Searching, Finding and Following the Truth

When we eat a piece of meat today, where does it come from?It seems like a simple question. But let’s unpack it–our answer might just change the way we live.Many of us imagine farms where pigs, chickens and cattle graze outdoors, living out decent lives until they are quietly and humanely killed. Take the image of quaint farms and free-roaming animals that bombard us from Subway ads, Chipotle boards and nearly every supermarket aisle we see. Even if we’ve heard hints of something a little more sinister, we usually quiet those voices and go on with our lives. It’s natural. It’s necessary.At one point in history, this may have been true: fewer animals were raised for food, and each had more space–farms were usually outdoors, and industrialization hadn’t hit farms yet. For animals, their lives were comparable to their cousins in the wild, if not better. For humans, we had few alternative sources of protein, so the occasional meat we could get was essential to our health.Since then, times have changed. Meat production and consumption have exploded—as of 2007, the average American ate about 269 pounds of meat every year (for reference, this is about 51 chickens slaughtered and eaten per year). In the last 50 years alone, the world’s meat production quadrupled, catching up with this huge increase in demand. And as our appetite for meat increased, we have found new ways to harvest meat, in ever-more efficient, industrial ways.Companies crammed together animals in giant sheds and warehouses, creating colossal animal operations made possible by advances in medicine, technology and bioengineering. These were a new species of farm, where huge numbers of animals were raised and slaughtered in record time. Yes, we satisfied our craving, but at a cost: the rise of the factory farm.These are the farms that are with us today. While companies would rather not have these farms in the public’s eye, we can still discover what goes on in them, if we’re willing to look. Try it yourself: Google meat production or animal farming or factory farms. Read one of the search results. Or watch one of the videos. One telling sign is that these videos must be shot undercover—most slaughterhouses and factory farms in America today aren’t required to have cameras filming in them at all. They operate entirely in the dark.Take chickens. First off, to make sure they don’t peck each other to death, all young chickens have their beaks sliced off by a hot blade (no anesthesia used—why bother?). From that point on, each chicken lives in the space of a page of notebook paper: either stuffed into a cage, or pressed in by thousands of other chickens. Chemicals, waste and filth pile up, impossible to clean under the press of bodies. Michael Specter, writing for the New Yorker on visiting a chicken farm for the first time: “I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe.” And this is not the exception: 99% of all chickens on the planet will spend their lives in complete confinement—from the day they are born to the day they die.Piglets and calves usually have their teeth ground down or clipped, then have their tails cut off, to avoid biting injuries and fighting in the cramped farms. Pigs live in crates or huge warehouses; cows live in dusty outdoor feedlots. Both shelters confine their animals to a bare minimum of movement, and both stink of the manure that coats the ground like a swamp. Disease is inevitable. Their feed is packed with growth hormones used to fatten them, and antibiotics to prevent the spread of disease, yet disease still spreads rampantly in farms. Following their short, squalid lives, they are crammed into trucks to be shipped across the country, then stunned (the stunning usually works . . .), then sliced up into the meat we consume.Trace meat back to its source. Sneak onto a farm today, and you would find a squealing, squawking prison of animals in various states of death, decay and insanity: billions of lives valued at nothing.Most days, we intentionally turn away from this. We blind ourselves to where our food comes from, so we can eat bacon without qualms. What I’m trying to do is make us stop for a moment and turn back—open our eyes once again. Because if we had the courage to confront our conscience, we’d see that these burning farms and stinking feedlots are tied to us. We are part of the problem.We’ve seen the sacrifice required to bring meat to our plates—that is the pain. But this pain is completely unnecessary—senseless. Why? Because eating so much meat actually worsens our health—the only sense in eating meat is the trivial pleasure of our own taste buds (although it does feel pretty sensible when we’re faced with a slab of steak). Meat supplies us with iron and protein, but also with large amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol; because of this, meat has become a major culprit in America’s obesity epidemic, and numerous studies have confirmed, over and over again, the health benefits of being vegetarian: fewer heart problems, lower blood pressure and a longer lifespan. There are plenty of other iron, protein and calcium sources that can make up for the lost nutrients, usually in better ways. Even if we were to simply decrease our meat consumption, it would not be a disadvantage to us. It would be a huge step forward.One final note about animals, and the system we’ve created to use them. Yes, animals are different from us. It would be crazy to demand the exact same rights for animals as for humans: a pig would be very confused if it were suddenly granted the right to vote. And yet animals and humans share one key characteristic: feeling pain. For insects and fish, the jury is still out; scientists aren’t sure how much pain they feel. But as for cows, pigs, chickens and most other farm animals, scientists have agreed that they definitely do feel pain.So perhaps there is a point we can reach where farming is truly “humane,” when so much unnecessary suffering is no longer a problem. But until then, our farm system today is wrong, by any measure: the animals we eat live devoid of any pleasure, living and dying in an endless cycle of distilled, crystal clear pain. Eating meat is, whether we like it or not, a direct result of this system, and this system is a direct result of us humans eating meat. Every chicken we buy, every pork chop we eat sends a message: “We want more meat! Raise more animals!” And companies answer that message, by building more farms, raising more animals, casting more animals into their blank lives of pain.We can choose to send that message. This choice faces us every time we walk down the line at D-Hall. But truly, it is not a choice, because the choice is clear. Right now, our actions fuel an industry of slaughter, but when we realize this, we realize that changing our own behavior can change the world.It’s easy to live our lives in a bubble, closing our eyes to events that go on around us. We could be oblivious souls, fulfill the Exonian stereotype of entitled, self-centered students: this is an easy path. But true courage is opening our eyes, even when it may disturb us. We search for truth, and when we’ve found it, we follow. ​