Annabelle Golden

The business model of the factory farm encourages maximum efficiency and profit at the expense of the animals and people living in or near their farms yet dealing with waste in that volume requires innovative solutions to manage that aren’t always the most cost-effective. The dispersion of food and food accessibility in the United States is rightfully subject to criticism, where lower-income communities don’t have access to the same food resources are high-income communities, often without a local grocery store and relying on convenience and corner stores to sustain and nourish their families. A lot of well-intentioned people will say something such as, “well the hamburger is going to get eaten anyway”, to communicate the idea that because one individual’s choice to not eat animal products won’t be the current that changes the tides of the system, they may as well continue to eat meat. For me change looked like telling myself that I could continue to eat meat in the coming months as I tried to phase myself out of my normal eating patterns in favor of healthier more environmentally sound choices, yet once the decision was made in my mind, the thought of eating meat stopped appealing to me.

People will happily support an initiative to ban plastic straws and encourage their friends, Facebook followers, companies, and local governments to abstain from using plastic straws to save the oceans and protect marine life, yet they won’t stop eating fish to save the oceans and protect marine life. (I also just want to add that there are of course certain plants and vegetables that require an unsustainable drain of resources, and that requires attention too, but the volume of meat consumption in the United States is so disproportionate with the rest of the world that factory farming and animal agriculture are an important place to start.) Cows natural diet is acquired by grazing on grasslands and eating the plants and shrubs; however, cattle farmers have discovered that transitioning cows to eat grains and corn allows them to grow much bigger in a shorter time frame, ignoring the digestion and intestinal problems created by forcing animals off of their natural diets. This has caused farming animals to evolve into a very unnatural process, by restricting the animals from engaging in their natural behaviors to feeding the animals large amounts of food outside of their natural diets, creating health problems for the animals that are routinely ignored.

My young mind couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of not eating pizza and cupcakes at a birthday party, or chicken nuggets when a parent would relent and pick up McDonald’s for an after-school snack. The whole process in the United States happens behind the scenes; factory farms are located in sparsely populated areas and the actual animals are often only transported to the slaughterhouse in the middle of the night, ensuring that people who aren’t looking won’t see what is happening. However, once I realized that the friendly chicken was, in fact, our lunch chicken and that a member of our group was the one to prepare our food and therefore kill the chicken, my perspective on our simple lunch became more complex. But, it was the first time in my life I was directly confronted with the reality of how my food comes to be something I would actually eat, and as I started to investigate further the reality of food production in the United States I kept thinking back to that chicken and how wildly different its experience was from the chickens we raise for food in the US.

As I grew older and busier I found it more difficult to incorporate reading into my routine lifestyle; however, finding pleasant company in the different characters of my favorite fiction novels or unique and interesting anecdotes from my favorite non-fiction works always provided me a sense of enjoyment. The first book I read this year is titled Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer in which unpacks what it means to eat meat in the capitalist and industrialized fashion we operate under currently. What distinguishes this book from other works on the same subject matter is that Foer is first and foremost a writer who subsequently became fixated on the topic of animal agriculture and the social costs of eating animals, which leaves the reader with an inviting read that seamlessly guides the reader through the biggest components of a complex problem. The second book I read this year is Cat’s Cradle, a work of science fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, that discusses the life of a fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb, Felix Hoenikker.