Industrial livestock and beef production promised to alleviate world hunger with expanded production, increased efficiency, and lower costs. However, research shows that elevated global demand for meat actually exacerbates global food insecurity and poor health outcomes. The collection, The Meat Business, edited by Geoff Tansey and Joyce D'Silva, demonstrates that excessive meat consumption by the wealthy directly contributes to global hunger and undernourishment—that “cheap” industrial meat production comes with great costs, especially to the poor. While the effects are most acute in the developing world, they also show up in less affluent areas of Global North cities, like Los Angeles, where cattle ranches have been replaced by food deserts, as Rachel Surls and Judith Garber show in From Cows to Concrete. Some communities have begun to mobilize to meet local food needs, but the structural challenges in the way of food justice are substantial, as Gerardo Otero demonstrates in The Neoliberal Diet. Therein, he shows how state support for corporate agribusiness, alongside trade liberalization and austerity, has ensured the dominance of a diet based on ultra-processed foods and copious amounts of meat. The structural determinants of this diet essentially nullify the conventional advice urging individuals to make healthier food choices and exercise to prevent obesity.
Industrial production methods and corporate influence over government have raised concerns over pathogen-laced, adulterated, or mislabeled meat. Books like Food Politics by Marion Nestle and Food Adulteration and Food Fraud by Jonathan Rees emphasize the ways corporate power has shaped nutritional recommendations (like inflating meat consumption guidelines) and has facilitated adulteration (such as the use of soy extenders in ground beef) and fraudulent marketing to increase consumption and profits. As David Robinson Simon shows in Meatonomics, animal products corporations gain subsidies and other preferential policies, so they can sell meat for artificially low prices, while obscuring the other costs consumers pay to prop up animal industry. Gary Winslett examines corporate pressure to deregulate the meat industry and dismantle consumer protections in Competitiveness and Death. In Consumers, Meat and Animal Products, Terence J. Centner examines industry practices and regulations governing the use of antibiotics, feed additives, and hormones, as well as the treatment of animals in the meat industry. The book offers recommendations to improve the safety and transparency of meat production for consumers, including reform of ag-gag laws that hide production practices from the public. Though industrial beef offers the illusion of choice, it comes with the constriction of options and the erosion of agency.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the disparate environmental impacts of cattle raising. Livestock production is the single largest contributor to the global climate crisis, emitting more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation combined. The environmental and public health hazards of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are the focus of several volumes, including CAFO, edited by Daniel Imhoff, and Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health, edited by James Merchant and Robert Martin. The latter volume exposes problems such as infectious disease and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, water and air pollution that disproportionately affect poor and racially marginalized communities, the destabilization of rural communities and eradication of local producers, meatpacking workers’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, and corporate influence in government and policy. Relatedly, the environmental consequences of livestock production weigh heaviest on the world’s marginalized populations. Climate Change, Cattle, and the International Legal Order by Rebecca Williams examines international legal regimes governing the emissions from cattle, highlighting the disproportionate impact of high consumption of livestock goods by the affluent. Williams highlights how fairer livestock emissions mitigation can be achieved by accounting for this differential beef consumption.
The devastating environmental consequences of factory farming cannot be separated from a whole host of other detrimental impacts on public health, animal lives, labor, and more. Philip Lymbery’s Farmageddon foregrounds how the industrial production of cheap meat, driven by growing global demand, entails significant costs to labor, human health, animals, the environment, biodiversity, and economically marginalized populations. Several recent edited collections provide good entry points to explore the interrelated impacts of industrial livestock production. The Meat Crisis, edited by Joyce D'Silva and John Webster, examines the consequences of rising meat consumption to the planet, animal welfare, and human health, and how rising meat consumption shows up in ethical and policy debates. Political Ecologies of Meat, edited by Emel and Neo, explores how political, economic, and cultural structures that enable livestock production and consumption globally impact marginalized people, animals, and the environment. The collection Global Meat, edited by Bill Winders and Elizabeth Ransom, explores three major themes related to this increase—the dominance of major corporations, like Brazil’s JBS, China’s WH Group, and the United States’s Tyson, which have benefited from government subsidies and which undermine local food autonomy; worsening environmental degradation, labor abuses, and animal cruelty; and how the increase in meat production has exacerbated rather than ameliorated local food insecurity due to corporate concentration in the meat and feed grain industries. Zeroing in on Tyson, Christopher Leonard’s The Meat Racket exposes how corporate meat giants raise prices on consumers while driving down prices to farmers, all while suppressing reform efforts.
Despite growing concerns over the detrimental impacts of factory farming, beef consumption remains elevated in the United States and continues to grow across the developing world. In Meat We Trust, by Maureen Ogle, frames U.S. meat consumption in much the same light as gasoline—price hikes inspire temporary consumer outrage at corporate greed but fail to reduce consumption or galvanize meaningful change. While the book largely focuses on the rise of industrial livestock production during the second half of the twentieth century, the emphasis is on the steady demand for and consumption of meat, despite the regular outrage over corporate greed and safety concerns.
A core enabler of expanding meat consumption is concealment—of meat’s animal origins, of the violence of animal industry, of the health and environmental destruction it causes. Live, Die, Buy, Eat by Kristian Bjørkdahl and Karen V. Lykke traces the historical process of consumer alienation from the animal origins of meat, which fuels rising consumption despite repeated controversies, using Norway as a case study. In Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, Richard W. Bulliet explains high rates of meat consumption as a result of increased distance between most consumers and the meat-bearing animals they consume, associated with the shift from small-scale farms to industrial production. Most urban dwellers encounter farm animals only as the sanitized, saran-wrapped meat they buy at grocery stores, but consuming this product invokes ambivalence, including guilt and shame about the death, cruelty, and crisis it entails.
Industrial killing facilities have shifted from urban centers to more remote rural towns, where the nondescript buildings blend into the landscape and the atrocities become less noticeable. Emblematic of this geographic camouflage was the 1971 closure of the Chicago union stockyards and packing plants. The legislative landscape also helps obscure the violence of industrial killing. Ag-gag laws—those barring activists from investigating, documenting, or publicly exposing the horrors that take place behind closed doors in agricultural facilities—have obscured the routinized abuses of these slaughter plants. Through workers’ testimony, though, Gail A. Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse shows how deregulation and ever-faster line speeds intensify dangerous working conditions and animal suffering. In Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat, who worked undercover in a large industrial slaughterhouse, explains how these large-scale killing operations are deliberately situated to obscure the violence of transforming cattle into meat. The implications of the physical location and visibility of slaughterhouses also emerge in the geographical research on animal industry, including Chris Philo and Ian MacLachlan’s contribution, “The Strange Case of the Missing Slaughterhouse Geographies,” to Historical Animal Geographies, edited by Sharon Wilcox and Stephanie Rutherford. The growing isolation of kill sites from public view since the nineteenth century even shapes literary depictions of cattle slaughter, as Sune Borkfelt shows in Reading Slaughter.
Meat industrialists have also sought to deflect criticism. The collection Meatsplaining, edited by Jason Hannon, details the industrial rhetoric deployed to downplay the ethical, biomedical, and environmental harms inherent in meat production. In a clever nod to Rebecca Solnit’s 2014 narrative of mansplaining, Hannan analyzes how meat industry marketing executives “explain things to us” in the marketing of beef, eggs, and poultry, government policy, and in patronizing representations of vegans. For instance, U.S. beef corporations attempted to “greenwash” a meat byproduct known as “pink slime,” often used as a filler, by presenting it as healthy, while spinning health and safety and consumer freedom arguments to defuse the scandal. Other examples include the invocation of patriotism to override concerns about the occupation of Indigenous land in Canadian beef propaganda, U.S. beef producers’ manipulation of USDA dietary recommendations, EU beef producers’ deployment of tactics pioneered in the tobacco, fossil fuels, and vivisection industries to evade environmental regulations, and the mobilization of development tropes to market Australian beef exports.
Also deliberately obscured from public view are the ways other industries, ostensibly less ethically egregious than beef, are implicated in bovine suffering and death. The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie is an incredibly moving account of bovine physical and emotional experiences within the dairy industry, eviscerating the myth that milk consumption is somehow benign. Dairy production is a primary source of veal, cheap hamburger meat, and pet food. Like other accounts of the dairy industry, including Cash Cow by Élise Desaulniers and Kirk Kardashian’s Milk Money, Gillespie highlights the agonizing emotional and physical cruelties of the reproductive exploitation of dairy cows, repeatedly impregnated and stripped of their young until mastitis or other ailments diminish their output. Newborn calves are removed from their mothers, females are indentured for dairy production like their mothers, and males are diverted to veal crates, auction, or destruction. She captures the unfathomably mundane violence of commodification through heart-wrenching stories of individual animals—a “spent” cow collapsed on the auction floor, a newly postpartum cow crying out in grief for the newborn snatched away from her, a day-old calf struck brutally on the face while seeking affection, an unruly breeding bull tortured by men wielding electric prods, an escaped steer shot dead on the road, and others—as they move through different phases of commodification, the logic of which normalizes extreme suffering.
Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health
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Climate Change, Cattle, and the International Legal Order
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