God created a natural world that is characterized by incredible diversity (Gen. 1). This ecological variety helps to prevent disease through the special functions, or what I like to call the “I-factors,” unique to each species within the ecosystem, just as each of us is uniquely made in the image of God with a specific, love-based purpose in his plan. From the thousands of species of bees that pollinate our world to the millions of tiny microorganisms that enrich our soils, the world is wired for love and life.
In contrast to this rich diversity within each ecosystem, imagine an ecosystem in which a single species of a single plant dominates. This is what we have on many massive farms today. Picture wheat or corn—one species—as far as the eye can see in every direction. This is called monoculture, the mass production of single (“mono”) crops.
Food monocultures, such as corn, soy, or wheat, and the factory farming of animals both focus on the mass production of a single species and are removing the delicate ecological balance found in diversity.1 In 1904, for instance, there were over seven thousand varieties of apples grown in the United States. Today, we have lost roughly 86 percent of these varieties.2 Certainly, God has given us the freedom to choose, but we are not free from the consequences of our choices. And the consequences of a monoculture-style food system are the necessary use of artificial substances such as pesticides to merely keep crops alive, the loss of diversity and thereby health, and the destruction of our planet.3
Indeed, the majority of us today consume foods that essentially come from plants kept alive on an IV of synthetic substances.4 These plants survive our manipulation of the natural diversity found in nature, but they do not thrive in such conditions. And, with the alarming loss of 75 percent of our natural agricultural diversity, seed banks (such as the well-known Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway) are being established across the globe to urgently save as many varieties of produce and grains as possible.5
Is this a healthy situation? What happens if the crop of that one particular species is infected with some kind of fungus, for instance? The mid-nineteenth-century Irish potato famine, although it happened in a different time in history, with its own unique origins and results, can still serve as a warning for us today. All of Ireland was crippled because it had put its faith in one variety of one crop, the Lumper potato. When these potatoes were infected with fungus, an unknown strain of Phytophthora infestans, they turned into a revolting mush. Around a million people starved to death, while countless others were compelled to leave their homeland.6 With our continued reliance on monocultures such as corn, soy, and wheat, there is the very real danger that our global food production is at risk of failing in a similar manner.7
Corn and Soy: Our “Golden” Crops?
Why have corn and soy in particular become the dominant monocultures today? Although the changes in American agriculture over the past several decades are manifold and complex, one of the turning points was the Farm Bill of 1933, which was a response to the need for an adequate food supply during the Great Depression. A great and admirable goal: millions of Americans were starving, and the individuals behind this bill were passionately driven to help them. However, this same bill, which is reintroduced every five years, continues to promote the large-scale government subsidization of corn and soy production in the United States, despite the fact that the times, and the issues we face, have changed dramatically.8
However, the overproduction of corn and soy only began around forty-five years ago. Previously, the Farm Bill paid farmers not to overproduce grains that no one could afford to buy. In the 1970s, the US government shifted its farm policy toward the support of large, consolidated, one-crop farming operations rather than traditional, diverse family farms, since large operations could produce far more food at lower prices. It was the time of US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s “get big or get out”: no longer would the US government pay farmers not to overproduce corn. Now the motto of the day was “fence row to fence row”: produce as much of these single crops as possible by employing as much scientific and technological help as humans could provide.9
Joining the US government’s “get big” support with its own, the oil industry further consolidated this trend toward large monoculture farms. Big farms, with their big technologies, require a big bit of oil: the global food industry is largely run on fossil fuels, while it supports the petroleum industry through the development of corn ethanol. Now, at the average gas station in the United States, you can find corn-based nourishment for not only yourself, at the small convenience store, but your car as well: the corn sources of both “foods” are often one and the same. It therefore should not surprise us that agribusiness’s special interest lobbying power in Washington is second only to the oil industry’s, while members of the US government are often supported by Big Agriculture’s dollars during election campaigns.10 This monetary influence is particularly alarming in light of the fact that many economists consider the use of food for fuel as a major contributor to the high price of food today, further exacerbating our global food crisis.11
And there certainly is a lot of corn and soy to go around. These two crops account for roughly half of the three hundred million acres of farmland in production in the United States, while just fourteen million acres produce “specialty crops” such as vegetables and fruit (the other major staple produced in the United States is wheat). This large-scale subsidization has, in turn, allowed food companies to manufacture cheap corn-, soy- and wheat-based products in equally large numbers and to provide us with what appears to be an unlimited variety of foodstuffs. Indeed, it is estimated that the modern American food industry produces an average of six thousand calories per person per day, while more than seventeen thousand new industrial food products are introduced each year.12 Of these products, a startling 77 percent come from corn, soy, and wheat.13
Great Yields at Great Cost: Mass Animal Production
Without these farm subsidies, the shelves of our grocery stores would not be filled with meat and dairy products, and a burger would not cost a dollar.14 What do corn and soy have to do with meat and dairy? Today, animal feed is made up largely of corn and soy.
The modern food industry has taken animals off the farm and placed them in industrial facilities called CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These facilities are often located in different states and are specifically geared toward feeding, slaughtering, or packaging meat on an industrial scale.15 Indeed, you need look no further than the average supermarket: rows and rows of neatly packaged pieces of meat overwhelm the customer with choices. It is estimated that these industrial feedlots have doubled meat production in the United States alone over the last fifty years.16
Within these operations, it is both cheaper and less time-consuming to feed the animals corn and soy in confined spaces, even though these grain-based, immobile diets are not well adapted to the way God created these animals. For example, cattle have rumens, which are designed to digest various grasses and plants, not massive amounts of grain, and as a result these cattle are more prone to disease and general ill health, such as stomach ulcers, while they are less nutritious to consume. God designed cattle as animals that graze over stretches of grass, but these industrial operations work on economies of time and scale: confined cattle eat all day, getting fatter in a much shorter space of time, while a single operation can hold far more cattle in a smaller space.17
In the feces-covered facilities of many industrial operations, these grain-based diets necessitate the large-scale use of antibiotics (80 percent of all antibiotics in the United States alone) to simply prevent the animals from dying. This has significantly contributed to the global antibiotic-resistance crisis. Many animals are also given growth hormones to further speed up the fattening process.18 These hormones are associated with a number of health risks in both animals and humans, including a possible correlation with cancer, which is why many countries no longer permit the use of hormones in industrial meat production.19
Yet the animals are not just fed corn and soy. Expired cookies, candy, and even other animals are often turned into feed, including feed for large-scale dairy operations. We have turned herbivores like cattle into carnivores, often with fatal side effects. Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the recent epidemic of mad cow disease, a variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy that leads to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans.20 In the United Kingdom, cows that were fed the remains of other cows in meat and bone meal contracted this disease, killing over a hundred people in 1996. Although this major incident shows the dangers of feeding animals to other animals, it is often still considered an economically viable practice for industrial operations. Many feedlots in the United States, for instance, feed their cows chicken meat, while some companies even consider it “sustainable” to feed chicken to farmed fish.21
Unfortunately, these cruelties have not subsided over time. If you live in America, your tax dollars are currently being used to fund research on the immunocastration of male pigs (boars) to improve the flavor of the animals and make them easier to handle inside the CAFOs.22 In fact, pigs’ tails are already cut off inside these confined facilities, since when the animals are stressed they tend to chew them off.23 Similarly, chickens have part of their beaks sawed off, since they too are destructive when stressed.24 Are we being good stewards of God’s magnificent creation?
Animals, Workers, and the Environment: All Are Affected
These industrial meat operations are sources of cruelty not only to the animals they intend to slaughter but often to their employees as well. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser highlights the disturbing abuse of workers, in particular migrant and nonlegal peoples, within the American meat and fast-food industries.25 The poignant 2014 documentary Food Chains further highlights the injustice faced by many of the people who produce the food we consume today.26 Indeed, human trafficking is a dominant issue in agriculture, both within the United States and globally. Slaves are used to pick fruit and vegetables on a number of commercial farms, in meat-packing factories, and in food-service establishments, while the trafficking of women for sexual purposes often accompanies the development of large commodity farms with many laborers.27 In some cases it is impossible for these industrial operations to even find people willing to work, compelling these companies to use prisoners to slaughter the animals. In light of these circumstances, where injury and death are ever-present, is it any wonder that many employees in slaughterhouses develop pathological disorders? 28
In fact, within the often-merciless logic of the industry, the abuse of not only labor but also the environment is often hidden behind the abundance of “cheap” food. In CAFOs, for instance, lakes of sewage can often be found nearby the facilities, releasing toxic gases into the air (such as ammonia and methane) that contribute to our current global climate crisis, while polluting the surrounding land and waterways. One CAFO can in fact produce as much waste as a large city. Likewise, the transportation of animals from the farms where they spend the first few months of their lives, to the feedlots where they are fattened, to the slaughterhouses where they are killed, to the packaging facilities where they are transformed into neat commodities, to the various food establishments that sell these products further contributes to global warming. Overall, the global meat industry contributes more to global warming than cars, trains, and planes—an alarming 18 percent of all emissions.29
This environmental pollution is just another example of the danger and narrow logic of monoculture production today. On smaller and more diverse farms, the waste from animals was often used to fertilize the crops: nature worked in tandem. By contrast, in industrial agriculture today we have created two major issues where once we had one solution. As Pollan notes, we took the animals off the farm to plant more crops and created a fertility problem that requires the large-scale use of artificial fertilizer, while we placed the animals in industrial operations and created a waste problem that is contributing to the destruction of God’s beautiful planet.30
What Is the Real Price Tag?
Yes, more people certainly can afford to purchase meat today than ever before in our recorded history. However, the monetary cost of cheap meat, like that of mass-produced bread and other foodstuffs, does not reflect the true price paid to bring it to our plates: the effect it has on the lives of the people who work in these facilities, the damage it does to local environments, the 38.4 billion dollars a year of taxpayer money given to the meat industry in subsidies, and the strain it puts on our own health as we overconsume meat that is less nutritious and potentially contaminated with deadly microbes from the process of mass production. One could include in that price the fact that all the land used to produce animal feed (around two-thirds of arable farmland), could otherwise be used to feed the millions of starving people in the world today, including the estimated forty-nine million Americans who suffer from food insecurity and hunger.31
Finally, we can’t appreciate the real price of cheap food until we consider its effects on our health. We’ll take a brief look at that next and explore it more fully in part 2.