Food

Food

Contents

General

General

Now the animals are brought together in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, or CAFOs. It is not unusual to have a million hens, 100,000 pigs, or 50,000 cattle brought together to be fed in this way – the hens and pigs indoors, in vast sheds, the cattle outdoors, on dirt feedlots that stretch to the horizon. Once the animals are concentrated in this way, they need to be fed, so we grow food for them. We use synthetic fertilizers and oil-powered tractors to grow corn or soybeans. Then we truck it to the animals so they can eat it. And instead of spreading their manure in a natural manner around the fields, it accumulates in vast quantities. It needs to be trucked away, but often, before it is, it pollutes local streams and ground water. All this use of oil contributes significantly to global warming. These CAFOs also have terrible odour problems and attract flies and other vermin.

When we confine animals in factory farms, we have to grow food for them. The animals burn up most of that food’s energy just to breathe and keep their bodies warm, so we end up with a small fraction – usually no more than one-third and sometimes as little as one-tenth – of the food value that we feed them.

In Europe, mad cow disease shocked many people, not only because it shattered beef’s image as a safe and healthy food, but also because they learned that the disease was caused by feeding cattle the brains and nerve tissue of sheep. People who naively believed that cows ate grass discovered that beef cattle in feed lots may be fed anything from corn to fish meal, chicken litter (complete with chicken droppings), and slaughterhouse waste.

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