Last updated on March 18, 2014
Let’s consider the nature of nonindustrial animal agriculture, bringing the same level of scrutiny to those operations that we bring to factory farms. Do this, and two damning realities begin to emerge. Together, they emphasize the consequences of the movement’s failure to follow the logic of its own findings and to promote, as it should, the end of animal agriculture as a revolutionary path to agrarian reform, one with the potential to meet the movement’s most passionately articulated goals.
The first is that the economics of nonindustrial animal agriculture doesn’t work. Consolidation pays. Pasture-based systems are a costly alternative to factory farming and will by necessity appeal primarily to [Mark] Bittman’s “privileged” consumers rather than have broad appeal to the carnivorous masses. In perhaps the most important and overlooked book published on animal agriculture in a generation, Jayson Lusk and F. Bailey Norwood’s Compassion, by the Pound, the authors—agricultural economists—document the hard economic reality of humane farming. They show beyond a doubt that Plato’s pig requires the riches of Croesus and a horde of foodies willing to pay a mint for meat. Of course, many carnivores will happily do that. Niche support for humane meat, however, will do very little to challenge the overall allure of cheap protein churned out by agribusiness. Most consumers will always rally around the lowest price. If there is no stigma against eating animals, the cheapest options will prevail. And so will agribusiness. Simply put: you can’t beat the devil at his own game.
The second unrecognized reality is that although nonindustrial animal agriculture might appear to be substantially more humane than industrialized agriculture, small farms are only nominally more accommodating of farm animals’ full interests. My research for a book looking into the downside of small-scale animal agriculture has revealed that problems reminiscent of factory farms readily plague many of their smaller counterparts, too. Owning animals for the purposes of slaughter and consumption means that ethical corners will be cut to enhance the bottom line. As competition for privileged consumers increases, this corner cutting can only be expected to intensify.
From a long, but excellent article (so excellent, in fact, that I made it compulsory reading for the two students to whom I teach food policy as an independent study) aptly titled “Loving Animals to Death” in the American Scholar by James McWilliams, a professor of history at Texas State.
I did not know McWilliams’ work before reading his article, but he has written several books about food, and he has a blog of his own, which I encourage readers of this blog to check. I added it to my RSS feed, and I expect to learn a lot from it. This is especially so given that much “food writing” is left to journalists (who are rarely experts) and advocates (who usually have an axe to grind and talking points to push), and so the signal-to-noise ratio tends to be extremely low when it comes to food policy. It is also especially nice to see a historian write about food, rather than yet another economist or sociologist.