Another vegetarian cry against factory farms
------spoiler alert------
I believed in the promise of a unbias survey about eating meat, for example, something like a historical approach that explores eating meat over the time in different civilizations or easily the meat culture in different countries nowadays. Sadly, I got disappointed for two reasons: (1) the book is focused in the present when much the author goes back some centuries, and (2) it is US-centered mentioning other countries almost exclusively in a comparative context. If I was interested in eating meat behavior nowadays in the US, it would be the right book. But even better if I had been interested in factory farming...oh yeees, it would be the perfect book! Factory farming seems a subconscious obsession of Safran and he almost filled the entire book with it:
" I've filled this book with an awful lot of facts because they are a necessary starting point." p. 263
A starting point of 263 pages. Impressive!
Let's overcome this and consider that I really wanted to know more about factory farming and I bought a factory farming book. It would not help to hold my disappointment back because I think Safran waste way too many pages to say what any PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) video is able to show with a bigger impact in 10 min. The description is prolix and the discussion upon is poor. I think the discussion is poor because it is based on a single argument: eating meat is intrinsically immoral. And the author just finds thousands of ways to dress the same argument with different words. The thing develops in a way that somewhere just after the middle of the book his speech even becomes apocalyptic:
"The earth will eventually shake off factory farming like a dog shakes off fleas; the only question is whether we will get shaken off along with." p. 264
I could not avoid painting the picture of people popping out of a frenetically shaking planet. Kinda funny!
Plus a few info that is out of date or unprecise. Two examples:
1 - Eating meat as the activity with biggest environmental impact:
"...no daily choices that we make has a greater impact to the environment." p. 74
A study made in 2017 by researchers from Lundy University calculated the greenhouse gases emission per year associated with individual actions and the one with the highest rank was having a child rather than having an omnivorous diet.
2 - Avian flu is related to factory farming.
" 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." p. 127The information can be didactically found in the flu's review of Ozawa and Kawaoka (2013) already in the first picture. Despite some theories that do the correlation between flu and factory farming, as Safran mention in the book. It is well accepted that the influenza viruses can have multiple hosts from aquatic mammals, migratory birds, domestic animals, yes, poultry and humans. The line between an epidemia and a pandemia is the movement of this hosts. Enclosed factory farming animals do not cross borders before their death. I do not want to advocate here in favor of the factory farming, just want to point out when the focus of the speech tends to go to imprecise data.
Plus a temporal mismatch. The deadliest flu was in 1918, five years before the foundation of the first factory farming.
Okay, let's take the fact that is not meant to be a scientific book in consideration.
Okay, let's take the fact that is not meant to be a scientific book in consideration.
Then the author brings testimonies of different people: real farmers, businessman, PETA, all kind. Really cool! All different point of views within their own words. From all these testimonies, for me, as a biologist, the argument that made more sense was the speech of Bill Niman particularly this argument:
"...the norms of natural ecosystem hold boundless wisdom about economy, order, and stability. And meat eating is (and always has been) the norm in nature." p. 218
So true, the book could be summed up into this lines.
The book sells being vegetarian as the most coherent human choice, I partially agree. The part that I do not agree is having compassion as unquestionable reason graved in stone. We are animals just as the others, but compassion is intrinsically human. Did you ever see a starving animal skipping a meal for compassion? It might happen but I would say it is not the rule. Why should we be the only animal that was evolution led to an omnivorous position in the food chain to deliberate replace our position? And replace because of an abstract reason such as compassion is? I do believe in evolution and its wisdom most of the times, platypuses make me skeptical, and I think that the condition shaped by thousands of years might be somehow the best one.
The part I agree is that, indeed, factory farming needs to come to an end for a whole book of 300 pages of reasons. By the way, the book could be renamed: "hundreds of reasons why factory farm must end". Factory farming is run by a bunch of people just like the others, but with way too much power, they can pollute the environment without limit, treat animals as commodities, dictate prices for the market, make their own rules, it is unfair to the other people and it needs to come to an end.
The claim that one will break factory farming only by stop consumption is obviously not working. When one quit eating meat and says "look I did my part" the focus is on the wrong target and the responsibility falls on people without the power that factory farming headers have. At the end of the day, those that do not consume directly factory farming product are affected by the harm they do to the environment as well. As a victim, one must urge for policies that restrict their power rather than look to the side and judge bad your omnivorous dude that sometimes is eating just what he or she can afford. Advocate against things like factory farming is more urgent than ask everybody to go vegetarian. And to request the government to change the laws and complain about the companies all over seems a feasible start for a feasible way to end factory farming. It should be the same as when mining companies pollute, people just do not quite buying every subproduct and act as is everything going on the right track, people fight against, complaint, write emails, sign petitions, urge for politicians to do something about it, people do it actively, why not with factory farming?
Being vegetarian is a way broad issue that per pass cultural values and other things, it is not that straightforward. And being vegetarian itself do not make anybody free from responsibilities. As vegetarian one can rather feed another big powerful corporation that harms the environment as well, we do not know. Plus the food waste, pollution caused by food transportation, unfair working conditions in some manufacturers, and from my point of view the worse is the impact of monoculture on biodiversity. To be proactive and responsible for the origin of the food that goes to our plate is way more important than just being naive and think we are doing the right thing because we become vegetarian.
The classic argumentation is that by quitting eating meat people can instead feed on the grains that today serves to the enclosed farming animals, but the numbers do not match. The book says the actual grains production can easily feed 4 bi famine, the world population is close to 7 bi. In the end, we are way too many and feed all of us is more complex than we treat and the food problem is more heterogeneous than we think. I believe there is not an absolute solution better than regional ones and something like a step back in the direction of a diverse and less centralize process would be a good start. The solution for the food problem is too complex to be treated as manageable by the simply unified adoption of a certain diet.
The part I agree is that, indeed, factory farming needs to come to an end for a whole book of 300 pages of reasons. By the way, the book could be renamed: "hundreds of reasons why factory farm must end". Factory farming is run by a bunch of people just like the others, but with way too much power, they can pollute the environment without limit, treat animals as commodities, dictate prices for the market, make their own rules, it is unfair to the other people and it needs to come to an end.
The claim that one will break factory farming only by stop consumption is obviously not working. When one quit eating meat and says "look I did my part" the focus is on the wrong target and the responsibility falls on people without the power that factory farming headers have. At the end of the day, those that do not consume directly factory farming product are affected by the harm they do to the environment as well. As a victim, one must urge for policies that restrict their power rather than look to the side and judge bad your omnivorous dude that sometimes is eating just what he or she can afford. Advocate against things like factory farming is more urgent than ask everybody to go vegetarian. And to request the government to change the laws and complain about the companies all over seems a feasible start for a feasible way to end factory farming. It should be the same as when mining companies pollute, people just do not quite buying every subproduct and act as is everything going on the right track, people fight against, complaint, write emails, sign petitions, urge for politicians to do something about it, people do it actively, why not with factory farming?
Being vegetarian is a way broad issue that per pass cultural values and other things, it is not that straightforward. And being vegetarian itself do not make anybody free from responsibilities. As vegetarian one can rather feed another big powerful corporation that harms the environment as well, we do not know. Plus the food waste, pollution caused by food transportation, unfair working conditions in some manufacturers, and from my point of view the worse is the impact of monoculture on biodiversity. To be proactive and responsible for the origin of the food that goes to our plate is way more important than just being naive and think we are doing the right thing because we become vegetarian.
The classic argumentation is that by quitting eating meat people can instead feed on the grains that today serves to the enclosed farming animals, but the numbers do not match. The book says the actual grains production can easily feed 4 bi famine, the world population is close to 7 bi. In the end, we are way too many and feed all of us is more complex than we treat and the food problem is more heterogeneous than we think. I believe there is not an absolute solution better than regional ones and something like a step back in the direction of a diverse and less centralize process would be a good start. The solution for the food problem is too complex to be treated as manageable by the simply unified adoption of a certain diet.
"...not a pie-in-the-sky idea." p. 210 (funny way to say crazy shit)
"I wholeheartedly agree..." p. 215 (polite replacement for fucking)
E.g.: "This book is a pie-in-the-sky idea and I do wholeheartedly not care if people agree!"
I left the book available to a book swap and within hours it was requested.
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