chicken producers could, for a few cents per bird, handle their chickens more gently at all stages of catching, transport and slaughter, but they do not do so.49 Instead, everything is geared to speed of production and cutting labour costs. The same indifference to ethical concerns is evident in the way that the chicken industry treats the environment, those who live near the chicken sheds, their workers, and their contractors. We should boycott those who treat animals, the environment, and workers so callously. As we shall see in Part III, intensive farming doesn’t even help to feed the world—it actually reduces the total amount of food available for human consumption. We’ll also see that consumers should have no trouble finding healthy, tasty, low-cost alternatives that are, on ethical grounds, much better than factory farmed food.