The empathetic among us may want to avert their eyes if they're brave enough to watch the recently released documentary Eating Animals. It's tough--and guilt-inducing--to be confronted with scenes of cruel conditions forced on animals in factory farms in order to feed the world's escalating demand for meat on the table. Nobody wants to know the details of how those tidily wrapped packages of meat appear on grocery shelves.
But concerns beyond animal welfare are revealed in the film, produced and directed by Christopher Quinn and based on the book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer. What about the welfare of the world's meat consumers, naively reveling in the seemingly inexhaustible supply of chicken, pork, and beef at astonishingly low prices?
Before firing up the grill, the film urges audiences to consider the health--if you can call it that--of chickens, hogs, turkeys, and cows in those industrial operations. In the decades since inexpensive and readily available meat became the norm (beef costs half of what it did in 1970), animals have been bio-engineered to maximize their growth (it's as if a human baby weighed 600 pounds) and consequent food output, and are routinely doused with hormones and antibiotics to keep them alive.
Their health could affect our health.
On a typical factory farm, drugs are fed to animals with every meal. When his book was released, Foer told CNN, "It's a perfect storm: The animals have been bred to such extremes that sickness is inevitable, and the living conditions promote illness. Industry saw this problem from the beginning, but rather than accept less-productive animals, it compensated for the animals' compromised immunity with drugs. As a result, farmed animals are fed antibiotics non-therapeutically--that is, before they get sick."
The use of all those antibiotics by factory farms (mostly owned by corporations such as Perdue, Cargill, Tyson, Smithfield, and JBS) contributes to the growth of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens.
The result: diseases such as swine influenza, avian influenza, foot-and-mouth disease, and mad-cow disease that can be passed on to the humans who consume them.
And here's a chicken-and-egg question: Did a demand for meat fuel the creation of factory farms in the 1960s and '70s, or did the creation of factory farms enable Americans to eat an average of 270 pounds per person annually?
The latter explanation is more likely.
According to Worldwatch Institute, international meat production has tripled over the last four decades and increased 20 percent in the last 10 years. Industrial countries are consuming nearly double the quantity in developing countries. Sure, we all know that meat is a good source of protein and vitamins and nutrients such as iron, zinc, and vitamins. But a diet high in red and processed meats can contribute to obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
The moral and ethical difficulties with factory farming--which produces and sells 99 percent of the meat we consume--also plague the people who run them. "[Contract] farmers just end up on a big treadmill of debt," director Quinn said in an interview with Heritage Radio Network, "because they [the corporate owners] come in the next year and say you have to replace your ventilation fans with these new ventilation fans. Then you have to put another $175,000 into restoring your barn to the standards that these corporations want you to have, and it puts you further in debt. They like the farmers to be in debt, because it's a vicious cycle."
Why are factory farms so powerful? The answer, says Foer, is that "We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products."
What's the alternative? The most sustainable but probably least likely and far more expensive is going back to raising animals the way it used to be done. The result, according to Arkansas pasture pig operator Carol Bansley, quoted in a story by former factory hog farmer Johnny Carrol Sain in the August issue of Arkansas Life, are animals that, unlike those confined in factory farms, "had a good life, and we're eating a cleaner, healthier product from an animal that had one bad day, only one bad day. Actually just one bad minute. The rest of its life was outside, on the grass, in the fresh air and sun."
When the National Pork Board's marketers came out with the "other white meat" campaign in 1987, it was propaganda, Bansley said. "Pork isn't supposed to be white. "The meat [on our pigs] is red, it's not pale. It's got marbling on it; it's got flavor."
In one of its more upbeat moments, Eating Animals features Paul Willis of Iowa, whose pasture-raised hogs enjoy getting their ears scratched by him; a San Francisco restaurateur tells him his pork is the best he has ever tasted. Also on screen is Frank Reese, a Kansas heritage farmer who's created the Good Shepherd Poultry Institute to show young farmers the rapidly disappearing method of raising heritage breeds, which can reproduce and regenerate themselves--a process independent of the factory farm system.
Eating Animals was screened last weekend in Little Rock for receptive guests of Washington, D.C.-based EJF Philanthropies, bent on creating a healthy food system through grants and impact investments, and garden expert P. Allen Smith, who raises heritage chickens on his Moss Mountain Farm outside Little Rock.
Activists such as Willis, Reese (who, along with Quinn, attended the Little Rock screening), and others in Eating Animals show that dedicated and passionate people can make a difference. And there are companies such as Beyond Meat, which is producing scientifically engineered plant-based burgers, sauce, and chicken strips that the company claims look, cook and satisfy like meat and are available at many Kroger and Target locations.
Wired reports that we're well on our way to building lab-grown meat from cell samples; it might be on the market by 2020.
But it won't happen if we aren't interested. If we don't consider the pain of the animals we eat, the effect of eating those animals on our health, and the sorry circumstances of factory farmers to make that happen. It won't happen if we avert our eyes.
Editorial on 08/12/2018