Do you want to eat arsenic and ammonia?

A large portion of my interest in food is rooted in the anger I get from discovering how corporate entities manipulate our natural food system in the name of profit while discarding any impact on human health and environmental health. By now many of us understand the underlying facts and have heard the basic framework: Corporations use their capital to impact legislation and purchase large tracts of land to produce food. The market is flooded with cheap food produced like goods in a factory. Throughout the process crutality is inflicted on animals, the land is abused, and pollution is omitted from the massive "soil to plate" route. The individual is a victim of images that instead hype false health benefits and hide the true nature of food production. In recent years the factory farming system has been shook by outbreaks of disease, bestselling books, documentaries, and the growing availability of organic and local food.

David Kirby's book "Animal Factory" provides an in your face account of the realities of this system for animals and humans alike. He gained impressive access to chicken and pig farms that revealed the horrid conditions the animals experienced even after business hours. He vividly recalls the sounds of pigs squeeling loudly while attacking each other throughout the night due to their overcrowded conditions. For those that often consider the poor treatment of animals as part of the food chain, there is ample evidence that factory farming is more than just a little bit of animal cruelty. The externalities of a factory farm extend into our drinking water, make us vulnerabile to infection, impact hunger in the developing world, and taint the nutrition in the food on your fork. His account makes vegetarianism an even more necessary path for the 21st Century. It helps your health, the earth, the animal population, our resources, and others.

Here is a clip from Democracy Now that gives a great summary of the impacts of factory farming and the challenge of ending it.