Our present way of eating — the dollars we daily funnel to the likes of Smithfield — rewards the very worst conceivable practices.

paying fines for polluting is cheaper than giving up the entire factory farm system,

farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population — roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second.

sometimes they simply spray it straight up into the air, a geyser of shit wafting fine fecal mists that create swirling gases capable of causing severe neurological damage.

individual farms “can generate more raw waste than the populations of some U.S. cities.”

Today a typical pig factory farm will produce 7.2 million pounds of manure annually, a typical broiler facility will produce 6.6 million pounds, and a typical cattle feedlot 344 million pounds.

The problem is quite simple: massive amounts of shit. So much shit, so poorly managed, that it seeps into rivers, lakes, and oceans — killing wildlife and polluting air, water, and land in ways devastating to human health.

It’s an empowering idea. The entire goliath of the food industry is ultimately driven and determined by the choices we make as the waiter gets impatient for our order or in the practicalities and whimsies of what we load into our shopping carts or farmers’-market bags.

buildings, cut off from sun and seasons. We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial of settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.