An Unlikely Ambassador

Living in Tasmania can be quite insular. Some of the meat we have access to is from farms we can see just down the road. This is a huge difference to living in the states where there is only the smallest percentage of traditional farms providing beef, chicken, or pork for sale.

Regardless of a local option here in Tas, we still get a majority of our meat from factory farms on the mainland.

I recently read a book called "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safron Foer. The book is written by a new father investigating the state of the meat industry in the USA. He is not a vegetarian at the time he begins this process, but by the end he is. He doesn't intend to make a case against eating meat, but inevitably the more you peer inside the way that 99% of the meat we purchase is produced, you can't help but lose taste for it. I expected it would be about how cruel the industry is, and I wasn't especially surprised on this front. What was reinforced however, were the other effects of this industry on our health. It was so much worse than I could have imagined.

I love chicken, I love steak, I love pork. However after reading this book - I know that by eating meat produced this way I am advocating it - and I don't want to do that.

The modern meat chicken has a life span of 40 days and in order to reach slaughter weight in the shortest amount of time it is genetically modified, pumped full of hormones, and force fed a series of antibiotics. Why does this matter to the people that eat this meat?

Oversight.

From what I've read the cycle seems to work like this. As a consumer you want to pay as little as possible for meat, and you want a lot of it. In order to supply the demand these highly efficient systems have been developed. The factory farm can do it cheaper and more efficiently so they become the single biggest producer and their market share is virtually total. To sustain this relationship the producers have at their disposal massive financial resources to lobby, and to even write the laws that govern their own industry. Effectively the whim of the consumer ends up being the final say in this industry, there is no leadership in this closed loop. Nobody can step in and say "wait a minute, look at the effect of this industry on the health of our nation" - it propels itself and all the power rests in the decisions made at the consumer level.

How scary is that?

There is really no big bad corporation that is trying to kill you, there is merely an industry that does exactly what consumers want - and uses every resource it can to sustain it.

If there was an alternative that cost a little bit more, but wasn't forcing you to take these kinds of health risks you would probably do it. Realistically though for must of us, there isn't that option. We don't live next to a farmer that raises beef cattle, pigs, or chickens anymore, its all or nothing. If you eat meat from the grocery store, it is produced in this way.

If this industry is to change, we either pay higher prices for a better alternative or we buy less of whats available. There are options.