Widespread media coverage of sick and dying slaughterhouse workers, the killing of millions of chickens before they leave the farm and “depopulating” thousands of unwanted pigs using wood chippers are the most recent dramatic signs of our broken meat production system. These failings of supply chain logistics, highlighted by the extreme conditions of the pandemic, have attracted broad criticism and unprecedented scrutiny of industrialized animal agriculture.
Consumers are becoming more aware of the impacts of their food choices and this is forcing a reckoning for the industry. Public commentary is focusing on the climate, environmental, health and animal welfare impacts of the meat production system and is calling for change. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the US, the largest meat market in the world.
Respected commentator Fareed Zakaria on CNN and writing in The Washington Post calls out the widespread damage inflicted by the factory farming system and how our “insatiable appetite for meat” is a potential path for the next pandemic. The New York Times, profiles a county sheriff in Iowa who asks whether a pork chop is worth a worker’s life. Best-selling author Jonathan Safran Foer heralds The End of Meat in The New York Times, and in The Washington Post says “letting the monstrous factory farm system fail would allow safer, more just and sustainable models of agriculture.”
Financial market commentator Jim Cramer on CNBC says the pandemic is accelerating demand for plant-based meat because “people are getting appalled at what is happening at the meatpackers” and that products such as Beyond Meat “will allow people to skip that thing called the industrial cow.” A story in The American Conservative covers the bi-partisan tradition of animal welfare in the US using the headline, “A Rosa Parks Moment for Animal Welfare.” And Joseph Winters of the Harvard Political Review writes “we must critically examine and dismantle the country’s unsustainable and unethical meat production pipeline.” It seems that NOT eating meat is having a moment.