Factory Farming

The purpose of this paper is to explore the harmful affects of factory farming and help identify ways we can protect ourselves. The essay reviews the history of the industrialization of farms in our country, and offers a true understanding of where our food comes from. After reading Meat and Milk Factories by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, I was reminded of today’s growing problems created by the industrialization of farming. It is important to address the concerns of human health, animal welfare, and the environment as they relate to the radical and drastic changes our country has forcefully imposed on us, with the rise of genetically engineer foods that are mass produced on factory farms.

The paper discusses the division between those who see the rise of economic opportunities, verses those who see destruction of our nations natural foods. I hope to challenge the reader to think globally and personally and make individual decisions that will fight against factory farming and fight toward a better future of American food sources.

The Battle Against Factory Farming: What we can do to change the systemand chose the foods we want to eat

“I will have the Chicken caser salad, a diet coke and a side of recombinant bivine growth hormone with extra antibiotics and chemical pesticides sprinkled on top.” Although this may not be the exact menu description from your local diner, it is most probably what you are going to get. Did you know that 99% of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States have been genetically modified and pumped with antibiotics and growth hormones on farm factories? (Foer, 2009) That means most of what we see in the grocery stores and on our menus have been tainted with chemicals we do not even know about.

Did you also know that the Food and Drug Administration reported recently that 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States go to livestock, not humans? This alarming statistic reveals the amount of chemicals and medicine that is needed to be injected into our food supply in order for it to “be safe” sfor human consumption. These statistics are just a few that demonstrate how little the average American knows about where our food comes from or what has been done to it before it appears on our plates. In all fairness, much of today’s food industry remains hidden to the American consumer.

Over the past 40 years, powerful corporate businesses and influential political trends have grossly reshaped the food supply industry of our nation. Thanks to developing technology of factory farming, we now have an abundance of bigger chicken breasts, larger pork chops and practically indestructible tomatoes; but we now also have new resistant strains of E.coli, and other mutated harmful bacteria that circle around our national food supply.

There is a blatant paradox within the industrial food supply system where the goal to make affordable abundant food readily available is also the contributor to the rampant spread of poor nutrition, obesity and disease. How can we protect ourselves from these harmful effects of factory farming in America? To answer this we must better educate ourselves on todays growing problems and review some of the major destructive consequences that have been created by the industrialization of farming.

Factory farming has directly compromised 3 major areas in our lives: human health, natural environment and animal welfare. Each area has been engrossedly intertwined causing damage to spiral out of control in a chain reaction of irresponsible practices. Until our government enforces better regulations to ban the practices of factory farming it is up to us individually to boycott against these practices and join in the crusade to a better future for ourselves.

When you think about a farm, what pops into your head? Most of us can imagine a picturesque landscape of rolling meadows with a red barn and white picket fencing, with magnificent cows grazing in green pastures, a flock of mother hens pecking in the grassy lawn and the faint sound of “cock-a-doodle-do” from a nearby rooster.

Farm life is depicted as a countryside paradise filled with bountiful crops and happy farm animals, and to maybe only to select few; this comes close to being true. In fact, most farming today comes from a place that is far different then we may think of. Picture huge steel factories with concrete floors and artificial lighting, that dimly shines on crowd of livestock crammed up against each other, saturated with the stench of ammonia and animal waste with an over looming sense of insanity in the air. This is a more accurate picture to paint when discussing U.S. farming today.

Before discussing the hazardous affects of factory farming and identifying what we can do to protect ourselves, let us first review a summarized timeline of how and why the practice started in our country. In the early 1900’s most everything we ate was naturally organic. Our country was filled with farmlands and farmers who took great pride in the work and who supplied our population with an abundance of untainted produce and wholesome meat and dairy. Then one day, a food scientist had discovered a way to increase the production of chicken by adding vitamin A and D into their diet. Once these vitamins were force fed into the diet, animals no longer need sunlight or exercise for growth. This allowed many animals to be raised indoors and year round.

The sudden increase of population led to grossly overpopulated barns, which in turn led to spread of disease. The disease was then was counteracted with the development of antibiotics that controlled the disease and again, led for an increase of animal production. The “mad scientist” philosophy behind the bigger and faster production began a revolution of genetically modified and engineered farmed products that would ultimately compromise the well being of our entire nation.

Food scientists and large food corporations began to “tinker” with the genetics of farm animals and experimented with chemicals to change the nature of evolution. “The technology of genetic engineering (GE) is the practice of altering or disrupting the genetic blueprints of living organisms-plants, trees, fish, animals, humans and microorganisms” (Weber, 2009). With the ability to alter they way we farm animals, large corporations soon caught on to the fact that modifying specific DNA could lead to quicker production and larger quantities, which in turns brings them enormous profit. This super size mentality of food production on a larger scale helped fuel the development of “Drive-In Fast Food” chains in the early 1930’s.

This new business of pumping fast food out quickly demanded a new factory supply system from farm to restaurant kitchen. For the first time the demand of fast food dictated where our farms where about to do and a boom of factory farms began to take over our country. Family farms were invaded, bought out and controlled by large corporations that put business profit in front of human health. With the new development of antibodies and growth hormones, corporate greed soon reigned supreme and a few select large corporations such as Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue and Monsanto swallowed up family farms and dictated what this country was going to feed themselves.

Businessmen worked with scientists and bioengineers to create “Franken foods” that would make the corporate big shots rich with no regards to the well being of human health and the environment. The business of agriculture made a drastic paradigm shift in what was grown and why and mass production of food with the promise of money prevailed over all other reasoning.

Very little thought went into the potential long-term consequences of this new practice, but pretty soon, we began to see the side affects and were able to identify the problems that were growing with factory farming. The first major concern created by the industrialization of farming is how business greed directly leads to overcrowded livestock and the shameful disregard of animal welfare. Because businessmen want to see more production they pack more animals together then adequate space allowed for.

To house these kinds of numbers, huge factories were built to industrialize the process of animal production on an enormous scale, putting quantity way ahead of the quality of what is being farmed. Factory farms can house more than 125,000 animals under one roof and are designed to produce the highest possible output at the lowest possible cost. As a result of these overcrowded spaces packed with animals who have been completely confined indoors with out their natural outside environment, these animals developed stressful behavior and clinical depression.

Their disposition was not unlike the institutionalized behavior of pacing tigers kept in small cages of old fashion zoos. In order to “handle” the stressed and potentially aggressive behavior, farmers adapted in-humane practices such as debeaking of chickens and tail cutting of pigs in thought that they would protect these animals from harming each other, in turn lowering the lower death rate caused by animal fighting and increasing the bottom line and profitability of these animals. The astonishing number of animals living on top of one another speak not only against proper treatment of animals, but lead to greater issues of sanitation and horrifying filth that these animals are forced to live in; most of their lives spent laying in their own “shit”.

In the essay Meat and Milk Factories, the authors review the living conditions of pigs and dairy cattle in our country. “More than 90% of pigs raised for meat today are raised indoors in crowded pens of concrete and steel…a large confinement operation, say, fifty thousand pigs, creates half a million pounds of pig urine and excrement every day” (Singer and Mason, 2006) This statement indicates the amount of raw sewage that one factory can produce each day.

This alone creates an unnatural environment for the animals to live in, but when the amount of waste that is then in need of removal, it is then released untreated into our environment most often sprayed over our land and dumped into “waste lagoons”. These practices of displacing untreated waste is a major problem that is destroying our lands soil, polluting our water sources and even creating excessive gases that deteriorate our planets ozone layer.

The destruction of our environment is the second major concern directly related to the industrial practices of factory farming. Did you know that the United States produces the second largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions per year second only to China, and production of food is one of the major polluters” (Tirrell, 2011)? The massive use of fossil fuels releasing poisonous gases into our atmosphere, combined with the staggering size of waste disposal polluting our soil and water, makes farm factories one of our biggest concerns that affects our entire ecosystem. In addition to the animal waste, the factories also poison our soil with pesticides, fertilizers, steroids and other harmful chemicals.

The soil in turn, washes into our rivers and streams and contaminates our agricultures water systems. Water quality is a key factor for the survival of an ecosystem, and once the industrial pollutants contaminate it, the entire system could collapse. Not only do these pollutants threaten our ecosystem, but also they can be directly linked to both immediate and long term health hazards for people nearby. There have been numerous reports of sudden nausea, headaches, and even asthma from people who live nearby farm factories. This further supports that pollution of our environment causing a chain reaction to our health.

The link between pollution and human health brings us to our third major concern of the affects of factory farming. We grow up protecting ourselves and caring for our families trying to prevent harm, illness and disease. Unfortunately, today we are faced with more heath challenges that can be directly tied to the harmful affects of factory farming. Our health goes back to how the farm animals are raised. Most factory-farmed animals are injected with steroids and growth hormones to speed up production time. This allows them to be slaughtered and sent to market in half the time nature intended. In the research interviews discussed in Food Inc., one farmer clearly sums up this process when he says, “Why would you grow a chicken in 3 months, if you can do it in 49 days?”(Food Inc., 2009).

Due to factory practices of speeding up animal growth, and the unsanitary, overcrowded living conditions, these animals are continuously subjected to infection and death. In order to deal directly with these infections, factory farmers continuously pump antibiotics into the animals. The antibiotics are then transmitted into the human body through consumption, causing allergies, diabetics and other medical side affects. The animals develop diseases that can be passed through during the processing of the animal. “Cows stand ankle deep in their own feces all day and then get processed at the plant without even being cleaned off, inevitably passing the bacteria on to the food” (Food Inc., 2009).

There was a very important case in 2001 where one woman’s two-year-old child died from e-coli after eating a burger. The woman fought against factory farms and worked with lobbyists to pass a new law named after her son. “Kevin’s law” helped give back some power to the USDA to shut down plants that produced and delivered contaminated meat. Yet still, the corporate meat producers continue to lobby against this and argue that the law is unnecessary and would just add to the cost of food.

E-coli is not just a concern when discussing contamination of meat; it threatens all of our countries agriculture. Do you remember the recall of spinach due to huge numbers of vegetation contaminated with e-coli? The factories spread the disease from animal to soil to water creating hazardous fields that poison our agriculture. This shocked the nation and particularly scared vegetarians who thought they were safe from animal spread disease.

Today factory farming has taking over the “family farm” and almost all farming done in America is now controlled by a handful of large corporations that put business profit in front of human health. Farms these days are no longer farms, but are mass-producing factories of food. So what can we do to battle against these super giant corporations and take back our food. Thankfully we still live in a country that has a democratic system and ultimately we have the power to individually change the system and fight against factory farming.

We should demand to know where our food comes from and demand proper, truthful labeling of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in our food supply. The stories of factory farming deal with ethical, cultural and economic implication of the choices we make about eating. Even though we are in the wake of a fast food nation, and much of what we consume, we do in blind faith, it is important to understand the story of the food we eat and breakdown what it is exactly that we are feeding to our families.

We are all too familiar with the famous saying, “You are what you eat!”, which reminds us to carefully watch what we eat and strive for a well balanced, nutritious diet. “After two decades of biotech bullying and force-feeding unlabeled and hazardous genetically engineered (GE) foods to animals and humans (Cumming, 2011)” it is important for each of us to fight against factory farming and bring back the food that will support a healthy diet. Although corporate America has taken reign over our food supply, it isn’t something that we cannot take control back from.

Now, more then ever, it is important for us to better educate ourselves on the foods we eat and make better efforts to improve our own health, protect our farm animals and save our global environment. One way to be certain of what we put into our bodies is to buy organic. “Organic stands for many things – a philosophy of wholeness, the science of integration, a rallying cry for keeping nature humming as the interdependent web of life…it is a simple farm policy and helps mitigate healthcare woes-you eat better, you are better” (Weber 2009).

It is important to understand what makes food organic and untouched by chemicals and learn about the significant benefits of organic foods. It is important to purify our diet and not support the unnatural genetically engineered (GE) foods and modified organisms (GMOs) provided by factory farms. It is an important and logical response to end factory farming and reclaim what we feed ourselves and what we feed our families.

Vote against GMOs and buy from companies that support the well being and fair treatment of their workers, animals and the environment. Read and learn about the food you buy. For better food choices, buy local, in season, organic foods, free from chemicals. Shop at farmers markets when possible, to cut out the middleman and ensure the best quality of food for the lowest prices. Limit your fast food consumption. Cook more meals from scratch with your family using GMO free whole foods and ingredients. These are just a few examples of what you can do to improve your health and protect our animals and our environment.

Being a chef, I love good food. I am not a purist when it comes to healthy eating or ethical eating. I am not a vegetarian or a vegan and I do not have a defined dietary lifestyle, but I am aware of what I eat and where it comes from. And although I have fluctuating dietary differences I do believe in the purity of food. I agree with the philosophy to “be well, eat well”, and support the natural properties of food, prior to chemical interference. Good food is particularly important to me and my definition of good food is that of the pure, honest and un-tampered form. Buying local, sustainable and organic food, supports good health and helps stand against factory farms. Trust me you will not only taste the difference, you will feel the difference.