Why Factory Farmed Meat Is a Threat to Your Health -- Even If You Don't Eat It

Rick Dove, Helen Reddout, and Karen Hudson aren't your typical environmental activists. A retired marine from the coastal plains of North Carolina, a mild-mannered farmwife in Washington's Yakima Valley, and a lighting company employee in a Peoria, Illinois suburb would, at first glance, have little in common. But in David Kirby's extensive investigation of how factory farms affect the people in communities around them, these three intrepid concerned citizens-cum-crusaders show that ordinary people are at the forefront of rural America's struggle against the proliferation of industrial farming.

A departure from the works to which it is often compared -- Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals -- Kirby's Animal Factory highlights very specific aspects of factory farming: how pollution from confined (or concentrated) animal feeding operations (CAFOs) affects wildlife and the environment, the health hazards for people living in rural communities with nearby CAFOs, and how mutant viral and antibiotic resistant bacteria strains could make the entire world susceptible to illness.

Kirby leads his readers into the bowels, literal and figurative, of some of the filthiest aspects of factory farming. Along the way, he assesses damages and benefits on both sides. Small, rural family farms have been run out of business, but food prices nationwide have never been lower. More food can be produced than ever before, but farmers leaning on unpopular synthetic hormones like recombinant bovine growth hormone (rGBH) are caught between contracts with agri-biotech giant Monsanto and losing their land. Kirby also introduces readers to the people behind groundbreaking lawsuits like CARE v. Henry Bosma Dairy, in which a Yakima Valley industrial dairy farmer was convicted of violating the Clean Water Act, and the creators of viral video, The Meatrix, a Matrix-themed cartoon that explores the dark underbelly of industrial farming.

Most frustrating are findings about the ways in which industrial farming collides with nature. Fish kills and unclean, unsafe water figure prominently in Kirby's investigations, which reads at times like a fictional thriller. With a significant number of CAFOs built in floodways and floodplains, it's no surprise that Hurricanes Bertha and Fran in 1996, along with Hurricane Floyd in 1999, caused unprecedented amounts of damage along North Carolina's Neuse River. Countless waste lagoons overflowed, and Rick Dove watched as thousands of pigs were buried in the oversaturated ground. If anything, these types of disasters only strengthen the use of the Clean Water Act in prosecuting negligent or outright obstinate farmers.

An epic, harrowing journey through two decades of factory farming and now out in paperback, Animal Factory highlights the ongoing debates about health issues related to confined (or concentrated) animal feeding operations (CAFOs), how mega-farms have skirted environmental regulation, why animal welfare is a consumer health issue, and whether or not we have an ethical obligation to understand the source of our food.

Brittany Shoot: Due to the often brutal, disgusting CAFO processes you describe, Animal Factory has drawn a lot of comparisons to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a fictionalized account of the abuses and filth found in early-20th-century meatpacking plants. Nearly one century later, why are we forced to revisit these issues? Why have we come full circle?

David Kirby: To be compared to Sinclair is truly humbling. I know that sounds cliché, but I'm really grateful. He's my hero. The Jungle was a novel -- a lot of people forget that -- but it was based on facts at the time. Sinclair was writing about the meatpacking industry, and I'm writing about the meat producing industry. Now, they are one in the same larger food chain and very much integrated with each other. But the principles from back then -- from the time of Teddy Roosevelt's conservative Republican environmentalism, trust-busting, muckraking, and actual investigative journalism -- hold true. Hyperconsolidation of any industry leads to abuses. Whether it's worker safety, food safety, animal welfare, or environmental degradation; when you allow industry to consolidate and become vertically integrated and extremely powerful, people, animals, and/or the environment can suffer without proper checks and controls.