Copyright

Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Safran Foer

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: November 2009

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ISBN: 978-0-316-08664-6

Also by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Everything Is Illuminated

for Sam and Eleanor,

trusty compasses

Contents

Copyright

Also by Jonathan Safran Foer

Storytelling

All or Nothing or Something Else

Words / Meaning

Hiding / Seeking

Influence / Speechlessness

Slices of Paradise / Pieces of Shit

I Do

Storytelling

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.

The Fruits of Family Trees

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. On the way in, Friday night, she would lift me from the ground in one of her fire-smothering hugs. And on the way out, Sunday afternoon, I was again taken into the air. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was weighing me.

My grandmother survived the War barefoot, scavenging other people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins, and the bits that clung to bones and pits. And so she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes. And hotel buffets: while the rest of us erected Golden Calves of breakfast, she would make sandwich upon sandwich to swaddle in napkins and stash in her bag for lunch. It was my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as you’re serving, and that every part of the apple is edible.

Money wasn’t the point. (Many of those coupons I clipped were for foods she would never buy.)

Health wasn’t the point. (She would beg me to drink Coke.)

My grandmother never set a place for herself at family dinners. Even when there was nothing more to be done — no soup bowls to be topped off, no pots to be stirred or ovens checked — she stayed in the kitchen, like a vigilant guard (or prisoner) in a tower. As far as I could tell, the sustenance she got from the food she made didn’t require her to eat it.

In the forests of Europe, she ate to stay alive until the next opportunity to eat to stay alive. In America, fifty years later, we ate what pleased us. Our cupboards were filled with food bought on whims, overpriced foodie food, food we didn’t need. And when the expiration date passed, we threw it away without smelling it. Eating was carefree. My grandmother made that life possible for us. But she was, herself, unable to shake the desperation.

Growing up, my brothers and I thought our grandmother was the greatest chef who ever lived. We would literally recite those words when the food came to the table, and again after the first bite, and once more at the end of the meal: “You are the greatest chef who ever lived.” And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the Greatest Chef Who Ever Lived would probably have more than one recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most Great Recipes involved more than two ingredients.

And why didn’t we question her when she told us that dark food is inherently healthier than light food, or that most of the nutrients are found in the peel or crust? (The sandwiches of those weekend stays were made with the saved ends of pumpernickel loaves.) She taught us that animals that are bigger than you are very good for you, animals that are smaller than you are good for you, fish (which aren’t animals) are fine for you, then tuna (which aren’t fish), then vegetables, fruits, cakes, cookies, and sodas. No foods are bad for you. Fats are healthy — all fats, always, in any quantity. Sugars are very healthy. The fatter a child is, the healthier it is — especially if it’s a boy. Lunch is not one meal, but three, to be eaten at 11:00, 12:30, and 3:00. You are always starving.

In fact, her chicken and carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. Her culinary prowess was one of our family’s primal stories, like the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents’ marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us. We were the family that chose its battles wisely, and used wit to get out of binds, and loved the food of our matriarch.

Once upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about it. More stories could be told about my grandmother than about anyone else I’ve ever met — her otherwordly childhood, the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her assimilation — and though I will one day try to tell them to my children, we almost never told them to one another. Nor did we call her by any of the obvious and earned titles. We called her the Greatest Chef.

Perhaps her other stories were too difficult to tell. Or perhaps she chose her story for herself, wanting to be identified by her providing rather than her surviving. Or perhaps her surviving is contained within her providing: the story of her relationship to food holds all of the other stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.

Possible Again

UNEXPECTED IMPULSES STRUCK WHEN I found out I was going to be a father. I began tidying up the house, replacing long-dead lightbulbs, wiping windows, and filing papers. I had my glasses adjusted, bought a dozen pairs of white socks, installed a roof rack on top of the car and a “dog/cargo divider” in the back, had my first physical in half a decade . . . and decided to write a book about eating animals.

Fatherhood was the immediate impetus for the journey that would become this book, but I’d been packing my bags for most of my life. When I was two, the heroes of all of my bedtime stories were animals. When I was four, we fostered a cousin’s dog for a summer. I kicked it. My father told me we don’t kick animals. When I was seven, I mourned the death of my goldfish. I learned that my father had flushed him down the toilet. I told my father — in other, less civil words — we don’t flush animals down the toilet. When I was nine, I had a babysitter who didn’t want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn’t having chicken with my older brother and me: “I don’t want to hurt anything.”

“Hurt anything?” I asked.

“You know that chicken is chicken, right?”

Frank shot me a look: Mom and Dad entrusted this stupid woman with their precious babies?

Her intention might or might not have been to convert us to vegetarianism — just because conversations about meat tend to make people feel cornered, not all vegetarians are proselytizers — but being a teenager, she lacked whatever restraint it is that so often prevents a full telling of this particular story. Without drama or rhetoric, she shared what she knew.

My brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of hurt chickens, and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-I-have-never-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-didn’t-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.

What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strangers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn’t make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to change my life.

Until I didn’t. My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyielding in the beginning, lasted a few years, sputtered, and quietly died. I never thought of a response to our babysitter’s code, but found ways to smudge, diminish, and forget it. Generally speaking, I didn’t cause hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to do the right thing. Generally speaking, my conscience was clear enough. Pass the chicken, I’m starving.

Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake sale cause to fill the self-conscious half hour of school break, an occasion to get closer to the breasts of activist women. (And I continued to think it was wrong to hurt animals.) Which isn’t to say that I refrained from eating meat. Only that I refrained in public. Privately, the pendulum swung. Many dinners of those years began with my father asking, “Any dietary restrictions I need to know about tonight?”

When I went to college, I started eating meat more earnestly. Not “believing in it” — whatever that would mean — but willfully pushing the questions out of my mind. I didn’t feel like having an “identity” right then. And I wasn’t around anyone who knew me as a vegetarian, so there was no issue of public hypocrisy, or even having to explain a change. It might well have been the prevalence of vegetarianism on campus that discouraged my own — one is less likely to give money to a street musician whose case is overflowing with bills.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

When I graduated, I ate meat — lots of every kind of meat — for about two years. Why? Because it tasted good. And because more important than reason in shaping habits are the stories we tell ourselves and one another. And I told a forgiving story about myself to myself.

Then I was set up on a blind date with the woman who would become my wife. And only a few weeks later we found ourselves talking about two surprising topics: marriage and vegetarianism.

Her history with meat was remarkably similar to mine: there were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there were choices made at the breakfast table the next morning. There was a gnawing (if only occasional and short-lived) dread that she was participating in something deeply wrong, and there was the acceptance of both the confounding complexity of the issue and the forgivable fallibility of being human. Like me, she had intuitions that were very strong, but apparently not strong enough.

People get married for many different reasons, but one that animated our decision to take that step was the prospect of explicitly marking a new beginning. Jewish ritual and symbolism strongly encourage this notion of demarcating a sharp division with what came before — the most well-known example being the smashing of the glass at the end of the marriage ceremony. Things were as they were before, but they will be different now. Things will be better. We will be better.

Sounds and feels great, but better how? I could think of endless ways to make myself better (I could learn foreign languages, be more patient, work harder), but I’d already made too many such vows to trust them anymore. I could also think of endless ways to make “us” better, but the meaningful things we can agree on and change in a relationship are few. In actuality, even in those moments when so much feels possible, very little is.

Eating animals, a concern we’d both had and had both forgotten, seemed like a place to start. So much intersects there, and so much could flow from it. In the same week, we became engaged and vegetarian.

Of course our wedding wasn’t vegetarian, because we persuaded ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests, some of whom had traveled great distances to share our joy. (Find that logic hard to follow?) And we ate fish on our honeymoon, but we were in Japan, and when in Japan . . . And back in our new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only every now and then. Only whenever we felt like it.

And that, I thought, was that. And I thought that was just fine. I assumed we’d maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistency. Why should eating be different from any of the other ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.

And I couldn’t even feel confident that my intuitions were anything more than sentimental vestiges of my childhood — that if I were to probe deeply, I wouldn’t find indifference. I didn’t know what animals were, or even approximately how they were farmed or killed. The whole thing made me uncomfortable, but that didn’t imply that anyone else should be, or even that I should be. And I felt no rush or need to sort any of this out.

But then we decided to have a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story.

About half an hour after my son was born, I went into the waiting room to tell the gathered family the good news.

“You said he! So it’s a boy?”

“What’s his name?”

“Who does he look like?”

“Tell us everything!”

I answered their questions as quickly as I could, then went to a corner and turned on my cell phone.

“Grandma,” I said. “We have a baby.”

Her only phone is in the kitchen. She picked up after the first ring, which meant she had been sitting at the table, waiting for the call. It was just after midnight. Had she been clipping coupons? Preparing chicken and carrots to freeze for someone else to eat at some future meal? I’d never once seen or heard her cry, but tears pushed through her voice as she asked, “How much does it weigh?”

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, “Everything is possible again.” It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

Eating Animals

PERHAPS THE FIRST DESIRE MY son had, wordlessly and before reason, was the desire to eat. Seconds after being born, he was breastfeeding. I watched him with an awe that had no precedent in my life. Without explanation or experience, he knew what to do. Millions of years of evolution had wound the knowledge into him, as it had encoded beating into his tiny heart, and expansion and contraction into his newly dry lungs.

The awe had no precedent in my life, but it bound me, across generations, to others. I saw the rings of my tree: my parents watching me eat, my grandmother watching my mother eat, my great-grandparents watching my grandmother . . . He was eating as had the children of cave painters.

As my son began life and I began this book, it seemed that almost everything he did revolved around eating. He was nursing, or sleeping after nursing, or getting cranky before nursing, or getting rid of the milk he had nursed. As I finish this book, he is able to carry on quite sophisticated conversations, and increasingly the food he eats is digested together with stories we tell. Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (his physical health matters, the pleasure of eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter. These stories bind our family together, and bind our family to others. Stories about food are stories about us — our history and our values. Within my family’s Jewish tradition, I came to learn that food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable — the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

There are thousands of foods on the planet, and explaining why we eat the relatively small selection we do requires some words. We need to explain that the parsley on the plate is for decoration, that pasta is not a “breakfast food,” why we eat wings but not eyes, cows but not dogs. Stories establish narratives, and stories establish rules.

At many times in my life, I have forgotten that I have stories to tell about food. I just ate what was available or tasty, what seemed natural, sensible, or healthy — what was there to explain? But the kind of parenthood I always imagined practicing abhors such forgetfulness.

This story didn’t begin as a book. I simply wanted to know — for myself and my family — what meat is. I wanted to know as concretely as possible. Where does it come from? How is it produced? How are animals treated, and to what extent does that matter? What are the economic, social, and environmental effects of eating animals? My personal quest didn’t stay that way for long. Through my efforts as a parent, I came face-to-face with realities that as a citizen I couldn’t ignore, and as a writer I couldn’t keep to myself. But facing those realities and writing responsibly about them are not the same.

I wanted to address these questions comprehensively. So although upwards of 99 percent of all animals eaten in this country come from “factory farms” — and I will spend much of the rest of the book explaining what this means and why it matters — the other 1 percent of animal agriculture is also an important part of this story. The disproportionate amount of this book that is occupied by discussion of the best family-run animal farms reflects how significant I think they are, but at the same time, how insignificant: they prove the rule.

To be perfectly honest (and to risk losing my credibility on page 13), I assumed, before beginning my research, that I knew what I would find — not the details, but the general picture. Others made the same assumption. Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about “eating animals,” they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case. (What assumptions did you make upon seeing the title of this book?)

I, too, assumed that my book about eating animals would become a straightforward case for vegetarianism. It didn’t. A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I’ve written here.

Animal agriculture is a hugely complicated topic. No two animals, breeds of animals, farms, farmers, or eaters are the same. Looking past the mountains of research — reading, interviewing, seeing firsthand — that was necessary even to begin to think about this stuff seriously, I had to ask myself if it was possible to say something coherent and significant about a practice that is so diverse. Perhaps there is no “meat.” Instead, there is this animal, raised on this farm, slaughtered at this plant, sold in this way, and eaten by this person — but each distinct in a way that prevents them from being pieced together as mosaic.

And eating animals is one of those topics, like abortion, where it is impossible to definitively know some of the most important details (When is a fetus a person, as opposed to a potential person? What is animal experience really like?) and that cuts right to one’s deepest discomforts, often provoking defensiveness or aggression. It’s a slippery, frustrating, and resonant subject. Each question prompts another, and it’s easy to find yourself defending a position far more extreme than you actually believe or could live by. Or worse, finding no position worth defending or living by.

Then there is the difficulty of discerning the difference between how something feels and what something is. Too often, arguments about eating animals aren’t arguments at all, but statements of taste. And where there are facts — this is how much pork we eat; these are how many mangrove swamps have been destroyed by aquaculture; this is how a cow is killed — there’s the question of what we can actually do with them. Should they be ethically compelling? Communally? Legally? Or just more information for each eater to digest as he sees fit?

While this book is the product of an enormous amount of research, and is as objective as any work of journalism can be — I used the most conservative statistics available (almost always from government, and peer-reviewed academic and industry sources) and hired two outside fact-checkers to corroborate them — I think of it as a story. There’s plenty of data to be found, but it is often thin and malleable. Facts are important, but they don’t, on their own, provide meaning — especially when they are so bound to linguistic choices. What does a precisely measured pain response in chickens mean? Does it mean pain? What does pain mean? No matter how much we learn about the physiology of the pain — how long it persists, the symptoms it produces, and so forth — none of it will tell us anything definitive. But place facts in a story, a story of compassion or domination, or maybe both — place them in a story about the world we live in and who we are and who we want to be — and you can begin to speak meaningfully about eating animals.

We are made of stories. I’m thinking of those Saturday afternoons at my grandmother’s kitchen table, just the two of us — black bread in the glowing toaster, a humming refrigerator that couldn’t be seen through its veil of family photographs. Over pumpernickel ends and Coke, she would tell me about her escape from Europe, the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn’t. It was the story of her life — “Listen to me,” she would plead — and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was.

I know, now, what it was. And though the particulars couldn’t be more different, I am trying, and will try, to transmit her lesson to my son. This book is my most earnest attempt to do so. I feel great trepidation as I begin, because there is so much reverberation. Putting aside, for a moment, the more than ten billion land animals slaughtered for food every year in America, and putting aside the environment, and workers, and such directly related issues as world hunger, flu epidemics, and biodiversity, there is also the question of how we think of ourselves and one another. We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves. If my wife and I raise our son as a vegetarian, he will not eat his great-grandmother’s singular dish, will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the Greatest Chef Who Ever Lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.

My grandmother’s first words upon seeing my son for the first time were “My revenge.” Of the infinite number of things she could have said, that was what she chose, or was chosen for her.

Listen to Me:

“WE WEREN’T RICH, BUT WE always had enough. Thursday we baked bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted the whole week. Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and soup with noodles. You would go to the butcher and ask for a little more fat. The fattiest piece was the best piece. It wasn’t like now. We didn’t have refrigerators, but we had milk and cheese. We didn’t have every kind of vegetable, but we had enough. The things that you have here and take for granted . . . But we were happy. We didn’t know any better. And we took what we had for granted, too.

“Then it all changed. During the War it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I’m not just talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn’t too good to eat from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn’t eat. If you helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find. I ate things I wouldn’t tell you about.

“Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition.

“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”

“He saved your life.”

“I didn’t eat it.”

“You didn’t eat it?”

“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”

“Of course.”

“But not even to save your life?”

“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

Modern industrial fishing lines can be as long as 75 miles — the same distance as from sea level to space.

1.

George

I SPENT THE FIRST TWENTY-SIX years of my life disliking animals. I thought of them as bothersome, dirty, unapproachably foreign, frighteningly unpredictable, and plain old unnecessary. I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs — inspired, in large part, by a related fear that I inherited from my mother, which she inherited from my grandmother. As a child I would agree to go over to friends’ houses only if they confined their dogs in some other room. If a dog approached in the park, I’d become hysterical until my father hoisted me onto his shoulders. I didn’t like watching television shows that featured dogs. I didn’t understand — I disliked — people who got excited about dogs. It’s possible that I even developed a subtle prejudice against the blind.

And then one day I became a person who loved dogs. I became a dog person.

George came very much out of the blue. My wife and I hadn’t broached the subject of getting a dog, much less set about looking for one. (Why would we? I disliked dogs.) In this case, the first day of the rest of my life was a Saturday. Strolling down Seventh Avenue in our Brooklyn neighborhood, we came upon a tiny black puppy, asleep on the curb, curled into its ADOPT ME vest like a question mark. I don’t believe in love at first sight or fate, but I loved that damned dog and it was meant to be. Even if I wouldn’t touch it.

Suggesting we adopt the puppy might have been the most unpredictable thing I’d ever done, but here was a beautiful little animal, the sort that even a hard-hearted dog skeptic would find irresistible. Of course, people find beauty in things without wet noses, too. But there is something unique about the ways in which we fall in love with animals. Unwieldy dogs and minuscule dogs and long-haired and sleek dogs, snoring Saint Bernards, asthmatic pugs, unfolding shar-peis, and depressed-looking basset hounds — each with devoted fans. Bird-watchers spend frigid mornings scanning skies and scrub for the feathered objects of their fascination. Cat lovers display an intensity lacking — thank goodness — in most human relationships. Children’s books are constellated with rabbits and mice and bears and caterpillars, not to mention spiders, crickets, and alligators. Nobody ever had a plush toy shaped like a rock, and when the most enthusiastic stamp collector refers to loving stamps, it is an altogether different kind of affection.

We took the puppy home. I hugged it — her — from across the room. Then, because it — she — gave me reason to think I wouldn’t lose digits in the process, I graduated to feeding her from my palm. Then I let her lick my hand. And then I let her lick my face. And then I licked her face. And now I love all dogs and will live happily ever after.

Sixty-three percent of American households have at least one pet. This prevalence is most impressive because of its newness. Keeping companion animals became common only with the rise of the middle class and urbanization, perhaps because of the deprivation of other contact with animals, or simply because pets cost money and are therefore a signifier of extravagance (Americans spend $34 billion on their companion animals every year). Oxford historian Sir Keith Thomas, whose encyclopedic work Man and the Natural World is now considered a classic, argues that

the spread of pet-keeping among the urban middle classes in the early modern period is . . . a development of genuine social, psychological, and indeed commercial importance. . . . It also had intellectual implications. It encouraged the middle classes to form optimistic conclusions about animal intelligence; it gave rise to innumerable anecdotes about animal sagacity; it stimulated the notion that animals could have character and individual personality; and it created the psychological foundation for the view that some animals at least were entitled to moral consideration.

It wouldn’t be right to say that my relationship with George has revealed to me the “sagacity” of animals. Beyond her most basic desires, I don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on in her head. (Although I have become convinced that much, beyond basic desires, is going on.) I’m surprised by her lack of intelligence as often as I’m surprised by her intelligence. The differences between us are always more present than the similarities.

And George isn’t a kumbaya being who wants only to give and receive affection. As it turns out, she is a major pain in the ass an awful lot of the time. She compulsively pleasures herself in front of guests, eats my shoes and my son’s toys, is monomaniacally obsessed with squirrel genocide, has the savant-like ability to find her way between the camera lens and the subject of every photo taken in her vicinity, lunges at skateboarders and Hasids, humiliates menstruating women (and is the worst nightmare of menstruating Hasids), backs her flatulent ass into the least interested person in the room, digs up the freshly planted, scratches the newly bought, licks the about-to-be-served, and occasionally exacts revenge (for what?) by shitting in the house.

Our various struggles — to communicate, to recognize and accommodate each other’s desires, simply to coexist — force me to encounter and interact with something, or rather someone, entirely other. George can respond to a handful of words (and choose to ignore a slightly larger handful), but our relationship takes place almost entirely outside of language. She seems to have thoughts and emotions. Sometimes I think I understand them, but often I don’t. Like a photograph, she cannot say what she lets me see. She is an embodied secret. And I must be a photograph to her.

Just last night, I looked up from my reading to find George staring at me from across the room. “When did you come in here?” I asked. She lowered her eyes and lumbered away from me, down the hall — not a silhouette so much as a kind of negative space, a form cut out of the domesticity. Despite our patterns, which are more regular than anything I share with another person, she still feels unpredictable to me. And despite our closeness, I am occasionally thrilled, and even a bit scared, by the foreignness of her. Having a child greatly exacerbated this, as there was absolutely no guarantee — beyond the one I felt absolutely — that she wouldn’t maul the baby.

The list of our differences could fill a book, but like me, George fears pain, seeks pleasure, and craves not just food and play, but companionship. I don’t need to know the details of her moods and preferences to know that she has them. Our psychologies are not the same or similar, but each of us has a perspective, a way of processing and experiencing the world that is intrinsic and unique.

I wouldn’t eat George, because she’s mine. But why wouldn’t I eat a dog I’d never met? Or more to the point, what justification might I have for sparing dogs but eating other animals?

A Case for Eating Dogs

DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT’S perfectly legal in forty-four states, eating “man’s best friend” is as taboo as a man eating his best friend. Even the most enthusiastic carnivores won’t eat dogs. TV guy and sometimes cooker Gordon Ramsay can get pretty macho with baby animals when doing publicity for something he’s selling, but you’ll never see a puppy peeking out of one of his pots. And though he once said he’d electrocute his children if they became vegetarian, I wonder what his response would be if they poached the family pooch.

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can’t hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don’t they get to curl up by the fire? Why can’t they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

Our taboo against dog eating says something about dogs and a great deal about us.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses.

The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows.

The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

While written in a much different context, George Orwell’s words (from Animal Farm) apply here: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The protective emphasis is not a law of nature; it comes from the stories we tell about nature.

So who’s right? What might be the reasons to exclude canine from the menu? The selective carnivore suggests:

Don’t eat companion animals. But dogs aren’t kept as companions in all of the places they are eaten. And what about our petless neighbors? Would we have any right to object if they had dog for dinner?

OK, then:

Don’t eat animals with significant mental capacities. If by “significant mental capacities” we mean what a dog has, then good for the dog. But such a definition would also include the pig, cow, chicken, and many species of sea animals. And it would exclude severely impaired humans.

Then:

It’s for good reason that the eternal taboos — don’t fiddle with your shit, kiss your sister, or eat your companions — are taboo. Evolutionarily speaking, those things are bad for us. But dog eating hasn’t been and isn’t a taboo in many places, and it isn’t in any way bad for us. Properly cooked, dog meat poses no greater health risks than any other meat, nor does such a nutritious meal foster much objection from the physical component of our selfish genes.

And dog eating has a proud pedigree. Fourth-century tombs contain depictions of dogs being slaughtered along with other food animals. It was a fundamental enough habit to have informed language itself: the Sino-Korean character for “fair and proper” (yeon) literally translates into “as cooked dog meat is delicious.” Hippocrates praised dog meat as a source of strength. The Romans ate “suckling puppy,” Dakota Indians enjoyed dog liver, and not so long ago Hawaiians ate dog brains and blood. The Mexican hairless dog was the principal food species of the Aztecs. Captain Cook ate dog. Roald Amundsen famously ate his sled dogs. (Granted, he was really hungry.) And dogs are still eaten to overcome bad luck in the Philippines; as medicine in China and Korea; to enhance libido in Nigeria; and in numerous places, on every continent, because they taste good. For centuries, the Chinese have raised special breeds of dogs, like the black-tongued chow, for chow, and many European countries still have laws on the books regarding postmortem examination of dogs intended for human consumption.

Of course, something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now. But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. This amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

In a sense it’s what we’re doing already. Rendering — the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets — allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain. In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food. (Almost twice as many dogs and cats are euthanized as are adopted.) So let’s just eliminate this inefficient and bizarre middle step.

This need not challenge our civility. We won’t make them suffer any more than necessary. While it’s widely believed that adrenaline makes dog meat taste better — hence the traditional methods of slaughter: hanging, boiling alive, beating to death — we can all agree that if we’re going to eat them, we should kill them quickly and painlessly, right? For example, the traditional Hawaiian means of holding the dog’s nose shut — in order to conserve blood — must be regarded (socially if not legally) as a no-no. Perhaps we could include dogs under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. That doesn’t say anything about how they’re treated during their lives, and isn’t subject to any meaningful oversight or enforcement, but surely we can rely on the industry to “self-regulate,” as we do with other eaten animals.

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes. The inefficient use of dogs — conveniently already in areas of high human population (take note, local-food advocates) — should make any good ecologist blush. One could argue that various “humane” groups are the worst hypocrites, spending enormous amounts of money and energy in a futile attempt to reduce the number of unwanted dogs while at the very same time propagating the irresponsible no-dog-for-dinner taboo. If we let dogs be dogs, and breed without interference, we would create a sustainable, local meat supply with low energy inputs that would put even the most efficient grass-based farming to shame. For the ecologically minded it’s time to admit that dog is realistic food for realistic environmentalists.

Can’t we get over our sentimentality? Dogs are plentiful, good for you, easy to cook, and tasty, and eating them is vastly more reasonable than going through all the trouble of processing them into protein bits to become the food for the other species that become our food.

For those already convinced, here’s a classic Filipino recipe. I haven’t tried it myself, but sometimes you can read a recipe and just know.

Stewed Dog, Wedding Style

First, kill a medium-sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire. Carefully remove the skin while still warm and set aside for later (may be used in other recipes). Cut meat into 1" cubes. Marinate meat in mixture of vinegar, peppercorn, salt, and garlic for 2 hours. Fry meat in oil using a large wok over an open fire, then add onions and chopped pineapple and sauté until tender. Pour in tomato sauce and boiling water, add green pepper, bay leaf, and Tabasco. Cover and simmer over warm coals until meat is tender. Blend in puree of dog’s liver and cook for additional 5–7 minutes.

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing.

Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

2.

Friends and Enemies

DOGS AND FISH DON’T GO together. Dogs go with cats, kids, and firemen. We share our food and beds with them, bring them on planes and to doctors, take joy in their joy, and mourn their deaths. Fish go in aquariums, with tartar sauce, between chopsticks, and at the far end of human regard. They are divided from us by surfaces and silence.

The differences between dogs and fish couldn’t seem more profound. Fish signifies an unimaginable plurality of kinds, an ocean of more than 31,000 different species unleashed by language each time we use the word. Dogs, by contrast, are decisively singular: one species and often known by personal names, e.g., George. I am among the 95 percent of male dog owners who talk to their dogs — if not the 87 percent who believe their dogs talk back. But it’s hard to imagine what a fish’s internal experience of perception is like, much less try to engage with it. Fish are precisely attuned to changes in water pressure, can cue in to a diverse array of chemicals released by the bodies of other sea animals, and respond to sounds from as far away as twelve miles. Dogs are here, padding mud-pawed through our living rooms, snoring under our desks. Fish are always in another element, silent and unsmiling, legless and dead-eyed. They were created, in the Bible, on a different day, and are thought of as an unflatteringly early stop in the evolutionary march toward the human.

Historically, tuna — I’ll use the tuna as the ambassador of the fish world, as it’s the most eaten fish in the United States — were caught with individual hooks and lines, ultimately controlled by individual fishermen. A hooked fish might bleed to death or drown (fish drown when unable to move), and then be hauled into the boat. Larger fish (including not only tuna, but swordfish and marlin) would often only be injured by the hook, their wounded bodies still more than capable of resisting the pull of the line for hours or days. The massive power of larger fish meant that two and sometimes three men were required to pull in a single animal. Special pickax tools called gaffs were (and still are) used to pull in large fish once they were within reach. Slamming a gaff into the side, fin, or even the eye of a fish creates a bloody but effective handle to help haul it on deck. Some claim that it’s most effective to place the hook of the gaff under the backbone. Others — like the authors of a United Nations manual for fishing — argue, “If possible gaff it by the head.”

In the old days, fishermen painstakingly located schools of tuna and then muscled in one after another with pole, line, and gaff. The tuna on our plates today, though, is almost never caught with simple “pole and line” equipment, but with one of two modern methods: the purse seine or the longline. Since I wanted to learn about the most common techniques for bringing the most commonly eaten sea animals to market, my research ultimately turned to these dominant methods of tuna fishing — and I’ll describe them later. But I had plenty to consider first.

The Internet is overflowing with video footage of fishing. Shitty B rock as soundtracks to men behaving as if they just saved someone’s life after reeling in a wearied marlin or bluefin. And then there are the subgenres of bikini-clad women gaffing, very young children gaffing, first-time gaffers. Looking past the bizarre ritualism, my mind kept returning to the fish in these videos, to the moment when the gaff is between the fisher’s hand and the creature’s eye. . . .

No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face. Nothing could be more obvious or less in need of explanation. Is such concern morally out of place when applied to fish, or are we silly to have such unquestioning concern about dogs? Is the suffering of a drawn-out death something that is cruel to inflict on any animal that can experience it, or just some animals?

Can the familiarity of the animals we have come to know as companions be a guide to us as we think about the animals we eat? Just how distant are fish (or cows, pigs, or chickens) from us in the scheme of life? Is it a chasm or a tree that defines the distance? Are nearness and distance even relevant? If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

The lives of billions of animals a year and the health of the largest ecosystems on our planet hang on the thinly reasoned answers we give to these questions. Such global concerns can themselves feel distant, though. We care most about what’s close to us, and have a remarkably easy time forgetting everything else. We also have a strong impulse to do what others around us are doing, especially when it comes to food. Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories. The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore — “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” — can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.

There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists. These opposing positions — and the closely related unwillingness to take a position — converge in suggesting that eating animals matters. If and how we eat animals cuts to something deep. Meat is bound up with the story of who we are and who we want to be, from the book of Genesis to the latest farm bill. It raises significant philosophical questions and is a $140 billion–plus a year industry that occupies nearly a third of the land on the planet, shapes ocean ecosystems, and may well determine the future of earth’s climate. And yet we seem able to think only about the edges of the arguments — the logical extremes rather than the practical realities. My grandmother said she wouldn’t eat pork to save her life, and though the context of her story is as extreme as it gets, many people seem to fall back on this all-or-nothing framework when discussing their everyday food choices. It’s a way of thinking that we would never apply to other ethical realms. (Imagine always or never lying.) I can’t count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn’t require that we pretend we are going to have collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what’s right for us personally and even about what’s right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?

War

FOR EVERY TEN TUNA, SHARKS, and other large predatory fish that were in our oceans fifty to a hundred years ago, only one is left. Many scientists predict the total collapse of all fished species in less than fifty years — and intense efforts are under way to catch, kill, and eat even more sea animals. Our situation is so extreme that research scientists at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia argue that “our interactions with fisheries resources [also known as fish] have come to resemble . . . wars of extermination.”

As I came to see, war is precisely the right word to describe our relationship to fish — it captures the technologies and techniques brought to bear against them, and the spirit of domination. As my experience with the world of animal agriculture deepened, I saw that the radical transformations fishing has undergone in the past fifty years are representative of something much larger. We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.

Like pornography, factory farming is hard to define but easy to identify. In a narrow sense it is a system of industrialized and intensive agriculture in which animals — often housed by the tens or even hundreds of thousands — are genetically engineered, restricted in mobility, and fed unnatural diets (which almost always include various drugs, like antimicrobials). Globally, roughly 450 billion land animals are now factory farmed every year. (There is no tally of fish.) Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or “externalize” such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering. For thousands of years, farmers took their cues from natural processes. Factory farming considers nature an obstacle to be overcome.

Industrial fishing is not exactly factory farming, but it belongs in the same category and needs to be part of the same discussion — it is part of the same agricultural coup. This is most obvious for aquaculture (farms on which fish are confined to pens and “harvested”) but is every bit as true for wild fishing, which shares the same spirit and intensive use of modern technology.

Captains of fishing vessels today are more Kirk than Ahab. They watch fish from electronics-filled rooms and plot the best moment to rope in entire schools at a time. If fish are missed, the captains know it and take a second pass. And these fishers aren’t just able to look at the schools of fish that are within a certain distance of their boats. GPS monitors are deployed along with “fish-attracting devices” (FADs) across the ocean. The monitors transmit information to the control rooms of fishing boats about how many fish are present and the exact location of the floating FADs.

Once the picture of industrial fishing is filled in — the 1.4 billion hooks deployed annually on longlines (on each of which is a chunk of fish, squid, or dolphin flesh used as bait); the 1,200 nets, each one thirty miles in length, used by only one fleet to catch only one species; the ability of a single vessel to haul in fifty tons of sea animals in a few minutes — it becomes easier to think of contemporary fishers as factory farmers rather than fishermen.

Technologies of war have literally and systematically been applied to fishing. Radar, echo sounders (once used to locate enemy submarines), navy-developed electronic navigation systems, and, in the last decade of the twentieth century, satellite-based GPS give fishers unprecedented abilities to identify and return to fish hot spots. Satellite-generated images of ocean temperatures are used to identify fish schools.

Factory farming’s success depends on consumers’ nostalgic images of food production — the fisherman reeling in fish, the pig farmer knowing each of his pigs as individuals, the turkey rancher watching beaks break through eggs — because these images correspond to something we respect and trust. But these persistent images are also factory farmers’ worst nightmares: they have the power to remind the world that what is now 99 percent of farming was not long ago less than 1 percent. The takeover of the factory farm could itself be taken over.

What might inspire such change? Few know the details about the contemporary meat and seafood industries, but most know the gist — at least that something isn’t right. The details are important, but they probably won’t, on their own, persuade most people to change. Something else is needed.

3.

Shame

AMONG MANY OTHER THINGS WE could say about his wide-ranging explorations of literature, Walter Benjamin was the most penetrating interpreter of Franz Kafka’s animal tales.

Shame is crucial in Benjamin’s reading of Kafka and is imagined as a unique moral sensibility. Shame is both intimate — felt in the depths of our inner lives — and, at the same time, social — something we feel strictly before others. For Kafka, shame is a response and a responsibility before invisible others — before “unknown family,” to use a phrase from The Trial. It is the core experience of the ethical.

Benjamin emphasizes that Kafka’s ancestors — his unknown family — include animals. Animals are part of the community in front of which Kafka might blush, a way of saying that they are within Kafka’s sphere of moral concern. Benjamin also tells us that Kafka’s animals are “receptacles of forgetting,” a remark that is, at first, puzzling.

I mention these details here to frame a small story about Kafka’s glance falling upon some fish in a Berlin aquarium. As told by Kafka’s close friend Max Brod:

Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. “Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don’t eat you anymore.” It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality — which was something almost completely foreign to him — he brought them out.

What had moved Kafka to become vegetarian? And why is it a comment about fish that Brod records to introduce Kafka’s diet? Surely Kafka also made comments about land animals in the course of becoming vegetarian.

A possible answer lies in the connection that Benjamin makes, on the one hand, between animals and shame, and on the other, between animals and forgetting. Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely — yet not entirely — forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification. Fish, for Kafka, must have been the very flesh of forgetting: their lives are forgotten in a radical manner that is much less common in our thinking about farmed land animals.

Beyond this literal forgetting of animals by eating them, animal bodies were, for Kafka, burdened with the forgetting of all those parts of ourselves we want to forget. If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our “animal nature.” We then repress or conceal that nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals. And this seems right. We do not, so to speak, blush with shame before fish. We can recognize parts of ourselves in fish — spines, nociceptors (pain receptors), endorphins (that relieve pain), all of the familiar pain responses — but then deny that these animal similarities matter, and thus equally deny important parts of our humanity. What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.

Today, at stake in the question of eating animals is not only our basic ability to respond to sentient life, but our ability to respond to parts of our own (animal) being. There is a war not only between us and them, but between us and us. It is a war as old as story and more unbalanced than at any point in history. As philosopher and social critic Jacques Derrida reflects, it is

an unequal struggle, a war (whose inequality could one day be reversed) being waged between, on the one hand, those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity.

War is waged over the matter of pity. This war is probably ageless but . . . it is passing through a critical phase. We are passing through that phase, and it passes through us. To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape. . . . The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it.

Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away (from the animal, our plate, our concern, ourselves) or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Perhaps the innocence of young children and their freedom from certain responsibilities allow them to absorb an animal’s silence and gaze with more ease than adults. Perhaps our children, at least, have not taken a side in our war, only the spoils.

My family lived in Berlin in the spring of 2007, and we spent several afternoons at the aquarium. We stared into the tanks — or tanks just like the tanks — that Kafka had stared into. I was particularly taken by the sight of sea horses — those strange, chessman-like creatures that are a favorite of the popular animal imaginaire. Sea horses come not only in the chessman variety, but also in soda straw and plantlike shapes, and range in size from one to eleven inches. I am clearly not the only one fascinated by the perpetually startling appearance of these fish. (We desire to look at them so much that millions die in the aquarium and souvenir trade.) And it is just this odd aesthetic bias that makes me spend time on them here, while I pass over so many other animals — animals closer to our realm of concern. Sea horses are the extreme of the extreme.

Sea horses, more than most animals, inspire wonder — they draw our attention to the astonishing similarities and discontinuities between each kind of creature and every other. They can change color to blend in with their surroundings, and beat their dorsal fins nearly as fast as a hummingbird beats its wings. Because they have no teeth or stomach, food moves through them almost instantly, requiring them to eat constantly. (Hence such adaptations as eyes that move independently, which allow them to search for prey without turning their heads.) Not terribly good swimmers, they can die of exhaustion when caught in even small currents, so they prefer to anchor themselves to sea grasses or coral, or to each other — they like to swim in pairs, linked by their prehensile tails. Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so. They live in long-term monogamous partnerships. What is perhaps most unusual, though, is that it is the male sea horse that carries the young for up to six weeks. Males become properly “pregnant,” not only carrying, but fertilizing and nourishing the developing eggs with fluid secretions. The image of males giving birth is perpetually mind-blowing: a turbid liquid bursts forth from the brood pouch, and like magic, minuscule but fully formed sea horses appear out of the cloud.

My son was not impressed. He should have loved the aquarium, but was terrified and spent our time there pleading to go home. Perhaps he encountered something in what were, for me, the mute faces of sea animals. More likely he was afraid of the wet dimness, or the throat clearing of the whirring pumps, or the crowds. I figured if we went enough times, and stayed long enough, he would realize — eureka! — that in fact he enjoyed being there. It never happened.

As a writer aware of that Kafka story, I came to feel a certain kind of shame at the aquarium. The reflection in the tanks wasn’t Kafka’s face. It belonged to a writer who, when held up to his hero, was grossly, shamefully inadequate. And as a Jew in Berlin, I felt other shades of shame. And there was the shame that came with being a tourist, and with being an American as photos of Abu Ghraib proliferated. And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed “unintentionally” in seafood production. The shame of indiscriminate killing for no nutritional necessity or political cause or irrational hatred or intractable human conflict. I felt shame in the deaths my culture justified by so thin a concern as the taste of canned tuna (sea horses are one of the more than one hundred sea animal species killed as “bycatch” in the modern tuna industry) or the fact that shrimp make convenient hors d’oeuvres (shrimp trawling devastates sea horse populations more than any other activity). I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity — a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history — but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My son not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but shamed me into reconsideration.

And then there’s George, asleep at my feet while I type these words, her body contorted to fit the rectangle of sun on the floor. Her paws are paddling in the air, so she is probably dreaming about running: Chasing a squirrel? Playing with another dog in the park? Maybe she’s dreaming about swimming. I’d love to get inside that oblong skull of hers and see what mental baggage she’s trying to sort through or unload. Occasionally, when dreaming, she’ll let out a little yelp — sometimes loud enough to wake herself up, sometimes loud enough to rouse my son. (She always falls back asleep; he never does.) Sometimes she’ll wake from a dream panting, jump to her feet, get right up near me — her hot breath pushing against my face — and look directly into my eyes. Between us is . . . what?

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.

ANIMAL

Before visiting any farms, I spent more than a year wading through literature about eating animals: histories of agriculture, industry and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) materials, activist pamphlets, relevant philosophical works, and the numerous existing books about food that touch on the subject of meat. I frequently found myself confused. Sometimes my disorientation was the result of the slipperiness of terms like suffering, joy, and cruelty. Sometimes it seemed to be a deliberate effect. Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate. Some words, like veal, help us forget what we are actually talking about. Some, like free-range, can mislead those whose consciences seek clarification. Some, like happy, mean the opposite of what they would seem. And some, like natural, mean next to nothing.

Nothing could seem more “natural” than the boundary between humans and animals (see: SPECIES BARRIER). It happens, though, that not all cultures even have the category animal or any equivalent word in their vocabulary — the Bible, for example, lacks any word that parallels the English animal. Even by the dictionary definition, humans both are and are not animals. In the first sense, humans are members of the animal kingdom. But more often, we casually use the word animal to signify all creatures — from orangutan to dog to shrimp — except humans. Within a culture, even within a family, people have their own understandings of what an animal is. Within each of us there are probably several different understandings.

What is an animal? Anthropologist Tim Ingold posed the question to a diverse group of scholars from the disciplines of social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, biology, psychology, philosophy, and semiotics. It proved impossible for them to reach a consensus on the meaning of the word. Tellingly, though, there were two important points of agreement: “First, that there is a strong emotional undercurrent to our ideas about animality; and, second, that to subject these ideas to critical scrutiny is to expose highly sensitive and largely unexplored aspects of the understanding of our own humanity.” To ask “What is an animal?” — or, I would add, to read a child a story about a dog or to support animal rights — is inevitably to touch upon how we understand what it means to be us and not them. It is to ask, “What is a human?”

ANTHROPOCENTRISM

The conviction that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, the appropriate yardstick by which to measure the lives of other animals, and the rightful owners of everything that lives.

ANTHROPODENIAL

The refusal to concede significant experiential likeness between humans and the other animals, as when my son asks if George will be lonely when we leave the house without her, and I say, “George doesn’t get lonely.”

ANTHROPOMORPHISM

The urge to project human experience onto the other animals, as when my son asks if George will be lonely.

The Italian philosopher Emanuela Cenami Spada wrote:

Anthropomorphism is a risk we must run, because we must refer to our own human experience in order to formulate questions about animal experience. . . . The only available “cure” [for anthropomorphism] is the continuous critique of our working definitions in order to provide more adequate answers to our questions, and to that embarrassing problem that animals present to us.

What is that embarrassing problem? That we don’t simply project human experience onto animals; we are (and are not) animals.

BATTERY CAGE

Is it anthropomorphism to try to imagine yourself into a farmed animal’s cage? Is it anthropodenial not to?

The typical cage for egg-laying hens allows each sixty-seven square inches of floor space — somewhere between the size of this page and a sheet of printer paper. Such cages are stacked between three and nine tiers high — Japan has the world’s highest battery cage unit, with cages stacked eighteen tiers high — in windowless sheds.

Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft. This is a kind of blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into your feet.

After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of food and hope, will become cannibalistic.

There is no respite, no relief. No elevator repairman is coming. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for your journey to the only place worse (see: PROCESSING).

BROILER CHICKENS

Not all chickens have to endure battery cages. In this way only, it could be said that broilers — chickens that become meat (as opposed to layers, chickens that lay eggs) — are lucky: they tend to get close to a single square foot of space.

If you aren’t a farmer, what I’ve just written probably confuses you. You probably thought that chickens were chickens. But for the past half century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens — broilers and layers — each with distinct genetics. We call them both chickens, but they have starkly different bodies and metabolisms, engineered for different “functions.” Layers make eggs. (Their egg output has more than doubled since the 1930s.) Broilers make flesh. (In the same period, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time. Chickens once had a life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent.)

This raises all kinds of bizarre questions — questions that before I learned about our two types of chickens, I’d never had reason to ask — like, What happens to all of the male offspring of layers? If man hasn’t designed them for meat, and nature clearly hasn’t designed them to lay eggs, what function do they serve?

They serve no function. Which is why all male layers — half of all the layer chickens born in the United States, more than 250 million chicks a year — are destroyed.

Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about.

Most male layers are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Other layer chicks are destroyed in other ways, and it’s impossible to call those animals more or less fortunate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled to the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top. Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks).

Cruel? Depends on your definition of cruelty (see: CRUELTY).

BULLSHIT

1) The shit of a bull (see also: ENVIRONMENTALISM)

2) Misleading or false language and statements, such as:

BYCATCH

Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident — except not really “by accident,” since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. Modern fishing tends to involve much technology and few fishers. This combination leads to massive catches with massive amounts of bycatch. Take shrimp, for example. The average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 POUNDS OF OTHER SEA ANIMALS WERE KILLED AND TOSSED BACK INTO THE OCEAN FOR EVERY 1 POUND OF THIS SHRIMP.

Or take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed — gratuitously — while killing tuna are: manta ray, devil ray, spotted skate, bignose shark, copper shark, Galapagos shark, sandbar shark, night shark, sand tiger shark, (great) white shark, hammerhead shark, spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish, bigeye thresher, mako, blue shark, wahoo, sailfish, bonito, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, longbill spearfish, white marlin, swordfish, lancet fish, grey triggerfish, needlefish, pomfret, blue runner, black ruff, dolphin fish, bigeye cigarfish, porcupine fish, rainbow runner, anchovy, grouper, flying fish, cod, common sea horse, Bermuda chub, opah, escolar, leerfish, tripletail, goosefish, monkfish, sunfish, Murray eel, pilotfish, black gemfish, stone bass, bluefish, cassava fish, red drum, greater amberjack, yellowtail, common sea bream, barracuda, puffer fish, loggerhead turtle, green turtle, leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, Kemp’s ridley turtle, Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, Audouin’s gull, balearic shearwater, black-browed albatross, great black-backed gull, great shearwater, great-winged petrel, grey petrel, herring gull, laughing gull, northern royal albatross, shy albatross, sooty shearwater, southern fulmar, Yelkouan shearwater, yellow-legged gull, minke whale, sei whale, fin whale, common dolphin, northern right whale, pilot whale, humpback whale, beaked whale, killer whale, harbor porpoise, sperm whale, striped dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, spinner dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and goose-beaked whale.

Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

CAFO

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, a.k.a. factory farm. Tellingly, this formal designation was created not by the meat industry but by the Environmental Protection Agency (see also: ENVIRONMENTALISM). All CAFOs harm animals in ways that would be illegal according to even relatively weak animal welfare legislation. Thus:

CFE

Common Farming Exemptions make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry. In other words, farmers — corporations is the right word — have the power to define cruelty. If the industry adopts a practice — hacking off unwanted appendages with no painkillers, for example, but you can let your imagination run with this — it automatically becomes legal.

CFEs are enacted state by state and range from the disturbing to the absurd. Take Nevada. Under its CFE, the state’s welfare laws cannot be enforced to “prohibit or interfere with established methods of animal husbandry, including the raising, handling, feeding, housing, and transporting, of livestock or farm animals.” What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Lawyers David Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan, experts on the issue, explain:

Certain states exempt specific practices, rather than all customary farming practices. . . . Ohio exempts farmed animals from requirements for “wholesome exercise and a change of air,” and Vermont exempts farmed animals from the section in its criminal anticruelty statute that deems it illegal to “tie, tether and restrain” an animal in a manner that is “inhumane or detrimental to its welfare.” One cannot help but assume that in Ohio farmed animals are denied exercise and air, and that in Vermont they are tied, tethered or restrained in a manner that is inhumane.

COMFORT FOOD

One night, when my son was four weeks old, he developed a slight fever. By the next morning he was having trouble breathing. On our pediatrician’s recommendation, we took him to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), which often expresses itself in adults as the common cold, but in babies can be extremely dangerous, even life threatening. We ended up spending a week in the pediatric intensive-care unit, my wife and I taking turns sleeping in the armchair in our son’s room, and on the waiting-room recliner.

On the second, third, fourth, and fifth days, our friends Sam and Eleanor brought us food. Lots of food, far more than we could eat: lentil salad, chocolate truffles, roasted vegetables, nuts and berries, mushroom risotto, potato pancakes, green beans, nachos, wild rice, oatmeal, dried mango, pasta primavera, chili — all of it comfort food. We could have eaten in the cafeteria or ordered in. And they could have expressed their love with visits and kind words. But they brought all of that food, and it was a small, good thing that we needed. That, more than any other reason — and there are many other reasons — is why this book is dedicated to them.

COMFORT FOOD, CONT.

On the sixth day, my wife and I were able, for the first time since arriving, to leave the hospital together. Our son was clearly over the hump, and doctors thought we’d be able to take him home the following morning. We could hear the bullet we’d dodged whistle past. So as soon as he’d fallen asleep (with my in-laws by his bedside), we took the elevator down and reemerged into the world.

It was snowing. The snowflakes were surreally large, distinct and durable: like the ones children cut out of white paper. We glided like sleepwalkers down Second Avenue, no destination in mind, and ended up in a Polish diner. Massive glass windows faced the street, and the snowflakes clung for several seconds before descending. I can’t remember what I ordered. I can’t remember if the food was any good. It was the best meal of my life.

CRUELTY

Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

It’s often said that nature, “red in tooth and claw,” is cruel. I heard this again and again from ranchers, who tried to persuade me that they were protecting their animals from what lay outside the enclosures. Nature is no picnic, true. (Picnics are rarely picnics.) And it’s also true that animals on the very best farms often have better lives than they would in the wild. But nature isn’t cruel. And neither are the animals in nature that kill and occasionally even torture one another. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

DESPERATION

There are sixty pounds of flour in my grandmother’s basement. On a recent weekend visit, I was sent down to retrieve a bottle of Coke and discovered the sacks lining the wall, like sandbags on the banks of a rising river. Why would a ninety-year-old woman need so much flour? And why the several dozen two-liter bottles of Coke, or the pyramid of Uncle Ben’s, or the wall of pumpernickel loaves in the freezer?

“I noticed you have an awful lot of flour in the basement,” I said, returning to the kitchen.

“Sixty pounds.”

I couldn’t read her tone. Was that pride I heard? A hint of challenge? Shame?

“Can I ask why?”

She opened a cabinet and took down a thick stack of coupons, each of which offered a free sack of flour for every bag purchased.

“How did you get so many of these?” I asked.

“It wasn’t a problem.”

“What are you going to do with all of that flour?”

“I’ll make some cookies.”

I tried to imagine how my grandmother, who has never driven a car in her life, managed to schlep all of those sacks from the supermarket to her house. Someone drove her, as always, but did she load down any one car with all sixty, or did she make multiple trips? Knowing my grandmother, she probably calculated how many sacks she could get in one car without overly inconveniencing the driver. She then contacted the necessary number of friends and made that many trips to the supermarket, likely in one day. Was this what she meant by ingenuity, all those times she told me that it was her luck and ingenuity that got her through the Holocaust?

I’ve been an accomplice on many of my grandmother’s food-acquisition missions. I remember a sale of some pelleted bran cereal, for which the coupon limited three boxes per customer. After buying three boxes herself, my grandmother sent my brother and me to buy three boxes each while she waited at the door. What must I have looked like to the cashier? A five-year-old boy using a coupon to buy multiple boxes of a foodstuff that not even a genuinely starving person would willfully eat? We went back an hour later and did it again.

The flour demanded answers. For what population was she planning on baking all of these cookies? Where was she hiding the 1,400 cartons of eggs? And most obviously: How did she get all of those sacks into the basement? I’ve met enough of her decrepit chauffeurs to know they weren’t doing the hauling.

“One bag at a time,” she said, dusting the table with her palm.

One bag at a time. My grandmother has trouble making it from the car to the front door one step at a time. Her breathing is slow and labored, and on a recent visit to the doctor, it was discovered that she shares a heart rate with the great blue whale.

Her perpetual wish is to live to the next bar mitzvah, but I expect her to live another decade, at least. She’s not the kind of person who dies. She could live to be 120, and there’s no way she’ll use up half of the flour. And she must know that.

DISCOMFORT FOOD

Sharing food generates good feeling and creates social bonds. Michael Pollan, who has written as thoughtfully about food as anyone, calls this “table fellowship” and argues that its importance, which I agree is significant, is a vote against vegetarianism. At one level, he’s right.

Let’s assume you’re like Pollan and are opposed to factory-farmed meat. If you’re at the guest end, it stinks not to eat food that was prepared for you, especially (although he doesn’t get into this) when the grounds for refusal are ethical. But how much does it stink? It’s a classic dilemma: How much do I value creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible? The relative importance of ethical eating and table fellowship will be different in different situations (declining my grandmother’s chicken with carrots is different from passing on microwaved buffalo wings).

More important, though, and what Pollan curiously doesn’t emphasize, is that attempting to be a selective omnivore is a much heavier blow to table fellowship than vegetarianism. Imagine an acquaintance invites you to dinner. You could say, “I’d love to come. And just so you know, I’m a vegetarian.” You could also say, “I’d love to come. But I only eat meat that is produced by family farmers.” Then what do you do? You’ll probably have to send the host a web link or list of local shops to even make the request intelligible, let alone manageable. This effort might be well-placed, but it is certainly more invasive than asking for vegetarian food (which these days requires no explanation). The entire food industry (restaurants, airline and college food services, catering at weddings) is set up to accommodate vegetarians. There is no such infrastructure for the selective omnivore.

And what about being at the host end of a gathering? Selective omnivores also eat vegetarian fare, but the reverse is obviously not true. What choice promotes greater table fellowship?

And it isn’t just what we put into our mouths that creates table fellowship, but what comes out. There is also the possibility that a conversation about what we believe would generate more fellowship — even when we believe different things — than any food being served.

DOWNER

1) Something or someone depressing.

2) An animal that collapses from poor health and is unable to stand back up. This does not imply grave illness any more than a fallen person does. Some downed animals are seriously ill or injured, but often enough they require little more than water and rest to be spared a slow, painful death. There aren’t reliable statistics available about downers (who would report them?), but estimates put the number of downed cows at around 200,000 a year — about two cows for every word in this book. When it comes to animal welfare, the absolute bare minimum, the least we could conceivably give, would seem to be euthanizing downed animals. But that costs money, and downers have no use and so earn no regard or mercy. In most of America’s fifty states it is perfectly legal (and perfectly common) to simply let downers die of exposure over days or toss them, live, into dumpsters.

My first research visit for this book was to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. Farm Sanctuary is not a farm. Nothing is grown or raised there. Founded in 1986, by Gene Baur and his then-wife, Lorri Houston, it was created as a place for rescued farmed animals to live out their unnatural lives. (Natural lives would be an awkward expression to use in reference to animals designed to be slaughtered in their adolescence. Farmed pigs, for example, are usually slaughtered at about 250 pounds. Let these genetic mutants live on, as they do at Farm Sanctuary, and they can exceed 800 pounds.)

Farm Sanctuary has become one of the most important animal protection, education, and lobbying organizations in America. Once funded by the sales of veggie hot dogs off the back of a VW van at Grateful Dead concerts — there’s no real need to make a joke here — Farm Sanctuary has expanded to occupy 175 acres in upstate New York and another 300-acre sanctuary in northern California. It has more than 200,000 members, an annual budget of about $6 million, and the ability to help shape local and national legislation. But none of that is why I chose to begin there. I simply wanted to interact with farmed animals. In my thirty years of life, the only pigs, cows, and chickens I had touched were dead and cut up.

As we walked the pasture, Baur explained that Farm Sanctuary was less his dream or big idea than it was the product of a fortuitous event.

“I was driving around the Lancaster stockyard, and saw, around back, a pile of downers. I approached, and one of the sheep moved her head. I realized she was still alive, left there to suffer. So I put her in the back of my van. I’d never done anything like that before, but I couldn’t leave her like that. I took her to the vet, expecting she’d be euthanized. But after a bit of prodding, she just stood right up. We took her to our house in Wilmington, and then, when we got the farm, we took her here. She lived ten years. Ten. Good years.”

I mention this story not to promote additional farm sanctuaries. They do plenty of good, but that good is educational (offering exposure to people like me) and not practical in the sense of actually rescuing and caring for a significant number of animals. Baur would be the first to acknowledge this. I mention the story to illustrate just how close to health downed animals can be. Any individual that close needs either to be saved or mercifully killed.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Concern for the preservation and restoration of natural resources and the ecological systems that sustain human life. There are grander definitions I could get more excited about, but this is in fact what is usually meant by the term, at least for the moment. Some environmentalists include animals as resources. What is meant by animals here is usually endangered or hunted species, rather than those most populous on earth, which are most in need of preservation and restoration.

A University of Chicago study recently found that our food choices contribute at least as much as our transportation choices to global warming. More recent and authoritative studies by the United Nations and the Pew Commission show conclusively that globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than transport. According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector — cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships — combined. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO_2, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO_2. The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.

The UN summarized the environmental effects of the meat industry this way: raising animals for food (whether on factory or traditional farms) “is one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. . . . [Animal agriculture] should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale.” In other words, if one cares about the environment, and if one accepts the scientific results of such sources as the UN (or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or the Pew Commission, or the Union of Concerned Scientists, or the Worldwatch Institute . . . ), one must care about eating animals.

Most simply put, someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.

FACTORY FARM

This term is sure to fall out of use in the next generation or so, either because there will be no more factory farms, or because there will be no more family farms to compare them to.

FAMILY FARM

A family farm is typically defined as a farm where a family owns the animals, manages the operations, and contributes labor on a day-to-day basis. Two generations ago, virtually all farms were family farms.

FEED CONVERSION

By necessity, both factory and family farmers are concerned with the ratio of edible animal flesh, eggs, or milk produced per unit of food a farmed animal is fed. It’s the disparity of their concern — and the very different lengths to which they will go to increase profitability — that distinguishes the two kinds of farmers. For example:

FOOD AND LIGHT

Factory farms commonly manipulate food and light to increase productivity, often at the expense of the animals’ welfare. Egg farmers do this to reboot birds’ internal clocks so they start laying valuable eggs faster and, crucially, at the same time. Here’s how one poultry farmer described the situation to me:

As soon as females mature — in the turkey industry at twenty- three to twenty-six weeks and with chickens sixteen to twenty — they’re put into barns and they lower the light; sometimes it’s total darkness twenty-four/seven. And then they put them on a very low-protein diet, almost a starvation diet. That will last about two or three weeks. Then they turn the lights on sixteen hours a day, or twenty with chickens, so she thinks it’s spring, and they put her on high-protein feed. She immediately starts laying. They have it down to such a science that they can stop it, start it, and everything. See, in the wild, when spring comes, the bugs come and the grass comes and the days get longer — that’s a key to tell the birds, “Well, I better start laying. Spring is coming.” So man has tapped into that already built-in thing. And by controlling the light, the feed, and when they eat, the industry can force the birds to lay eggs year-round. So that’s what they do. Turkey hens now lay 120 eggs a year and chickens lay over 300. That’s two or even three times as many as in nature. After that first year, they are killed because they won’t lay as many eggs in the second year — the industry figured out that it’s cheaper to slaughter them and start over than it is feed and house birds that lay fewer eggs. These practices are a big part of why poultry meat is so cheap today, but the birds suffer for it.

While most people know the vague outlines of the cruelty of factory farms — the cages are small, the slaughter is violent — certain widely practiced techniques have eluded the public consciousness. I had never heard about food and light deprivation. And after learning about it, I didn’t want to eat a conventional egg ever again. Thank goodness for free-range. Right?

FREE-RANGE

Applied to meat, eggs, dairy, and every now and then even fish (tuna on the range?), the free-range label is bullshit. It should provide no more peace of mind than “all-natural,” “fresh,” or “magical.”

To be considered free-range, chickens raised for meat must have “access to the outdoors,” which, if you take those words literally, means nothing. (Imagine a shed containing thirty thousand chickens, with a small door at one end that opens to a five-by-five dirt patch — and the door is closed all but occasionally.)

The USDA doesn’t even have a definition of free-range for laying hens and instead relies on producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims. Very often, the eggs of factory-farmed chickens — chickens packed against one another in vast barren barns — are labeled free-range. (“Cage-free” is regulated but means no more or less than what it says — they are literally not in cages.) One can reliably assume that most “free-range” (or “cage-free”) laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once “spent.” I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range.

FRESH

More bullshit. According to the USDA, “fresh” poultry has never had an internal temperature below 26 degrees or above 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Fresh chicken can be frozen (thus the oxymoron “fresh frozen”), and there is no time component to food freshness. Pathogen-infested, feces-splattered chicken can technically be fresh, cage-free, and free-range, and sold in the supermarket legally (the shit does need to be rinsed off first).

HABIT, THE POWER OF

My father, who did just about all of the cooking in our house, raised us on exotics. We ate tofu before tofu was tofu. It’s not that he liked the taste, or even that the supposed health benefits were touted as they are now. He simply liked eating something that no one else ate. And it wasn’t enough to use an unfamiliar food according to its typical preparation. No, he made portobello “fingers,” falafel “ragu,” seitan “scramblers.”

Much of my father’s scare-quote cooking involved food substitution, sometimes in the interest of placating my mother by replacing a gratuitously unkosher food with a more subtly unkosher one (bacon→turkey bacon), an unhealthy food with a more subtly unhealthy one (turkey bacon→fakin’ bacon), and sometimes simply to prove it could be done (flour→buckwheat). A few of his substitutions seemed to be nothing less than flipped middle fingers at nature itself.

On a recent trip home, I found the following foods in my parents’ refrigerator: faux chicken patties, nuggets, and strips; fake sausage links and patties; butter and egg substitutes, veggie burgers, and vegetarian kielbasa. You might assume that someone with a dozen varieties of imitation animal products was a vegan, but that would not only be incorrect — my father eats meat all the time — it would miss the point entirely. My father has always cooked against the grain. His cuisine is as existential as it is gastronomic.

We never questioned it, and might even have liked it — even if we never wanted to have friends come over for dinner. We might even have thought of him as a Great Chef. But as with my grandmother’s cooking, the food wasn’t food. It was story: ours was the dad who liked to take safe chances, who encouraged us to try the new thing because it was new, who liked it when people laughed at his mad-scientist cooking, because the laughter was more valuable than the taste of food could ever be.

One thing that never followed dinner was dessert. I lived with my parents for eighteen years and cannot remember a single family meal that included something sweet. My father wasn’t trying to protect our teeth. (I don’t remember being asked to brush much in those years.) He just didn’t think of dessert as necessary. Savory foods were clearly superior, so why waste stomach real estate? The amazing thing is that we believed him. My tastes — not only my ideas about foods, but my preconscious cravings — were formed around his lessons. To this day, I get less excited about dessert than anyone I know, and would always choose a slice of black bread over one of yellow cake.

Around what lessons will my son’s cravings be formed? Although my taste for meat has almost entirely gone away — I often find the sight of red meat repulsive — the smell of a summer barbecue still makes my mouth water. What will it do to my son? Will he be among the first of a generation that doesn’t crave meat because it never tasted it? Or will he crave it even more?

HUMAN

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don’t), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

INSTINCT

Most of us are familiar with the remarkable navigational abilities of migrating birds, which are able to find their way to specific nesting grounds across continents. When I learned about this, I was told that it was “instinct.” (“Instinct” continues to be the explanation of choice whenever animal behavior implies too much intelligence [see: INTELLIGENCE].) Instinct, though, wouldn’t go very far in explaining how pigeons use human transportation routes to navigate. Pigeons follow highways and take particular exits, likely following many of the same landmarks as the humans driving below.

Intelligence used to be narrowly defined as intellectual ability (book smarts); we now consider multiple intelligences, such as visual-spatial, interpersonal, emotional, and musical. A cheetah is not intelligent because it can run fast. But its uncanny ability to map space — to find the hypotenuse, to anticipate and counter the movements of prey — is a kind of mental work that matters. To write this off as instinct makes as much sense as equating the kick that results from a physician’s mallet tapping your knee to your being able to successfully take a penalty kick in a soccer game.

INTELLIGENCE

Generations of farmers have known that clever pigs will learn to undo the latches of their pens. Gilbert White, the British naturalist, wrote in 1789 of one such pig, a female, who, after undoing her own latch, “used to open all the intervening gates, and march, by herself, up to a distant farm where [a male] was kept; and when her purpose was served” — a great way of putting it — “would return home by the same means.”

Scientists have documented a pig language of sorts, and pigs will come when called (to humans or one another), will play with toys (and have favorites), and have been observed coming to the aid of other pigs in distress. Dr. Stanley Curtis, an animal scientist friendly to the industry, empirically evaluated the cognitive abilities of pigs by training them to play a video game with a joystick modified for snouts. They not only learned the games, but did so as fast as chimpanzees, demonstrating a surprising capacity for abstract representation. And the legend of pigs undoing latches continues. Dr. Ken Kephart, a colleague of Curtis’s, not only confirms the ability of pigs to do this, but adds that pigs often work in pairs, are usually repeat offenders, and in some cases undo the latches of fellow pigs. If pig intelligence has been part of America’s barnyard folklore, that same lore has imagined fish and chickens as especially stupid. Are they?

INTELLIGENCE?

In 1992, only 70 peer-reviewed papers had reported on fish learning — a decade later there were 500 such papers (today it tops 640). Our knowledge of no other animal has been so quickly and dramatically revised. If you were the world expert on fish mental capacities in the 1990s, you’re at best a novice today.

Fish build complex nests, form monogamous relationships, hunt cooperatively with other species, and use tools. They recognize one another as individuals (and keep track of who is to be trusted and who is not). They make decisions individually, and monitor social prestige and vie for better positions (to quote from the peer review journal Fish and Fisheries: they use “Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation”). They have significant long-term memories, are skilled in passing knowledge to one another through social networks, and can also pass on information generationally. They even have what the scientific literature calls “long-standing ‘cultural traditions’ for particular pathways to feeding, schooling, resting or mating sites.”

And chickens? There has been a revolution in scientific understanding here as well. Dr. Lesley Rogers, a prominent animal physiologist, discovered the lateralization of avian brains — the separation of the brain into left and right hemispheres with different specialties — at a time when this was believed to be a unique property of the human brain. (Scientists now agree that lateralization is present throughout the animal kingdom.) Building on forty years of research experience, Rogers argues that our present knowledge of bird brains has made it “clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates.” She argues they have sophisticated memories that are “written down according to some sort of chronological sequence that becomes a unique autobiography.” Like fish, chickens can pass information generationally. They also deceive one another and can delay satisfaction for larger rewards.

Such research has altered our understanding of birds’ brains so much that in 2005, scientific experts from around the world convened to begin the process of renaming the parts of avian brains. They aimed to replace old terms that implied “primitive” functions with the new realization that bird brains process information in a manner analogous to (but different from) the human cerebral cortex.

The image of hard-nosed physiologists standing over diagrams of brains and arguing for a renaming has a larger resonance. Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?

KFC

Formerly signifying Kentucky Fried Chicken, now signifying nothing, KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history. KFC buys nearly a billion chickens a year — if you packed those chickens body to body, they would blanket Manhattan from river to river and spill from the windows of the higher floors of office buildings — so its practices have profound ripple effects throughout all sectors of the poultry industry.

KFC insists it is “committed to the well-being and humane treatment of chickens.” How trustworthy are these words? At a slaughterhouse in West Virginia that supplies KFC, workers were documented tearing the heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them. These acts were witnessed dozens of times. This slaughterhouse was not a “bad apple,” but a “Supplier of the Year.” Imagine what happens at the bad apples when no one is looking.

On KFC’s website, the company claims, “We are monitoring our suppliers on an ongoing basis to determine whether our suppliers are using humane procedures for caring for and handling animals they supply to us. As a consequence, it is our goal to only deal with suppliers who promise to maintain our high standards and share our commitment to animal welfare.” That is half true. KFC does deal with suppliers that promise to ensure welfare. What KFC doesn’t tell you is that anything the suppliers practice is necessarily considered welfare (see: CFE).

A similar half-truth is the claim that KFC conducts welfare audits of its suppliers’ slaughter facilities (the “monitoring” alluded to above). What we are not told is that these are typically announced audits. KFC announces an inspection meant (at least in theory) to document illicit behavior in a manner that allows plenty of time for the soon-to-be-inspected to throw a tarp over whatever they don’t want seen. Not only that, but the standards the auditors are asked to report on do not include a single one of the recommendations recently made by KFC’s own (now former) animal welfare advisers, five of whom resigned in frustration. One of them, Adele Douglass, told the Chicago Tribune that KFC “never had any meetings. They never asked any advice, and then they touted to the press that they had this animal-welfare advisory committee. I felt like I was being used.” Ian Duncan, the Emeritus Chair in Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph, another former board member and one of North America’s leading scientific experts on bird welfare, said that “progress was extremely slow, which is why I resigned. It was always going to be happening later. They just put off actually creating standards. . . . I suspect that upper management didn’t really think that animal welfare was important.”

How were these five board members replaced? KFC’s Animal Welfare Council now includes a vice president for Pilgrim’s Pride, the company operating the “Supplier of the Year” plant at which some workers were shown sadistically abusing birds; a director for Tyson Foods, which slaughters 2.2 billion chickens annually and where some employees were also found to be mutilating live birds during multiple investigations (in one, employees also urinated directly onto the slaughter line); and regular participation from its own “executives and other employees.” Essentially, KFC is claiming that its advisers developed programs for its suppliers, even though its advisers are its suppliers.

Like its name, KFC’s commitment to animal welfare signifies nothing.

KOSHER?

As I was taught them, in Hebrew school and at home, the Jewish dietary laws were devised as a compromise: if humans absolutely must eat animals, we should do so humanely, with respect for the other creatures in the world and with humility. Don’t subject the animals you eat to unnecessary suffering, either in their lives or in their slaughter. It’s a way of thinking that made me proud to be Jewish as a child, and that continues to make me proud.

This is why when fully conscious cattle at the (then) largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world, Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, were videotaped having their tracheas and esophagi systematically pulled from their cut throats, languishing for up to three minutes as a result of sloppy slaughter, and being shocked with electric prods in their faces, it bothered me even more than the innumerable times I’d heard of such things happening at conventional slaughterhouses.

To my relief, much of the Jewish community spoke out against the Iowa plant. The president of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, in a message sent to every one of its rabbis, asserted, “When a company purporting to be kosher violates the prohibition against tza’ar ba’alei hayyim, causing pain to one of God’s living creatures, that company must answer to the Jewish community, and ultimately, to God.” The Orthodox chair of the Talmud Department at Israel’s Bar Ilan University also protested, and did so eloquently: “It very well may be that any plant performing such types of [kosher slaughter] is guilty of hillul hashem — the desecration of God’s name — for to insist that God cares only about his ritual law and not about his moral law is to desecrate His Name.” And in a joint statement, more than fifty influential rabbis, including the president of the Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis and the dean of the Conservative movement’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, argued that “Judaism’s powerful tradition of teaching compassion for animals has been violated by these systematic abuses and needs to be reasserted.”

We have no reason to believe that the kind of cruelty that was documented at Agriprocessors has been eliminated from the kosher industry. It can’t be, so long as factory farming dominates.

This raises a difficult question, which I ask not as a thought experiment but straightforwardly: In our world — not the shepherd-and-flock world of the Bible, but our overpopulated one in which animals are treated legally and socially as commodities — is it even possible to eat meat without “causing pain to one of God’s living creatures,” to avoid (even after going to great and sincere lengths) “the desecration of God’s name”? Has the very concept of kosher meat become a contradiction in terms?

ORGANIC

What does organic signify? Not nothing, but a whole lot less than we give it credit for. For meat, milk, and eggs labeled organic, the USDA requires that animals must: (1) be raised on organic feed (that is, crops raised without most synthetic pesticides and fertilizers); (2) be traced through their life cycle (that is, leave a paper trail); (3) not be fed antibiotics or growth hormones; and (4) have “access to the outdoors.” The last criterion, sadly, has been rendered almost meaningless — in some cases “access to the outdoors” can mean nothing more than having the opportunity to look outside through a screened window.

Organic foods in general are almost certainly safer and often have a smaller ecological footprint and better health value. They are not, though, necessarily more humane. “Organic” does signal better welfare if we are talking about laying hens or cattle. It also may signal better welfare for pigs, but that is less certain. For chickens raised for meat and for turkeys, though, “organic” doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of welfare issues. You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

PETA

Pronounced like the Middle Eastern bread, and among the farmers I met, significantly better known. The largest animal rights organization in the world, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has more than two million members.

The folks at PETA will do almost anything legal to advance their campaigns, no matter how bad they look (which is impressive) and no matter who is insulted (which is not so impressive). They’ll distribute “unhappy meals” with bloodied, cleaver-wielding Ronald McDonalds to young children. They’ll publish stickers conveniently shaped like those normally found on tomatoes that say “Throw me at a fur-wearer.” They’ve tossed a dead raccoon on Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s lunch at the Four Seasons (and sent maggot-infested innards to her office), streaked presidents and royalty, distributed “Your Daddy Kills Animals!” pamphlets to schoolchildren, and asked the band Pet Shop Boys to change their name to Rescue Shelter Boys (the band didn’t, but acknowledged that there were issues worth discussing). It’s hard not to mock and admire their single-minded energy, and it’s easy to see why you would never want it directed at you.

Whatever one thinks of them, no organization strikes fear in the factory farm industry and its allies more than PETA. They are effective. When PETA targeted fast-food companies, the most famous and powerful welfare scientist in the country, Temple Grandin (who has designed more than half the cattle slaughter facilities in the nation), said she saw more improvement in welfare in one year than she had seen in her entire thirty-year career previously. Arguably the biggest PETA hater on the planet, Steve Kopperud (a meat industry consultant who has given anti-PETA seminars for a decade), puts it this way: “There’s enough understanding in the industry now of what PETA’s capable of to put the fear of God into many executives.” It didn’t surprise me to learn that companies of all kinds regularly negotiate with PETA and quietly make changes in their animal welfare policies to avoid being publicly targeted by the group.

PETA is sometimes accused of using cynical strategies for attention getting, which has some truth to it. PETA is also accused of arguing that humans and animals should be treated equally, which they don’t. (What would that even mean? Voting cows?) They are not a particularly emotional crowd; if anything, they are hyperrational, focused on making their austere ideal — “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment” — as famous as Pamela Anderson in a swimsuit. A surprise to many, PETA is pro-euthanasia: if the choice, for example, is between a dog living its life in a kennel or being euthanized, PETA not only opts for the latter, but advocates for it. They do oppose killing, but they oppose suffering more. People at PETA love their dogs and cats — many companion animals join them in PETA’s offices — but they are not especially motivated by a be-kind-to-dogs-and-cats ethic. They want a revolution.

They call their revolution “animal rights,” but the changes PETA has won for farmed animals (their biggest concern), while numerous, are not victories for animal rights so much as for animal welfare: fewer animals per cage, better-regulated slaughter, less-cramped transport, and the like. PETA’s techniques are often vaudeville-esque (or tasteless), but this over-the-top approach has won modest improvements that most people would say don’t go far enough. (Does anyone oppose better-regulated slaughter and less-cramped living and transport conditions?) Ultimately, the controversy around PETA may have less to do with the organization than with those of us who stand in judgment of it — that is, with the unpleasant realization that “those PETA people” have stood up for the values we have been too cowardly or forgetful to defend ourselves.

PROCESSING

Slaughter and butchery. Even people who don’t think that we owe farmed animals much during their lives always maintain they deserve a “good” death. The most macho, veal-crate-defending, branding-loving cattle rancher will agree with the vegan activist when it comes to killing humanely. Is this all that can be agreed on?

RADICAL

Virtually everyone agrees that animals can suffer in ways that matter, even if we don’t agree on just what that suffering is like or how important it is. When surveyed, 96 percent of Americans say that animals deserve legal protection, 76 percent say that animal welfare is more important to them than low meat prices, and nearly two-thirds advocate passing not only laws but “strict laws” concerning the treatment of farmed animals. You’d be hard-pressed to find any other issue on which so many people see eye to eye.

Another thing most people agree on is that the environment matters. Whether or not you are in favor of offshore oil drilling, whether or not you “believe” in global warming, whether you defend your Hummer or live off the grid, you recognize that the air you breathe and the water you drink are important. And that they will be important to your children and grandchildren. Even those who continue to deny that the environment is in peril would agree that it would be bad if it were.

In the United States, farmed animals represent more than 99 percent of all animals with whom humans directly interact. In terms of our effect on the “animal world” — whether it’s the suffering of animals or issues of biodiversity and the interdependence of species that evolution spent millions of years bringing into this livable balance — nothing comes close to having the impact of our dietary choices. Just as nothing we do has the direct potential to cause nearly as much animal suffering as eating meat, no daily choice that we make has a greater impact on the environment.

Our situation is an odd one. Virtually all of us agree that it matters how we treat animals and the environment, and yet few of us give much thought to our most important relationship to animals and the environment. Odder still, those who do choose to act in accordance with these uncontroversial values by refusing to eat animals (which everyone agrees can reduce both the number of abused animals and one’s ecological footprint) are often considered marginal or even radical.

SENTIMENTALITY

The valuing of emotions over reality. Sentimentality is widely considered out of touch, weak. Very often, those who express concern about (or even an interest in) the conditions in which farmed animals are raised are disregarded as sentimentalists. But it’s worth taking a step back to ask who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist.

Is caring to know about the treatment of farmed animals a confrontation with the facts about the animals and ourselves or an avoidance of them? Is arguing that a sentiment of compassion should be given greater value than a cheaper burger (or having a burger at all) an expression of emotion and impulse or an engagement with reality and our moral intuitions?

Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?

SPECIES BARRIER

The Berlin zoo (Zoologischer Garten Berlin) houses the largest number of species of any zoo in the world, around 1,400. Opened in 1844, it was the first zoo in Germany — the original animals were gifts from Frederick William IV’s menagerie — and with 2.6 million visitors a year, it is the most trafficked zoo in Europe. Allied air raids in 1942 destroyed nearly all of the infrastructure, and only ninety-one animals survived. (It’s amazing that in a city in which people were cutting down the public parks for firewood any animals survived at all.) Today there are about fifteen thousand animals. But most people pay attention to only one of them.

Knut, the first polar bear born to the zoo in thirty years, entered the world on December 5, 2006. He was rejected by his mother, the twenty-year-old Tosca, a retired German circus bear, and his twin brother died four days later. It’s a promising beginning for a bad TV movie, but not for a life. Little Knut spent his first forty-four days in an incubator. His keeper, Thomas Dörflein, slept at the zoo in order to provide twenty-four-hour care. Dörflein bottle-fed Knut every two hours, strummed Elvis’s “Devil in Disguise” on his guitar at Knut’s bedtime, and was covered in cuts and bruises from all the roughhousing. Knut weighed 1.8 pounds at birth, but by the time I saw him, about three months later, he had more than doubled his weight. If all goes well, he will one day be about two hundred times that size.

To say that Berlin loved Knut would be a tragic understatement. Mayor Klaus Wowereit checked the news every morning for fresh pictures of Knut. The city’s hockey team, the Eisbären, asked the zoo if they could adopt him as a mascot. Numerous blogs — including one by Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin’s most widely read paper — were dedicated to Knut’s hourly doings. He had his own podcast and webcam. He even replaced the topless model in a number of daily newspapers.

Four hundred journalists came to Knut’s public debut, which far overshadowed the EU summit taking place at the same time. There were Knut bow ties, Knut rucksacks (that’s German-English for backpack), Knut commemorative plates, Knut pajamas, Knut figurines, and probably, although I haven’t verified this, Knut panties. Knut has a godfather, Sigmar Gabriel, the German environment minister. Another zoo animal, the panda Yan Yan, was actually killed by Knut’s popularity. Zookeepers speculate that the thirty thousand people crowding into the zoo to see Knut overwhelmed Yan Yan — either overexcited her or depressed her to death (it wasn’t clear to me). And speaking of death, when an animal rights group raised the argument — only hypothetically, they later claimed — that it would be better to euthanize an animal than raise it in such conditions, schoolchildren took to the streets chanting “Knut must live.” Soccer fans chanted for Knut instead of their teams.

If you go to see Knut and get hungry, just a few feet from his enclosure is a stand selling “Wurst de Knut,” made from the flesh of factory-farmed pigs, which are at least as intelligent and deserving of our regard as Knut. This is the species barrier.

STRESS

A word used by the industry to elide what is being referred to, which is:

SUFFERING

What is suffering? The question assumes a subject that suffers. All the serious challenges to the idea that animals suffer tend to grant that animals “feel pain” at one level, but deny them the sort of being — the general mental-emotional world or “subjectivity” — that would make this suffering meaningfully analogous to our own. I think this objection hits at something very real and alive for many people, namely the sense that animals’ suffering is simply of a different order and therefore not really important (even if regrettable).

We all have strong intuitions of what suffering means, but they can be extremely difficult to capture in words. As children, we learn the meaning of suffering by interacting with other beings in the world — both humans, especially our family, and animals. The word suffering always implies an intuition of a shared experience with others — a shared drama. Of course, there are special kinds of human suffering — the unfulfilled dream, the experience of racism, bodily shame, and so on — but should that lead one to say that animal suffering is “not really suffering”?

The most important part of definitions of or other reflections on suffering is not what they tell us about suffering — about neural pathways, nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors — but about who suffers and how much that suffering should matter. There may well be philosophically coherent ways to imagine the world and the meaning of suffering so that we come up with a definition that won’t apply to animals. Of course, this would fly in the face of common sense, but I’ll grant that it might be done. So, if those who argue that animals don’t really suffer and those who argue that they do can both offer coherent understandings and present persuasive evidence, should we be dubious about animal suffering? Should we grant that animals might not really suffer — not in the ways that matter most?

As you can guess, I would say no, but I’m not going to argue over this. Rather, I think the essential point is simply to realize the magnitude of what is at stake when we ask “What is suffering?”

What is suffering? I’m not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

In the typical cage for egg-laying hens, each bird has 67 square inches of space—the size of the rectangle above. Nearly all cage-free birds have approximately the same amount of space.

1.

I’m Not the Kind of Person Who Finds Himself on a Stranger’s Farm in the Middle of the Night

I’M WEARING BLACK IN THE middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. There are surgical booties around my disposable shoes and latex gloves on my shaking hands. I pat myself down, quintuple-checking that I have everything: red-filtered flashlight, picture ID, $40 cash, video camera, copy of California penal code 597e, bottle of water (not for me), silenced cell phone, blow horn. We kill the engine and roll the final thirty yards to the spot we scouted out earlier in the day on one of our half-dozen drive-bys. This isn’t the scary part yet.

I am accompanied tonight by an animal activist, “C.” It wasn’t until I picked her up that I realized I’d been picturing someone who inspired confidence. C is short and wispy. She wears aviator glasses, flip-flops, and a retainer.

“You have a lot of cars,” I observed, as we pulled away from her house.

“I live with my parents for now.”

As we drove down the highway known to locals as Blood Run because of both the frequency of accidents and the number of trucks that use the road to transport animals to slaughter, C explained that sometimes “entry” is as simple as walking through an open gate, although this has become increasingly rare, given concerns about biosecurity and “troublemakers.” More often, these days, fences have to be hiked. Occasionally lights go on and alarms go off. Every now and then there are dogs, every now and then unleashed. She once encountered a bull that was left to roam among the sheds, waiting to impale snooping vegetarians.

“Bull,” I half-echoed, half-asked, with no obvious linguistic intent.

“Male cow,” she said brusquely, as she sorted through a bag of what appeared to be dental equipment.

“And if you and I should, tonight, encounter a bull?”

“We won’t.”

A tailgater forced me behind a truck packed tight and piled high with chickens on their way to slaughter.

“Hypothetically.”

“Stand very still,” C advised. “I don’t think they see stationary objects.”

If the question is, Have things ever gone seriously wrong on one of C’s night visits? the answer is yes. There was the time she fell into a manure pit, a dying rabbit under each arm, and found herself up to her neck (literally) in (literally) deep shit. And the night she was forced to spend in construction-paper blackness with twenty thousand miserable animals and their fumes, having accidentally locked herself in the shed. And the near-fatal case of campylobacter one of her cohorts picked up from picking up a chicken.

Feathers were collecting on the windshield. I turned on the wipers and asked, “What’s all that stuff in your bag?”

“In case we need to make a rescue.”

I had no idea what she was referring to, and I didn’t like it.

“Now, you said you don’t think bulls see stationary objects. Wouldn’t this qualify, though, as one of those things that you absolutely need to know? I don’t mean to belabor the point, but —”

— but what the hell have I gotten myself into? I am not a journalist, activist, veterinarian, lawyer, or philosopher — as, to my knowledge, have been the others who have made such a trip. I am not up for anything. And I am not someone who can stand very still in front of a guard bull.

We come to a gravelly stop at the planned-upon spot and wait for our synchronized watches to click over to 3:00 A.M., the planned-upon time. The dog we’d seen earlier in the day can’t be heard, although that’s hardly a comfort. I take the scrap of paper from my pocket and read it one last time —

In case any domestic animal is at any time . . . impounded and continues to be without necessary food and water for more than twelve consecutive hours, it is lawful for any person, from time to time, as may be deemed necessary, to enter into and upon any pound in which the animal is confined, and supply it with necessary food and water so long as it remains so confined. Such person is not liable for the entry . . .

— which, despite being state law, is about as reassuring as Cujo’s silence. I’m imagining some roused-from-REM-sleep-and-well-armed farmer coming upon I-know-the-difference-between-arugula-and-rugelach me scrutinizing the living conditions of his turkeys. He cocks his double-barrel, my sphincter relaxes, and then what? I whip out California penal code 597e? Is that going to make his trigger finger more or less itchy?

It’s time.

We use a series of dramatic hand signals to communicate what a simple whisper would have done just as well. But we’ve taken vows of silence: not a word until we’re safely on the way home. The twirl of a latexed index finger means Let’s roll.

“You first,” I blurt.

And now for the scary part.

Your Continued Consideration

To Whom It May Concern at Tyson Foods:

I am following up on my previous letters of January 10, February 27, March 15, April 20, May 15, and June 7. To reiterate, I am a new father, eager to learn as much as I can about the meat industry, in an effort to make informed decisions about what to feed my son. Given that Tyson Foods is the world’s largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork, your company is an obvious place to start. I would like to visit some of your farms and speak with company representatives about everything from the nuts and bolts of how your farms operate, to animal welfare and environmental issues. If possible, I would also like to speak with some of your farmers. I can make myself available at just about any time, and on relatively short notice, and am happy to travel as is needed.

Given your “family-centered philosophy” and recent “It’s What Your Family Deserves” advertising campaign, I assume you’ll appreciate my desire to see for myself where my son’s food comes from.

Thanks so much for your continued consideration.

Best,

Jonathan Safran Foer

The Whole Sad Business

WE’VE PARKED SEVERAL HUNDRED YARDS from the farm because C noticed in a satellite photo that it was possible to reach the sheds under the cover of an adjacent apricot grove. Our bodies bend the branches as we walk in silence. It’s six A.M. in Brooklyn, which means my son will be waking up soon. He will rustle around in his crib for a few minutes, then let out a cry — having stood himself up without knowing how to get himself back down — then be taken into my wife’s arms, into the rocking chair, against her body, and fed. All of this — this trip I’m making in California, these words I’m typing in New York, the farms I’ve come to know in Iowa and Kansas and Puget Sound — affects me in a way that could be more easily forgotten or ignored if I weren’t a father, son, or grandson — if, like no one who has ever lived, I ate alone.

After about twenty minutes, C stops and turns ninety degrees. I can’t imagine how she knows to stop right here, at a tree that is indistinguishable from the hundreds we’ve passed. We walk another dozen yards, through an identical grid of trees, and arrive, like kayakers at a waterfall. Through the last bits of foliage, I can see, only a dozen or so yards away, barbed-wire fencing, and past that the farm complex.

The farm is set up in a series of seven sheds, each about 50 feet wide by 500 feet long, each holding in the neighborhood of 25,000 birds — although I don’t yet know these facts.

Adjacent to the sheds is a massive granary, which looks more like something out of Blade Runner than Little House on the Prairie. Metal pipes spiderweb the outsides of the buildings, massive fans protrude and clang, and floodlights plow weirdly discrete pockets of day. Everyone has a mental image of a farm, and to most it probably includes fields, barns, tractors, and animals, or at least one of the above. I doubt there’s anyone on earth not involved in farming whose mind would conjure what I’m now looking at. And yet before me is the kind of farm that produces roughly 99 percent of the animals consumed in America.

With her astronaut’s gloves, C spreads the harp of barbed wire far enough apart for me to squeeze through. My pants snag and rip, but they are disposable, purchased for this occasion. She passes the gloves through to me, and I hold open the wires for her.

The surface is lunarlike. With each step, my feet sink into a compost of animal waste, dirt, and I-don’t-yet-know-what-else that has been poured around the sheds. I have to curl my toes to keep my shoes from being left behind in the glutinous muck. I’m squatting, to make myself as small as possible, and holding my hands against my pockets to keep their contents from jingling. We shuffle quickly and quietly past the clearing and into the rows of sheds, whose cover allows us to move about more freely. Huge fan units — maybe ten fans, each about four feet in diameter — come on and shut off intermittently.

We approach the first shed. Light spills from under its door. This is both good and bad news: good because we won’t have to use our flashlights, which, C told me, scare the animals, and in a worse case could get the entire flock squawking and agitated; bad because should someone open the door to check on things, it will be impossible for us to hide. I wonder: Why would a shed full of animals be brightly lit in the middle of the night?

I can hear movement from inside: the hum of machines blends with what sounds a bit like a whispering audience or a chandelier shop in a mild earthquake. C wrestles with the door and then signals that we should move to the next shed.

We spend several minutes like this, looking for an unlocked door.

Another why: Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm?

It can’t be because he’s afraid someone will steal his equipment or animals. There’s no equipment to steal in the sheds, and the animals aren’t worth the herculean effort it would take to illicitly transport a significant number. A farmer doesn’t lock his doors because he’s afraid his animals will escape. (Turkeys can’t turn doorknobs.) And despite the signage, it isn’t because of biosecurity, either. (Barbed wire is enough to keep out the merely curious.) So why?

In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors. Nothing will better capture the whole sad business of factory farming. And nothing will more strongly convince me to write this book.

As it turns out, locked doors are the least of it. I never heard back from Tyson or any of the companies I wrote to. (It sends one kind of message to say no. It sends another not to say anything at all.) Even research organizations with paid staffs find themselves consistently thwarted by industry secrecy. When the prestigious and well-heeled Pew Commission decided to fund a two-year study to evaluate the impact of factory farming, they reported that

there have been some serious obstacles to the Commission completing its review and approving consensus recommendations. . . . In fact, while some industrial agriculture representatives were recommending potential authors for the technical reports to Commission staff, other industrial agriculture representatives were discouraging those same authors from assisting us by threatening to withhold research funding for their college or university. We found significant influence by the industry at every turn: in academic research, agriculture policy development, government regulation, and enforcement.

The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.

The Rescue

MEN’S VOICES DRIFT OVER FROM the granary. Why are they working at 3:30 in the morning? Machines engage. What kinds of machines? It’s the middle of the night and things are happening. What is happening?

“Found one,” C whispers. She slides open the heavy wooden door, releasing a parallelogram of light, and enters. I follow, sliding the door shut behind me. The first thing that catches my attention is the row of gas masks on the near wall. Why would there be gas masks in a farm shed?

We creep in. There are tens of thousands of turkey chicks. Fist-sized, with feathers the color of sawdust, they’re nearly invisible on the sawdust floor. The chicks are huddled in groups, asleep beneath the heat lamps installed to replace the warmth their broody mothers would have provided. Where are the mothers?

There is a mathematical orchestration to the density. I pull my eyes from the birds for a moment and take in the building itself: lights, feeders, fans, and heat lamps evenly spaced in a perfectly calibrated artificial day. Besides the animals themselves, there is no hint of anything you might call “natural” — not a patch of earth or a window to let in moonlight. I’m surprised by how easy it is to forget the anonymous life all around and simply admire the technological symphony that so precisely regulates this little world-unto-itself, to see the efficiency and mastery of the machine, and then to understand the birds as extensions of, or cogs in, that machine — not beings, but parts. To see it any other way requires effort.

I look at a particular chick, how it is struggling to get from the outside of the pile around the heat lamp to its center. And then at another one, immediately under the lamp, seemingly content as a dog in a patch of sunlight. Then another, which isn’t moving at all, not even with the undulations of breath.

At first the situation doesn’t look too bad. It’s crowded, but they seem happy enough. (And human babies are kept in crowded indoor nurseries, right?) And they’re cute. The exhilaration of seeing what I came to see, and confronting all of these baby animals, has me feeling pretty good.

C is off giving water to some dreary-looking birds in another part of the shed, so I tiptoe around and explore, leaving vague bootie prints in the sawdust. I’m starting to feel more comfortable with the turkeys, willing to get closer to them, if not to handle them. (C’s first commandment was never to touch them.) The closer I look, the more I see. The ends of the beaks of the chicks are blackened, as are the ends of their toes. Some have red spots on the tops of their heads.

Because there are so many animals, it takes me several minutes before I take in just how many dead ones there are. Some are blood matted; some are covered in sores. Some seem to have been pecked at; others are as desiccated and loosely gathered as small piles of dead leaves. Some are deformed. The dead are the exceptions, but there are few places to look without seeing at least one.

I walk over to C — it’s been the full ten minutes, and I’m not eager to push our luck. She is kneeling over something. I approach and kneel beside her. A chick is trembling on its side, legs splayed, eyes crusted over. Scabs protrude from bald patches. Its beak is slightly open, and its head is shaking back and forth. How old is it? A week? Two? Has it been like this for all of its life, or did something happen to it? What could have happened to it?

C will know what to do, I think. And she does. She opens her bag and removes a knife. Holding one hand over the chick’s head — is she keeping it still or covering its eyes? — she slices its neck, rescuing it.

2.

I Am the Kind of Person Who Finds Herself on a Stranger’s Farm in the Middle of the Night

That turkey chick I euthanized on our rescue, that was hard. One of my jobs, many years ago, was at a poultry plant. I was a backup killer, which meant it was my responsibility to slit the throats of the chickens that survived the automated throat slitter. I killed thousands of birds that way. Maybe tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. In that context, you lose track of everything: where you are, what you’re doing, how long you’ve been doing it, what the animals are, what you are. It’s a survival mechanism, to keep you from going insane. But it’s its own insanity.

So because of my work on the kill line, I knew the anatomy of the neck and how to kill the chick instantly. And every part of me knew that it was the right thing to put it out of its misery. But it was hard, because that chick wasn’t in a line of thousands of birds to be slaughtered. It was an individual. Everything about this is hard.

I’m not a radical. In almost every way, I’m a middle-of-the-road person. I don’t have any piercings. No weird haircut. I don’t do drugs. Politically, I’m liberal on some issues and conservative on others. But see, factory farming is a middle-of-the-road issue — something most reasonable people would agree on if they had access to the truth.

I grew up in Wisconsin and Texas. My family was typical: My dad was (and is) into hunting; all of my uncles trapped and fished. My mom cooked roasts every Monday night, chicken every Tuesday, and so on. My brother was All-State in two sports.

The first time I was exposed to farming issues was when a friend showed me some films of cows being slaughtered. We were teenagers, and it was just gross-out shit, like those “Faces of Death” videos. He wasn’t a vegetarian — no one was vegetarian — and he wasn’t trying to make me one. It was for a laugh.

We had drumsticks for dinner that night, and I couldn’t eat mine. When I held the bone in my hand, it didn’t feel like chicken, but a chicken. I always knew I was eating an individual, I suppose, but it never hit me before. My dad asked me what was wrong, and I told him about the video. At that point in my life, I took whatever he said to be the truth, and I was sure he could explain everything. But the best he could come up with was something like “It’s unpleasant stuff.” If he’d left it there, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you now. But then he made a joke about it. The same joke everyone makes. I’ve heard it a million times since. He pretended he was a crying animal. It was revealing to me, and infuriating. I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible.

I wanted to know if that video was exceptional. I suppose I wanted a way out of having to change my life. So I wrote letters to all of the big farm corporations, asking for tours. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that they would say no or not respond. When that didn’t work, I started driving around and asking any farmers I saw if I could look in their sheds. They all had reasons for saying no. Given what they’re doing, I don’t blame them for not wanting anyone to see. But given their secrecy about something so important, who could blame me for feeling that I needed to do things my own way?

The first farm I entered at night was an egg facility, maybe a million hens. They were packed into cages that were stacked several rows high. My eyes and lungs burned for days after. It was less violent and gory than what I’d seen in the video, but it affected me even more strongly. That really changed me, when I realized that an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death.

The farm was so bad that I assumed it, too, had to be exceptional. I guess I couldn’t believe that people would let that kind of thing happen on so large a scale. So I got myself into another farm, a turkey farm. By chance I’d come just a few days before slaughter, so the turkeys were full grown and jammed body to body. You couldn’t see the floor through them. They were totally crazy: flapping, squawking, going after each other. There were dead birds everywhere, and half-dead birds. It was sad. I didn’t put them there, but I felt ashamed just to be a person. I told myself it had to be exceptional. So I entered another farm. And another. And another.

Maybe on some deep level, I kept doing this because I didn’t want to believe that the things I’d seen were representative. But everyone who cares to know about this stuff knows that factory farms are nearly all there is. Most people aren’t able to see these farms with their own eyes, but they can see them through mine. I’ve videotaped conditions at chicken and egg factories, turkey factories, a couple of hog farms (those are basically impossible to get into now), rabbit farms, drylot dairies and feedlots, livestock auctions, and in transport trucks. I’ve worked in a few slaughterhouses. Occasionally the footage will make its way onto the evening news or into the newspaper. A few times it’s been used in animal cruelty court cases.

That’s why I agreed to help you. I don’t know you. I don’t know what kind of book you’re going to write. But if any part of it is bringing what happens inside those farms to the outside world, that can only be a good thing. The truth is so powerful in this case it doesn’t even matter what your angle is.

Anyway, I wanted to be sure that when you write your book you don’t make it seem like I kill animals all the time. I’ve done it four times, only when it couldn’t be avoided. Usually I take the sickest animals to a vet. But that chick was too sick to be moved. And it was suffering too much to leave be. Look, I’m pro-life. I believe in God, and I believe in heaven and hell. But I don’t have any reverence for suffering. These factory farmers calculate how close to death they can keep the animals without killing them. That’s the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying.

This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

If I misuse a corporation’s logo, I could potentially be put in jail; if a corporation abuses a billion birds, the law will protect not the birds, but the corporation’s right to do what it wants. That is what it looks like when you deny animals rights. It’s crazy that the idea of animal rights seems crazy to anyone. We live in a world in which it’s conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal.

Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. Society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting. I’m not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of “animal welfare” and “humaneness,” then decide if you still believe in eating meat.

3.

I Am a Factory Farmer

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a retired farmer. I started milking cows when I was six. We lived in Wisconsin. My daddy had a small herd — fifty, give or take — which back then was pretty typical. I worked every day until I left home, worked hard. I thought I’d had enough of it at that point, thought there must be a better way.

After high school, I got a degree in animal science and went to work for a poultry company. I helped service, manage, and design turkey breeder farms. Bounced around some integrated companies after that. I managed large farms, a million birds. Did disease management, flock management. Problem solving, you could say. Farming is a lot of problem solving. Now I specialize in chicken nutrition and health. I’m in agribusiness. Factory farming, some people might say, but I don’t care for the term.

It’s a different world from the one I grew up in. The price of food hasn’t increased in the past thirty years. In relation to all other expenses, the price of protein stayed put. In order to survive — I don’t mean get rich, I mean put food on your table, send your kids to school, get a new car as needed — the farmer had to produce more and more. Simple math. Like I said, my daddy had fifty cows. The model now for a viable dairy is twelve hundred cows. That’s the smallest that can stay in business. Well, a family can’t milk twelve hundred cows, so you gotta get four or five employees, and each of them will have a specialized job: milking, managing illness, tending the crops. It’s efficient, yeah, and you can squeeze out a living, but a lot of people became farmers because of the diversity of farm life. And that’s been lost.

Another part of what’s happened in response to the economic squeeze is that you gotta make an animal that produces more of the product at a lower cost. So you breed for faster growth and improved feed conversion. As long as food continues to get cheaper and cheaper relative to everything else, the farmer has no choice but to produce food at a lower production cost, and genetically he’s going to move toward an animal that accomplishes that task, which can be counterproductive to its welfare. The loss is built into the system. It’s assumed that if you have fifty thousand broilers in a shed, thousands are going to die in the first weeks. My daddy couldn’t afford to lose an animal. Now you begin by assuming you’ll lose 4 percent right off the bat.

I’ve told you the drawbacks because I’m trying to be up-front with you. But in fact, we’ve got a tremendous system. Is it perfect? No. No system is perfect. And if you find someone who tells you he has a perfect way to feed billions and billions of people, well, you should take a careful look. You hear about free-range eggs and grass-fed cattle, and all of that’s good. I think it’s a good direction. But it ain’t gonna feed the world. Never. You simply can’t feed billions of people free-range eggs. And when you hear people talking about small farming as a model, I call that the Marie Antoinette syndrome: if they can’t afford bread, let them eat cake. High-yield farming has allowed everyone to eat. Think about that. If we go away from it, it may improve the welfare of the animal, it may even be better for the environment, but I don’t want to go back to China in 1918. I’m talking about starving people.

Sure, you could say that people should just eat less meat, but I’ve got news for you: people don’t want to eat less meat. You can be like PETA and pretend that the world is going to wake up tomorrow and realize that they love animals and don’t want to eat them anymore, but history has shown that people are perfectly capable of loving animals and eating them. It’s childish, and I would even say immoral, to fantasize about a vegetarian world when we’re having such a hard time making this one work.

Look, the American farmer has fed the world. He was asked to do it after World War II, and he did it. People have never had the ability to eat like they can now. Protein has never been more affordable. My animals are protected from the elements, get all the food they need, and grow well. Animals get sick. Animals die. But what do you think happens to animals in nature? You think they die of natural causes? You think they’re stunned before they’re killed? Animals in nature starve to death or are ripped apart by other animals. That’s how they die.

People have no idea where food comes from anymore. It’s not synthetic, it’s not created in a lab, it actually has to be grown. What I hate is when consumers act as if farmers want these things, when it’s consumers who tell farmers what to grow. They’ve wanted cheap food. We’ve grown it. If they want cage-free eggs, they have to pay a lot more money for them. Period. It’s cheaper to produce an egg in a massive laying barn with caged hens. It’s more efficient and that means it’s more sustainable. Yes, I’m saying that factory farming can be more sustainable, though I know that word is often used against the industry. From China to India to Brazil, the demand for animal products is growing — and fast. Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?

A friend of mine had an experience a few years ago where two young guys came and asked if they could take some footage for a documentary about farm life. Seemed like nice guys, so he said sure. But then they edited it to make it look like the birds were being abused. They said the turkeys were being raped. I know that farm. I’ve visited it many times, and I can tell you those turkeys were being cared for as well as they needed to survive and be productive. Things can be taken out of context. And novices don’t always know what they’re looking at. This business isn’t always pretty, but it’s a bad mistake to confuse something unpleasant with something wrong. Every kid with a video camera thinks he’s a veterinary scientist, thinks he was born knowing what takes years and years to learn. I know there’s a necessity to sensationalize stuff in order to motivate people, but I prefer the truth.

In the eighties, the industry tried to communicate with animal groups, and we got burned real bad. So the turkey community decided there would be no more of it. We put up a wall, and that was the end. We don’t talk, don’t let people onto the farms. Standard operating procedure. PETA doesn’t want to talk about farming. They want to end farming. They have absolutely no idea how the world actually works. For all I know, I’m talking to the enemy right now.

But I believe in what I’m telling you. And it’s an important story to tell, a story that’s getting drowned out by the hollering of the extremists. I asked you not to use my name, but I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing. You just have to understand that there’s a bigger picture here. And I’ve got bosses. I gotta put food on the table, too.

Can I make a suggestion to you? Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself. Don’t trust your eyes. Trust your head. Learn about animals, learn about farming and the economics of food, learn the history. Start at the beginning.

4.

The First Chicken

YOUR PROGENY WILL BE KNOWN as Gallus domesticus, chicken, cock, hen, poultry, the Chicken of Tomorrow, broiler, layer, Mr. McDonald, and many other names. Each name tells a story, but no stories have been told, no names have yet been given to you or to any animal.

Like all animals in this time before the beginning, you reproduce according to your own preferences and instincts. You are not fed, forced to labor, or protected. You are not marked as a possession with brands or tagging. No one has even thought of you as something that could be possessed or owned.

As a wild rooster, you survey the landscape, warn others of intruders with complex calls, and defend mates with beak and sharp toes. As a wild hen, you begin communicating with your chicks even before they hatch, responding to peeps of distress by shifting your weight. The image of your motherly protection and care will be used in the second verse of Genesis to describe the hovering of God’s first breath over the first water. Jesus will invoke you as an image of protective love: “I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” But Genesis has not yet been written, nor Jesus born.

The First Human

ANY FOOD YOU EAT IS food you have found for yourself. For the most part, you do not live in close proximity to the animals you kill. You do not share or compete for land with them, but must go out to seek them. When you do so, you generally kill animals that you don’t know as individuals, save in the brief space of the hunt itself, and you view the animals you hunt as equals of sorts. Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things. When you create rites and traditions, you do so with animals. You draw them in sand, in dirt, and on cave walls — not only animal figures, but also hybrid creatures that blend human and animal forms. Animals are what you are and are not. You have a complex relationship with them and, in a sense, an egalitarian one. This is about to change.

The First Problem

IT IS 8000 BCE. ONCE a wild jungle bird, the chicken is now domesticated, as are goats and cattle. This means a new kind of intimacy with humans — new kinds of care and new kinds of violence.

A common trope, ancient and modern, describes domestication as a process of coevolution between humans and other species. Basically, humans struck a deal with the animals we have named chickens, cows, pigs, and so forth: we’ll protect you, arrange food for you, etc., and, in turn, your labor will be harnessed, your milk and eggs taken, and, at times, you will be killed and eaten. Life in the wild isn’t a party, the logic goes — nature is cruel — so this is a good deal. And the animals, in their own way, have consented to it. Michael Pollan suggests this story in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans somehow imposed on animals some ten thousand years ago. Rather, domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and — yes — their flesh. . . . From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time.

This is the post-Darwinian version of the ancient myth of animal consent. It is offered by ranchers in defense of the violence that is part of their profession, and makes appearances in agricultural school curricula. Propping up the story is the idea that the interests of the species and those of individuals often conflict, but if there were no species there would be no individuals. If humankind went vegan, the logic goes, there would be no more farmed animals (which isn’t quite right, as there are already dozens of breeds of chickens and pigs that are “ornamental,” or raised for companionship, and others would be kept around to fertilize crops). The animals, in effect, want us to farm them. They prefer it this way. Some ranchers I met told me of times they’d accidentally left gates open, and none of the animals fled.

In ancient Greece the myth of consent was enacted at the oracle of Delphi by sprinkling water on the heads of animals before slaughter. When the animals shook off the water by nodding their heads, the oracle would interpret this as consent to be slaughtered and say, “That which willing nods . . . I say you may justly sacrifice.” A traditional formula used by Russian Yakuts reads, “You have come to me, Lord Bear, you wish me to kill you.” In the ancient Israelite tradition, the red heifer sacrificed for Israel’s atonement must walk to the altar willingly or the ritual is invalid. The myth of consent has many versions, but all imply a “fair deal” and, at least metaphorically, animal complicity in their own domestication and slaughter.

The Myth of the Myth

BUT SPECIES DON’T MAKE CHOICES, individuals do. And even if species somehow could, to imply that they would select perpetuity over individual well-being is hard to apply more broadly. By this logic, enslaving a group of humans is acceptable if the posed alternative were nonexistence. (Instead of Live free or die, the motto we script for our food animals is Die enslaved but live.) More obviously, most animals, even individually, are unable to fathom such an arrangement. Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.

That said, these objections might miss the point. Whatever the facts of the matter, most people can imagine fair and unfair treatment of, for example, the family dog or cat. And we can imagine methods of husbandry to which animals might, hypothetically, “consent.” (A dog given several years of tasty food, plenty of time outdoors with other dogs, and all the space she could want, aware of the hardships of dogs under wilder and less-regulated conditions, might conceivably agree to be eventually eaten in exchange.)

We can, do, and always have imagined such things. The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.

It is not surprising that, historically, most people seem to have accepted eating animals as a daily fact of life. Meat is filling and smells and tastes good to most. (It’s also not surprising that for virtually all of human history, some humans have kept other humans as slaves.) But as far back in time as records stretch, humans have expressed ambivalence about the violence and death dealing inherent in eating animals. So we’ve told stories.

The First Forgetting

WE SEE FARMED ANIMALS SO rarely today, it becomes easy to forget all of this. Earlier generations were more familiar than we are with both the personalities of farmed animals and the violence done to them. They would have known that pigs are playful, smart, and curious (we would say “like dogs”), and that they have complex social relationships (we would say “like primates”). They would have known the look and behavior of a caged pig, as well as the infant-like screech of a pig being castrated or slaughtered.

Having little exposure to animals makes it much easier to push aside questions about how our actions might influence their treatment. The problem posed by meat has become an abstract one: there is no individual animal, no singular look of joy or suffering, no wagging tail, and no scream. The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Some have tried to resolve this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn’t be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn’t do it.

Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

The First Animal Ethics

ONCE UPON A TIME the dominant ethic toward domestic animals, rooted in the demands of husbandry and responding to the fundamental problem of life feeding on sentient life, was not don’t eat (of course), but neither was it don’t care. Rather: eat with care.

The care for domesticated animals demanded by the eat with care ethic did not necessarily correspond to any official morality: it didn’t need to, as that ethic was based on the economic necessities of raising domestic animals. The very nature of the human–domestic animal relationship required some degree of caring, in the sense of providing provisions and a safe environment for one’s flock. Care for farmed animals was, to an extent, good business. But there was a price for this guarantee of sheepdogs and clean (enough) water: castration, exhausting labor, draining blood or cutting flesh from living animals, branding, removing young animals from their mothers, and, of course, slaughter were also good business. The animals were ensured police protection in exchange for being sacrificed to those policemen: protect and serve.

The eat with care ethic lived and evolved for thousands of years. It became many different ethical systems inflected by the diverse cultures in which it appeared: in India it led to prohibitions on eating cows, in Islam and Judaism it led to mandates for quick slaughter, on the Russian tundra it led Yakuts to claim the animals wanted to be killed. But it was not to last.

The eat with care ethic didn’t become obsolete over time, but died suddenly. It was killed, actually.

The First Line Worker

BEGINNING IN CINCINNATI AND EXPANDING to Chicago in the late 1820s and ’30s, early industrial “processing” plants (a.k.a. slaughterhouses) replaced the skilled knowledge of butchers with gangs of men who would perform a coordinated series of mind-, muscle-, and joint-numbing tasks. Kill men, sticker-bleeders, tail-rippers, leggers, butters, flankers, head-skinners, head-chislers, gutters, and back-splitters (among many others). By his own acknowledgment, the efficiencies of these lines inspired Henry Ford, who brought the model into the auto industry, leading to a revolution in manufacturing. (Putting together a car is just taking apart a cow in reverse.)

The pressure to improve upon the efficiency of slaughter and processing came in part as advances in rail transport, such as the 1879 invention of the refrigerator car, allowed for increasingly large concentrations of cattle to be brought together from ever-farther distances. Today, it isn’t unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers around fifteen hundred miles. That’s like me driving from Brooklyn to the Texas Panhandle for lunch.

By 1908, conveyer systems were introduced to the disassembly lines, allowing supervisors rather than workers to control line speeds. These speeds would ramp upward for more than eighty years — in many cases doubling and even tripling — with predictable increases in ineffective slaughter and associated workplace injuries.

Despite these trends in processing, at the dawn of the twentieth century, animals were still largely raised on farms and ranches in much the same manner they always had been — and as most people continue to imagine. It hadn’t yet occurred to farmers to treat living animals like dead ones.

The First Factory Farmer

IN 1923, IN THE DELMARVA (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) Peninsula, a small, almost-funny accident befell an Oceanview housewife, Celia Steele, and initiated the modern poultry industry and the global creep of factory farming. Steele, who managed her family’s small flock of chickens, allegedly received an order of five hundred chicks instead of the fifty she had requested. Rather than get rid of them, she decided to experiment with keeping the birds indoors through the winter. With the help of newly discovered feed supplements the birds survived, and the loop of her experimentations continued. By 1926, Steele had 10,000 birds, and by 1935, 250,000. (The average flock size in America in 1930 was still only 23.)

Just ten years after Steele’s breakthrough, the Delmarva Peninsula was the poultry capital of the world. Delaware’s Sussex County now produces more than 250 million broilers a year, nearly twice as many as any other county in the country. Poultry production is the region’s primary economic activity, and the primary source of its pollution. (Nitrates contaminate one-third of all groundwater in Delmarva’s agricultural areas)

Crowded and deprived for months of both exercise and sunlight, Steele’s birds never would have survived if it were not for the newly discovered benefits of adding vitamins A and D to the chickens’ feed. Nor would Steele even have been able to order her chicks if not for the prior rise of chicken hatcheries with artificial incubators. Multiple forces — generations of accumulated technologies — were converging and amplifying one another in unexpected ways.

By 1928, Herbert Hoover was promising a “chicken in every pot.” The promise would be realized and exceeded, though not as anyone had imagined. By the early 1930s, architects of the emerging factory farm like Arthur Perdue and John Tyson entered the chicken business. They helped underwrite the burgeoning science of modern industrial agriculture, generating a host of “innovations” in poultry production by World War II. Hybrid corn, produced with the help of government subsidies, provided cheap feed that soon was delivered by chain-driven feeders. Debeaking — usually performed by searing off chicks’ beaks with a hot blade — was invented and then automated (the beak is a chicken’s main instrument of exploration). Automatic lights and fans made even greater densities possible, and ultimately ushered in the now-standard manipulation of growing cycles by controlling light.

Every aspect of the chickens’ lives had been engineered to produce more food for less cost. So it was time for another breakthrough.

The First Chicken of Tomorrow

IN 1946, THE POULTRY INDUSTRY turned its gaze to genetics and, with the aid of the USDA, launched a “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest to create a bird that could produce more breast meat with less feed. The winner was a surprise: Charles Vantress, of Marysville, California. (Until then, New England had been the main source of breeding stock.) Vantress’s red-feathered Cornish–New Hampshire cross introduced Cornish blood, which gave, according to an industry periodical, “the broad-breasted appearance that would soon be demanded with the emphasis on marketing after the war.”

The 1940s also saw the introduction of sulfa drugs and antibiotics to chicken feed, which stimulated growth and held down the diseases induced by confinement. Feed and drug regimens were increasingly developed in coordination with the newly bred “chickens of tomorrow,” and by the 1950s there was not one “chicken” anymore, but two distinct chickens — one for eggs, one for flesh.

The very genetics of chickens, along with their feed and environment, were now intensively manipulated to produce either excessive amounts of eggs (layers) or flesh, especially breasts (broilers). From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of “broilers” increased by 65 percent, while their time-to-market dropped 60 percent and their feed requirements dropped 57 percent. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be three hundred pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.

These changes in chicken genetics were not one change among others: they dictated how the birds could be raised. With these new alterations, drugs and confinement were being used not only to increase profitability, but because the birds could no longer be “healthy” or often even survive without them.

Even worse, these genetically grotesque birds didn’t come to occupy only one portion of the industry — they now are practically the only chickens being raised for consumption. There were once dozens of different breeds of chickens raised in America (Jersey Giants, New Hampshire, Plymouth Rock), all of them adapted to the environment of their region. Now we have factory chickens.

In the 1950s and 1960s, poultry companies began to achieve total vertical integration. They owned the genetic pool (today two companies own three-fourths of the genetics for all broiler chickens on the planet), the birds themselves (farmers only tended to them, like counselors at a sleepaway camp), the requisite drugs, the feed, the slaughtering, the processing, and the market brands. It wasn’t just that techniques had changed: biodiversity was replaced with genetic uniformity, university departments of animal husbandry became departments of animal science, a business once dominated by women was now taken over by men, and skilled farmers were replaced with wage and contract workers. No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.

The First Factory Farm

THE FACTORY FARM WAS MORE event than innovation. Barren security buffers took over pastures, multitiered intensive confinement systems rose where barns once stood, and genetically engineered animals — birds that could not fly, pigs that could not survive outside, turkeys that could not naturally reproduce — replaced the once familiar barnyard cast.

What did — and do — these changes mean? Jacques Derrida is one of a small handful of contemporary philosophers who have taken on this inconvenient question. “However one interprets it,” he argues, “whatever practical, technical, scientific, juridical, ethical, or political consequence one draws from it, no one can deny this event anymore, no one can deny the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal.” He continues:

Such a subjection . . . can be called violence in the most morally neutral sense of the term. . . . No one can deny seriously, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence.

On their own and in alliances with the government and the scientific community, twentieth-century American businessmen planned and executed a series of revolutions in farming. They turned the early-modern philosophical proposition (championed by Descartes) that animals should be viewed as machines into reality for thousands, then millions, and now billions of farmed animals.

As described in industry journals from the 1960s onward, the egg-laying hen was to be considered “only a very efficient converting machine” (Farmer and Stockbreeder), the pig was to be “just like a machine in a factory” (Hog Farm Management), and the twenty-first century was to bring a new “computer ‘cookbook’ of recipes for custom-designed creatures” (Agricultural Research).

Such scientific wizardry succeeded in producing cheap meat, milk, and eggs. In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy, and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500 percent; new cars climbed more than 1,400 percent; but the price of milk is up only 350 percent, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled. Taking inflation into account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history. (That is, unless one also takes into account the externalized costs — farm subsidies, environmental impact, human disease, and so on — which make the price historically high.)

For each food animal species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm — 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle — but there are still some vibrant alternatives. In the pig industry, small farmers have begun to work cooperatively to preserve themselves. And the movements toward sustainable fishing and cattle ranching have captured significant press and market share. But the transformation of the poultry industry — the largest and most influential in animal agriculture (99 percent of all land animals slaughtered are farmed birds) — is all but complete. Incredibly, there may well be only one truly independent poultry farmer left. . . .

5.

I Am the Last Poultry Farmer

My name is Frank Reese and I’m a poultry farmer. It’s what I’ve given my whole life to. I don’t know where that comes from. I went to a little one-room country school. Mother said one of the first things I wrote was a story titled “Me and My Turkeys.”

I just always loved the beauty of them, the majesticness. I like how they strut. I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. I just love their feather patterns. I’ve always loved the personality of them. They’re so curious, so playful, so friendly and full of life.

I can sit in the house at night, and I can hear them, and I can tell if they’re in trouble or not. Having been around turkeys for almost sixty years, I know their vocabulary. I know the sound they make if it’s just two turkeys fighting or if there’s a possum in the barn. There’s the sound they make when they’re petrified and the sound they make when they’re excited over something new. The mother turkey is amazing to listen to. She has a tremendous vocal range when she’s speaking to her babies. And the little babies understand. She can tell them, “Run and jump and hide under me,” or “Move from here to here.” Turkeys know what’s going on and can communicate it — in their world, in their language. I’m not trying to give them human characteristics, ’cause they’re not humans, they’re turkeys. I’m only telling you what they are.

A lot of people slow down when they pass my farm. Get a lot of schools and churches and 4-H kids. I get kids asking me how a turkey got in my trees or on my roof. I tell ’em, “He flew there!” And they don’t believe me! Turkeys used to be raised out on fields like this by the millions in America. This kind of turkey is what everybody had on their farms for hundreds of years, and what everybody ate. And now mine are the only ones left, and I’m the only one doing it this way.

Not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket could walk normally, much less jump or fly. Did you know that? They can’t even have sex. Not the antibiotic-free, or organic, or free-range, or anything. They all have the same foolish genetics, and their bodies won’t allow for it anymore. Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination. If it were only for efficiency, that would be one thing, but these animals literally can’t reproduce naturally. Tell me what could be sustainable about that?

These guys here, cold weather, snow, ice — doesn’t hurt ’em. With the modern industrial turkey it would be a mess. They couldn’t survive. My guys could maneuver through a foot of snow without any trouble. And my turkeys all have their toenails; they all have their wings and beaks — nothing’s been cut off; nothing’s been destroyed. We don’t vaccinate, don’t feed antibiotics. No need to. Our birds exercise all day. And because their genes haven’t been messed with, they have naturally strong immune systems. We never lose birds. If you can find a healthier flock, anywhere in the world, you take me to it and then I’ll believe you. What the industry figured out — and this was the real revolution — is that you don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable. The animals have paid the price for our desire to have everything available at all times for very little money.

We never needed biosecurity before. Look at my farm. Anyone who wants to can visit, and I wouldn’t have a second thought about taking my animals to shows and fairs. I always tell people to visit an industrial turkey farm. You may not even have to go into the building. You’ll smell it before you get there. But people don’t want to hear those things. They don’t want to hear that these big turkey factories have incinerators to burn all the turkeys that die every day. They don’t care to hear that when the industry sends turkeys off to be processed, it knows and accepts that it’s gonna lose 10 to 15 percent of them in transport — the DOAs at the plant. You know my DOA rate this Thanksgiving? Zero. But these are just numbers, not anything anyone gets excited about. It’s all about nickels and dimes. So 15 percent of the turkeys suffocate. Throw them in the incinerator.

Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he’s seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don’t even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier, and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it’s our food. We’re messing with the genes of these animals and then feeding them growth hormones and all kinds of drugs that we really don’t know enough about. And then we’re eating them. Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff, and we’re making a science experiment out of them. Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

People are so removed from food animals now. When I grew up, the animals were taken care of first. You did chores before you ate breakfast. We were told that if we didn’t take care of the animals, we weren’t going to eat. We never went on vacations. Somebody always had to be here. I remember we had day trips, but we always hated them because if we didn’t get home before dark, we knew we’d be out in the pasture trying to get the cows in, and we’d be milking cows in the dark. It had to be done no matter what. If you don’t want that responsibility, don’t become a farmer. Because that’s what it takes to do it right. And if you can’t do it right, don’t do it. It’s that simple. And I’ll tell you another thing: if consumers don’t want to pay the farmer to do it right, they shouldn’t eat meat.

People care about these things. And I don’t mean rich city people. Most of the folks who buy my turkeys are not rich by any means; they’re struggling on fixed incomes. But they’re willing to pay more for the sake of what they believe in. They’re willing to pay the real price. And to those who say it’s just too much to pay for a turkey, I always say to them, “Don’t eat turkey.” It’s possible you can’t afford to care, but it’s certain you can’t afford not to care.

Everyone’s saying buy fresh, buy local. It’s a sham. It’s all the same kind of bird, and the suffering is in their genes. When the mass-produced turkey of today was designed, they killed thousands of turkeys in their experiments. Should it be shorter legs or shorter keel bone? Should it be like this or like this? In nature, sometimes human babies are born with deformities. But you don’t aim to reproduce that generation after generation. But that’s what they did with turkeys.

Michael Pollan wrote about Polyface Farm in The Omnivore’s Dilemma like it was something great, but that farm is horrible. It’s a joke. Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. It’s like putting a broken-down Honda on the Autobahn and saying it’s a Porsche. KFC chickens are almost always killed in thirty-nine days. They’re babies. That’s how rapidly they’re grown. Salatin’s organic free-range chicken is killed in forty-two days. ’Cause it’s still the same chicken. It can’t be allowed to live any longer because its genetics are so screwed up. Stop and think about that: a bird that you simply can’t let live out of its adolescence. So maybe he’ll just say he’s doing as much right as he can, but it’s too expensive to raise healthy birds. Well, I’m sorry if I can’t pat him on the back and tell him what a good guy he is. These aren’t things, they’re animals, so we shouldn’t be talking about good enough. Either do it right or don’t do it.

I do it right from beginning to end. Most important, I use the old genetics, the birds that were raised a hundred years ago. Do they grow slower? Yes. Do I have to feed them more? Yes. But you look at them and tell me if they’re healthy.

I don’t allow baby turkeys to be shipped through the mail. Lots of people don’t care that half their turkeys are going to die under the stress of going through the mail, or that those that do live are going to be five pounds lighter in the end than those that you give food and water to immediately. But I care. All my animals get as much pasture as they want, and I never mutilate or drug them. I don’t manipulate lighting or starve them to cycle unnaturally. I don’t allow my turkeys to be moved if it’s too cold or too hot. And I have them transported in the night, so they’ll be calmer. I only allow so many turkeys on a truck, even though I could pack many, many more in. My turkeys are always carried upright, never hung by their feet, even if that means it takes much longer. At our processing plant they have to slow everything down. I pay them twice as much to do it half as fast. They have to get the turkeys off the trailers safely. No broken bones and no unnecessary stress. Everything is done by hand and carefully. It’s done right every time. The turkeys are stunned before they’re shackled. Normally they’re hung live and dragged through an electrical bath, but we don’t do that. We do one at a time. It’s a person doing it, handheld. When they do it one by one, they do it well. My big fear is having live animals put in the boiling water. My sister worked at a large poultry plant. She needed the money. Two weeks, and that was all she could take. This was years and years ago, and she’s still talking about the horrors she saw there.

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.

My mother was part Indian. I still have that thing where the Indians apologize. In the fall, while other people are giving thanks, I find myself apologizing. I hate seeing them on the truck, waiting to be taken to slaughter. They’re looking back at me, saying, “Get me off of here.” Killing is . . . it’s very . . . Sometimes I justify it in my mind that I can at least make it as good as possible for the animals in my custody. It’s like . . . they look at me and I tell them, “Please forgive me.” I can’t help it. I personalize it. Animals are hard. Tonight I’ll go out and make everybody that jumped the fence come back in. These turkeys are used to me, they know me, and when I go out there, they’ll come running, and I’ll open the gate and they’ll come in. But at the same time, I put thousands on trucks and send them off to slaughter.

People focus on that last second of death. I want them to focus on the entire life of the animal. If I had to choose between knowing that my throat was going to be slit at the end, which might last three minutes, but I’ve had to live for six weeks in pain, I’d probably ask for that slit throat six weeks earlier. People only see the killing. They say, “What’s the big deal if the animal can’t walk or move, ’cause it’s just gonna get killed anyway?” If it was your child, do you want your child to suffer three years, three months, three weeks, three hours, three minutes? A turkey chick isn’t a human baby, but it suffers. I’ve never met anyone in the industry — manager, vet, worker, anyone — who doubts that they feel pain. So how much suffering is acceptable? That’s what’s at the bottom of all of this, and what each person has to ask himself. How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?

My nephew and his wife had a baby, and as soon as it was born they were told it wasn’t going to survive. They’re very religious. They got to hold her for twenty minutes. For twenty minutes she was alive, and in no pain, and she was part of their life. And they said they would never have traded those twenty minutes. They just thanked the Lord and praised him that she was alive, even if it was only twenty minutes. So how you gonna approach that?

On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime—one animal for every letter on the last five pages.

Lam Hoi-ka

BREVIG MISSION IS A TINY Inuit village on the Bering Strait. The one full-time local government employee is a “financial administrator.” No police or fire department, no utilities workmen, no waste management. Amazingly, though, there is an online dating service. (One might have thought that with only 276 citizens, everyone would more or less know who was available.) There are two women and two men looking for love, which would be good math, except that one of the men — last time I checked the site, anyway — isn’t into women. Cutieguy1, a black African, self-described as “cute 5.4 feet tall looking,” is the second-least-likely person you might imagine finding in Brevig. The prize itself goes to Johan Hultin, a six-foot-tall Swede with a shock of white hair and a trim white goatee. Hultin arrived in Brevig on August 19, 1997, having told only one person about his trip, and got right to digging. Beneath the feet of solid ice were bodies. He was excavating a mass grave.

Deep in the permafrost were preserved victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. The one person Hultin shared his plans with was a fellow scientist, Jeffery Taubenberger, who was also looking for the source of the 1918 flu.

Hultin’s search for the dead of 1918 was timely. It was only a few months before his arrival in Brevig Mission that an H5N1-type virus in Hong Kong’s chickens apparently “jumped” to humans for the first time — an event of potentially historic significance.

Three-year-old Lam Hoi-ka was the first of six to be killed by this particularly ominous version of the H5N1 virus. I, and now you, know his name because when a deadly virus jumps species, a window opens through which a new pandemic may enter the world. Had health authorities not acted as they did (or had our luck been worse), Lam Hoi-ka might have been death number one in a global pandemic. He still might be. The worrisome strains of H5N1 have not disappeared from the planet even if it has disappeared from American headlines. The question is whether it will continue to kill a relatively small number of people or mutate into a deadlier version. Viruses like H5N1 can be ferocious entrepreneurs, constantly innovating, relentless in their aim of corrupting the human immune system.

With a potential H5N1 nightmare looming, Hultin and Taubenberger wanted to know what had caused the 1918 pandemic. And for good reason: the 1918 pandemic killed more people faster than any other disease — or any other anything — had before or has since.

Influenza

THE 1918 PANDEMIC HAS BEEN remembered as the “Spanish flu” because the Spanish press was the only Western media to adequately cover its massive toll. (Some speculate that this is because the Spanish were not at war, and their press was not as distorted by wartime censorship and distraction.) Despite the name, Spanish flu struck the entire world — that’s what made it a pandemic instead of simply an epidemic. It was not the first influenza pandemic, nor the most recent (1957 and 1968 also saw pandemics), but it was by far the most deadly. Whereas AIDS took roughly twenty-four years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in twenty- four weeks. Some recent revisions of the death toll suggest that 50 million or even as many as 100 million people were killed worldwide. Estimates suggest that one-quarter of Americans, and perhaps one-quarter of the world, fell ill.

Unlike most influenzas that mortally threaten only the very young, very old, and already ill, the Spanish flu killed healthy people in the prime of their lives. Mortality was actually highest in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine-year-old group, and at the flu’s peak the average life expectancy for Americans was reduced to thirty-seven years. The scale of the misery was so vast in America — as elsewhere — that I find it impossible to understand why I didn’t learn more about it in school, or through memorials or stories. As many as twenty thousand Americans died in a week during the height of the Spanish flu. Steam shovels were used to dig mass graves.

Health authorities today fear precisely such an event. Many insist that a pandemic based on the H5N1 virus strain is inevitable, and the question is really one of when it will strike and, most important, just how severe it will be.

Even if the H5N1 virus manages to pass us by without much more ultimate impact than the recent outbreak of swine flu, no health authority today is predicting that pandemics can be completely prevented. The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said simply, “We know another pandemic is inevitable. . . . It is coming.” The National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine has added more recently that a pandemic is “not only inevitable, but overdue.” Recent history has averaged a pandemic every twenty-seven and a half years, and it’s now been over forty years since the last one. Scientists cannot know with certainty the future of pandemic diseases, but they can and do know that a threat is imminent.

WHO officials now have at their fingertips the most massive assemblage of scientific data ever gathered about a potential new flu pandemic. So it is quite unnerving that this very suit-and-tie-and-long-white-jackets, very now-don’t-everyone-panic type of institution has the following list of “things you need to know about pandemic influenza” for its constituency, which is everyone:

- The world may be on the brink of another pandemic.

- All countries will be affected.

- Widespread illness will occur.

- Medical supplies will be inadequate.

- Large numbers of deaths will occur.

- Economic and social disruption will be great.

The relatively conservative WHO suggests “a relatively conservative estimate — from 2 million to 7.4 million deaths” if bird flu jumps to humans and becomes airborne (as swine flu — H1N1 — did). “This estimate,” they go on to explain, “is based on the comparatively mild 1957 pandemic. Estimates based on a more virulent virus, closer to the one seen in 1918, have been made and are much higher.” Mercifully, the WHO does not include these higher estimates on its “things you need to know” list. Unmercifully, they cannot say that higher estimates are any less realistic.

Hultin eventually uncovered the remains of a woman among the frozen dead of 1918 and named her Lucy. He cut out Lucy’s lungs and mailed them to Taubenberger, who took samples from the tissue and found evidence of something quite remarkable. The results, published in 2005, show that the source of the 1918 pandemic was avian influenza — bird flu. A major scientific question had been answered.

Other evidence suggests that the 1918 virus might have mutated within pigs (which are uniquely susceptible to both human and bird viruses) or even in human populations for a time before reaching the deadly virtuosity of its final version. We cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that there is scientific consensus that new viruses, which move between farmed animals and humans, will be a major global health threat into the foreseeable future. The concern is not only bird flu or swine flu or whatever-comes-next, but the entire class of “zoonotic” (animal-to-human or vice versa) pathogens — especially viruses that move between humans, chickens, turkeys, and pigs.

We can also be sure that any talk of pandemic influenza today cannot ignore the fact that the most devastating disease event the world has ever known, and one of the greatest health threats before us today, has everything to do with the health of the world’s farmed animals, birds most of all.

All Flus

ANOTHER KEY FIGURE IN THE story of influenza research is a virologist named Robert Webster, who proved the avian origins of all human influenza. He called it the “barnyard theory,” which surmises that “the viruses in human pandemics recruit some of their genes from flu viruses in domestic birds.”

A few years after the 1968 “Hong Kong flu” pandemic (whose successor strains continue to quietly cause twenty thousand “excess deaths” annually in the United States), Webster identified the responsible virus. As he anticipated, the virus was a hybrid that had incorporated aspects of a bird virus found in a duck in central Europe. Today the best evidence suggests that the avian source of the 1968 pandemic is not unique: scientists now argue that the primordial source of all flu strains is migrating aquatic birds such as ducks and geese that have roamed the earth for more than a hundred million years. The flu, it turns out, is all about our relationship with birds.

Some basic science is necessary here. As the original source of these viruses, wild ducks, geese, terns, and gulls harbor the full spectrum of flu strains as categorized by today’s science: H1 through the recently discovered H16, N1 through N9. Domestic birds can also harbor a large reservoir of such flu strains. Neither wild nor domestic birds necessarily become sick from these viruses. They often simply carry them, sometimes clear across the globe, and then shed them through feces into lakes, rivers, ponds, and, quite often, thanks to industrial animal-processing techniques, directly into the food we eat.

Each mammalian species is vulnerable to only some of the viruses carried by birds. Humans, for example, are typically vulnerable to only H1, H2, and H3 viruses, pigs to H1 and H3, and horses to H3 and H7. The H stands for hemagglutinin, a spike-shaped protein found on the surface of influenza viruses and named after its ability to “agglutinate” — that is, to clump together red blood cells. Hemagglutinin serves as a kind of molecular bridge that allows the virus itself to flow into the victim’s cells like enemy troops crossing a makeshift bridge. Hemagglutinin is able to accomplish this deadly work through its remarkable ability to bind itself to specific kinds of molecular structures, known as receptors, on the surface of human and animal cells. H1, H2, and H3 — the three types of hemagglutinin that commonly attack humans — are specialists in binding to our respiratory systems, which is why the flu so often begins in the human respiratory tract.

The trouble begins when a virus in one species begins to get itchy and starts showing a fondness for mixing with viruses in others, as H1N1 has done (combining bird, pig, and human viruses). In the case of H5N1, there are fears that the actual “creation” of a new virus highly contagious to humans might occur in pig populations, since pigs are susceptible to the types of viruses that attack birds as well as to those that attack humans. When a single pig gets infected with two different virus types at the same time, there is a possibility of viruses trading genes. The H1N1 swine flu appears to have resulted from just this. What’s worrisome is that such gene swapping could lead to the creation of a virus that has the virulence of bird flu and the everyone-is-getting-it contagiousness of the common cold.

How did this new landscape of disease come about? To what extent is modern animal agriculture responsible? To answer these questions, we need to know where the birds we eat come from, and why their environments are perfect to make not only the birds, but us, sick.

The Life and Death of a Bird

THE SECOND FARM I SAW with C was set up in a series of twenty sheds, each 45 feet wide by 490 feet long, each holding in the neighborhood of 33,000 birds. I didn’t have a tape measure with me and couldn’t do anything resembling a head count. But I can assert these numbers with confidence because the dimensions are typical in the industry — though some growers are now building larger sheds: up to 60 feet by 504 feet, housing 50,000 or more birds.

It’s hard to get one’s head around the magnitude of 33,000 birds in one room. You don’t have to see it for yourself, or even do the math, to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal Welfare Guidelines, the National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot per bird. That’s what’s considered animal welfare by a “mainstream” organization representing chicken producers, which shows you how thoroughly co-opted ideas about welfare have become — and why you can’t trust labels that come from anywhere but a reliable third-party source.

It’s worth pausing on this for a moment. Although many animals live with far less, let’s assume the full eight-tenths of a square foot. Try to picture it. (It’s unlikely you’ll ever get to see the inside of a poultry factory farm in person, but there are plenty of images on the Internet if your imagination needs help.) Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

Now to the farming.

First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1 and 4 percent of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms. Another factory-farm-induced condition in which excess fluids fill the body cavity, ascites, kills even more (5 percent of birds globally). Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain. One out of four will have such significant trouble walking that there is no question they are in pain.

For your broilers, leave the lights on about twenty-four hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks’ lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day — just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long — the lighting and crowding, the burdens of their grotesque bodies. At least broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the forty-second day of their lives (or increasingly the thirty-ninth), so they haven’t yet established social hierarchies to fight over.

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.

Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don’t taste quite right — how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? — but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, “ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.”)

The farming done, it’s now time for “processing.”

First, you’ll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and “hold the line” that will turn the living, whole birds into plastic-wrapped parts. You will have to continuously find the workers, since annual turnover rates typically exceed 100 percent. (The interviews I did suggest turnover rates of around 150 percent.) Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America’s slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations; for you, they constitute a crucial way to produce cheap meat and feed the world. Pay your workers minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds — grabbing five in each hand, upside down by the legs — and jam them into transport crates.

If your operation is running at the proper speed — 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed — the birds will be handled roughly and, as I was also told, the workers will regularly feel the birds’ bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30 percent of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.) No laws protect the birds, but of course there are laws about how you can treat the workers, and this sort of labor tends to leave people in pain for days afterward, so, again, be sure you hire those who won’t be in a position to complain — people like “Maria,” an employee of one of the largest chicken processors in California, with whom I spent an afternoon. After more than forty years of work, and five surgeries due to work-related injuries, Maria no longer has enough use of her hands to do the dishes. She is in such constant pain that she spends her evenings soaking her arms in ice water, and often can’t fall asleep without pills. She is paid eight dollars an hour, and asked that I not use her real name, for fear of retribution.

Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don’t feed or water the birds, even if the plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, to hang upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, onto a moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won’t be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.

The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyzes them but doesn’t render them insensible. Other countries, including many European countries, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, where the USDA’s interpretation of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act exempts chicken slaughter, the voltage is kept low — about one-tenth the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has traveled through the bath, a paralyzed bird’s eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though attempting to scream.

The next stop on the line for the immobile-but-conscious bird will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, “all the time.” So you’ll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers —“kill men” — who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens “all the time.” According to the National Chicken Council — representatives of the industry — about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L. Lobb, the council’s spokesman, sighed, “The process is over in a matter of minutes.”

I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank. (Government estimates obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggest that this happens to about four million birds each year.) Since feces on skin and feathers end up in the tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin (the tanks’ heated water helps open the birds’ pores).

After the birds’ heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds’ body cavities. Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.” As a result, inspectors condemn half the number of birds. Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, “People are done consuming the feces in a matter of minutes.”

Next the birds are inspected by a USDA official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, both the carcass and the organs, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. Journalist Scott Bronstein wrote a remarkable series for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about poultry inspection, which should be required reading for anyone considering eating chicken. He conducted interviews with nearly a hundred USDA poultry inspectors from thirty-seven plants. “Every week,” he reports, “millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.”

Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the “water in these tanks has been aptly named ‘fecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around. By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you’re practically assuring cross-contamination.”

While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99 percent of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue the outmoded use of water-chilling. It’s not hard to figure out why. Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird’s carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as “fecal soup”). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity for the industry to turn wastewater into tens of millions of dollars’ worth of additional weight in poultry products.

Not too long ago there was an 8 percent limit set by the USDA on just how much absorbed liquid one could sell consumers at chicken meat prices before the government took action. When this became public knowledge in the 1990s, there was an understandable outcry. Consumers sued over the practice, which sounded to them not only repulsive, but like adulteration. The courts threw out the 8 percent rule as “arbitrary and capricious.”

Ironically, though, the USDA’s interpretation of the court ruling allowed the chicken industry to do its own research to evaluate what percentage of chicken meat should be composed of fouled, chlorinated water. (This is an all-too-familiar outcome when challenging the agribusiness industry.) After industry consultation, the new law of the land allows slightly more than 11 percent liquid absorption (the exact percentage is indicated in small print on packaging — have a look next time). As soon as the public’s attention moved elsewhere, the poultry industry turned regulations meant to protect consumers to its own advantage.

US poultry consumers now gift massive poultry producers millions of additional dollars every year as a result of this added liquid. The USDA knows this and defends the practice — after all, the poultry processors are, as so many factory farmers like to say, simply doing their best to “feed the world.” (Or in this case ensure its hydration.)

What I’ve described is not exceptional. It isn’t the result of masochistic workers, defective machinery, or “bad apples.” It is the rule. More than 99 percent of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this.

In some ways factory systems may differ considerably, for example in the percentage of birds that are accidentally scalded alive each week during processing or in the amount of fecal soup their bodies absorb. These are differences that matter. In other ways, though, chicken factory farms — well run or poorly run, “cage-free” or not — are basically the same: all birds come from similar Frankenstein-like genetic stock; all are confined; none enjoy the breeze or the warmth of sunlight; none are able to fulfill all (or usually any) of their species-specific behaviors like nesting, perching, exploring their environment, and forming stable social units; illness is always rampant; suffering is always the rule; the animals are always only a unit, a weight; death is invariably cruel. These similarities matter more than the differences.

The vastness of the poultry industry means that if there is anything wrong with the system, there is something terribly wrong in our world. Today six billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the European Union, over nine billion in America, and more than seven billion in China. India’s billion-plus population consumes very little chicken per capita, but that still amounts to a couple billion factory-farmed birds annually, and the number of birds they raise is increasing — as in China — at aggressive, globally significant rates (often double the growth of the rapidly expanding US poultry industry). All told, there are fifty billion (and counting) factory-farmed birds worldwide. If India and China eventually start consuming poultry at the rate the United States does, it would more than double this already mind-blowing figure.

Fifty billion. Every year fifty billion birds are made to live and die like this.

It cannot be overstated how revolutionary and relatively new this reality is — the number of factory-farmed birds was zero before Celia Steele’s 1923 experiment. And we’re not just raising chickens differently; we’re eating more chickens: Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago.

Another thing we could say about fifty billion is that it is calculated with the utmost meticulousness. The statisticians who generate the figure nine billion in the United States break it down by month, state, and the birds’ weight, and compare it — each and every month — to the death toll in the same month a year before. These numbers are studied, debated, projected, and practically revered like a cult object by the industry. They are no mere facts, but the announcement of a victory.

Influence

MUCH LIKE THE VIRUS IT names, the word influenza comes to us by way of a mutation. The word was first used in Italian and originally referred to the influence of the stars — that is, astral or occult influences that would have been felt by many people at once. By the sixteenth century, though, the word had begun mixing and blending with the meanings of other words and come to refer to epidemic and pandemic flues that simultaneously strike multiple communities (as if the result of some malevolent will).

At least etymologically speaking, when we talk about influenza we are talking about the influences that shape the world everywhere at once. Today’s bird flu or swine flu viruses or the 1918 Spanish flu virus are not the real influenza — not the underlying influence — but only its symptom.

Few of us any longer believe that pandemics are the creation of occult forces. Should we consider the contribution of 50 billion sickly, drugged birds — birds that are the primordial source of all flu viruses — an underlying influence propelling the creation of new pathogens that attack humans? What about the 500 million pigs with compromised immune systems in confinement facilities?

In 2004, a collection of the world’s experts on emerging zoonotic diseases gathered to discuss the possible relationship between all those compromised and sick farm animals, and pandemic explosions. Before getting to their conclusions, it is helpful to think about the new pathogens as two related but distinct kinds of public-health concerns. The first concern is a more general one about the relationship between factory farms and all kinds of pathogens, like new strains of campylobacter, salmonella, or E. coli. The second public-health concern is the more particular one: humans are setting the conditions for the creation of the superpathogen of all superpathogens, a hybrid virus that could cause a repeat, more or less, of the Spanish flu of 1918. These two concerns are intimately related.

Each case of food-borne illness cannot be traced, but where we do know the origin, or the “vehicle of transmission,” it is, overwhelmingly, an animal product. According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), poultry is by far the largest cause. According to a study published in Consumer Reports, 83 percent of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase.

I’m not sure why more people aren’t aware of (and angry about) the rates of avoidable food-borne illness. Perhaps it doesn’t seem obvious that something is amiss simply because anything that happens all the time, like meat (especially poultry) becoming infected by pathogens, tends to fade into the background.

In any case, if you know what to look for, the pathogen problem comes into terrifying focus. For example, the next time a friend has a sudden “flu” — what folks sometimes misdescribe as “the stomach flu” — ask a few questions. Was your friend’s illness one of those “twenty-four-hour flus” that come and go quickly — retch or shit then relief? The diagnosis isn’t quite so simple, but if the answer to this question is yes, your friend probably didn’t have the flu at all — he or she was probably among the 76 million cases of food-borne illness the CDC estimates occur in America each year. Your friend didn’t “catch a bug” so much as eat a bug. And in all likelihood that bug was created by factory farming.

Beyond the sheer number of illnesses linked to factory farming, we know that factory farms are contributing to the growth of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens simply because these farms consume so many antimicrobials. We have to go to a doctor to obtain antibiotics and other antimicrobials as a public-health measure to limit the number of such drugs being taken by humans. We accept this inconvenience because of its medical importance. Microbes eventually adapt to antimicrobials, and we want to make sure it is the truly sick people who benefit from the finite number of uses any antimicrobial will have before the microbes learn how to survive it.

On a typical factory farm drugs are fed to animals with every meal. In poultry factory farms, as I explained earlier, they almost have to be. Industry saw this problem from the beginning, but rather than accept less-productive animals, they compensated for the animals’ compromised immunity with feed additives.

As a result, farmed animals are fed antibiotics nontherapeutically (that is, before they get sick). In the United States, about 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock — at least that is what the industry claims. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has shown that the industry underreported its antibiotic use by at least 40 percent. The UCS calculated 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals, only counting nontherapeutic uses. They further calculated that fully 13.5 million pounds of those antimicrobials would currently be illegal within the EU.

The implications for creating drug-resistant pathogens are quite straightforward. Study after study has shown that antimicrobial resistance follows quickly on the heels of the introduction of new drugs on factory farms. For example, in 1995, when the Food and Drug Administration approved fluoroquinolones — such as Cipro — for use in chickens against the protest of the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of bacteria resistant to this powerful new class of antibiotics rose from almost zero to 18 percent by 2002. A broader study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed an eightfold increase in antimicrobial resistance from 1992 to 1997, and, using molecular subtyping, linked this increase to the use of antimicrobials in farmed chickens.

As far back as the late 1960s, scientists have warned against the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in farmed-animal feed. Today, institutions as diverse as the American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control, the Institute of Medicine (a division of the National Academy of Sciences), and the World Health Organization have linked nontherapeutic antibiotic use on factory farms with increased antimicrobial resistance and called for a ban. Still, the factory farm industry has effectively opposed such a ban in the United States. And, unsurprisingly, the limited bans in other countries are only a limited solution.

There is a glaring reason that the needed total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t already occurred: the factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals. The source of the industry’s immense power is not obscure. We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products (and water sold as animal products) — and we do so daily.

The same conditions that lead 76 million Americans to become ill from their food annually and that promote antimicrobial resistance also contribute to the risk of a pandemic. This brings us back to the remarkable 2004 conference in which the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) put their tremendous resources together to evaluate the available information on “emerging zoonotic diseases.” At the time of the conference, H5N1 and SARS topped the list of feared emerging zoonotic diseases. Today H1N1 would be pathogen enemy number one.

The scientists distinguished between “primary risk factors” for zoonotic diseases and mere “amplification risk factors,” which affect only the rate at which a disease spreads. Their paradigmatic examples of primary risk factors were “change to an agricultural production system or consumption patterns.” What particular agricultural and consumer changes did they have in mind? First in a list of four main risk factors was “increasing demand for animal protein,” which is a fancy way of saying that demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is a “primary factor” influencing emerging zoonotic diseases.

This demand for animal products, the report continues, leads to “changes in farming practices.” Lest we have any confusion about the “changes” that are relevant, poultry factory farms are singled out.

Similar conclusions were reached by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, which brought together industry experts and experts from the WHO, OIE, and USDA. Their 2005 report argued that a major impact of factory farming is “the rapid selection and amplification of pathogens that arise from a virulent ancestor (frequently by subtle mutation), thus there is increasing risk for disease entrance and/or dissemination.” Breeding genetically uniform and sickness-prone birds in the overcrowded, stressful, feces-infested, and artificially lit conditions of factory farms promotes the growth and mutation of pathogens. The “cost of increased efficiency,” the report concludes, is increased global risk for diseases. Our choice is simple: cheap chicken or our health.

Today the factory farm–pandemic link couldn’t be more lucid. The primary ancestor of the recent H1N1 swine flu outbreak originated at a hog factory farm in America’s most hog-factory-rich state, North Carolina, and then quickly spread throughout the Americas. It was in these factory farms that scientists saw, for the first time, viruses that combined genetic material from bird, pig, and human viruses. Scientists at Columbia and Princeton Universities have actually been able to trace six of the eight genetic segments of the (currently) most feared virus in the world directly to US factory farms.

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I’ve discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror s p