October 20th, 2010

CAFO pulls back the curtain on industrial agriculture.

CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Earth Aware, 2010) takes no shortcuts as it squires us on an uncomfortable walk through the ways of modern meat production. It’s a grimy, grisly world and while much is immediately apparent, it’s important to stay for the entire tour so you can appreciate all the connections, redundancies and stupidity in the system.

This isn’t easy. There are pictures — and text — that are pure horror show; glimpses of the slaughterhouse where you can almost smell the stench. But stay on the walk, so you’ll understand. That’s important, because in the end, this is not about a more efficient system that’s brutal but necessary to feed the world, but about a super-controlled corporate game that’s out of control.

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March 11th, 2010

(The piece posted here is the Introduction to Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby. The new book (March 2010)  examines the environmental contamination and heath impacts of industrial livestock production.)

David Kirby, author of Animal Factory

Many Americans have no idea where their food comes from, and many have no desire to find out.

That is unfortunate.

Every bite we take has had some impact on the natural environment, somewhere in the world. As the planet grows more crowded, and more farmers turn to industrialized methods to feed millions of new mouths, that impact will only worsen.

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May 14th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Veggie advocates want American omnivores to adopt a day without meat. Well, some of them want us to just give up meat totally, but I’m talking about the Meatless Monday campaign here, which argues that if we’d cut out the steaks and pork chops on just this one day, we’d reduce the saturated fat that we consume and make a big dent in the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the livestock industry.

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