Epilogue

When I first started writing Hamburgers Don’t Grow on Trees, I thought the book would end with a discussion of the importance of a humane slaughtering process and an acknowledgment that an animal’s life is taken for us to eat. I would discuss the web of life—a complex and interconnected system in which all animals, including humans, depend on plants and other animals for food.

But, as I researched for this book, I realized that the most important issue is not just the few minutes at the end of an animal’s life when they are slaughtered, but the animal’s quality of life starting from when they are born until the moment of their death. As you have learned from Lima Bean’s story, it is possible to give an animal a good life, even if they are going to be slaughtered for meat.

In the past, almost all animals raised for meat in the United States had a life like Lima Bean’s. Sadly, that is no longer the case for ninety-nine percent of the meat animals raised here. Even though advertisements for meat show “happy” cows, pigs, chickens, and lambs roaming freely on beautiful farms, most animals are raised in factory farms or on feedlots. Often, thousands of animals are crowded together in conditions of unimaginable cruelty and poor health. They are treated like machinery that happens to “produce” food, not living creatures that experience pain and fear.

Conditions in these factory farms are so bad that visitors are prohibited. In some states, it is illegal even to take videos or photographs that show what it is like inside. Corporations that own factory farms are afraid that if consumers knew how poorly the animals inside were treated, people would stop eating meat—and many would! Or they would demand that animals be treated humanely. If corporations and owners treated domestic cats and dogs the way they treat factory-farmed animals, they would be prosecuted under the anticruelty laws in all fifty states.

Humans can be carnivores, omnivores, or herbivores. Carnivores only eat meat; that is, other animals. Omnivores eat both animals and plants, while herbivores are exclusively plant-eaters. Size is not related to whether an animal is a carnivore or herbivore. Elephants, who are the largest land mammals, are herbivores, while one of the world’s smallest mammals, the least weasel, is carnivorous. Humans are mammals that evolved to be omnivorous, eating both animals and plants. We have sharp teeth for eating meat and flat teeth for grinding plants, along with a digestive system that can extract nutrients from both plants and animals.

After reading this book and getting to know Lima Bean, you are likely thinking about your own choices around eating meat. You might decide to become a vegetarian. Or you might choose to continue to eat meat—but only from animals that have been well treated. People who make this choice are known as “ethical omnivores.” Whatever you decide, you will make your decision with information and understanding—considering the living conditions under which the animal who’s providing your meat was raised.

All our meat animals deserve a quality of life like Lima Bean’s. For those of you who want to help stop factory farms, read “Suggested Action Steps” below for a list of suggestions for things you can do right now. Any change that you and your family adopt will help make the world a better place. Even small actions, when added together with others, can make a difference.

Suggested Action Steps

1. The most important step you can take is to stop eating factory-farmed meat. It might not seem like much, but stores sell only what people will buy. Small health-food stores and food co-ops are more likely to carry humanely raised meat. When enough people (and, therefore, stores and restaurants) stop buying factory-farmed meat, the system will change. You vote with your fork every time you put food in your mouth.
2. Ask questions:
   • Ask the places where you shop if they sell humanely raised meat, and if not, ask them if they would.
   • Ask restaurants if they cook with humanely raised meat, and if not, ask them to do so.
   • At farmers markets, ask farmers about the living conditions of their animals and try to arrange to visit farms to see them for yourself. Support farmers who are making the transition to more humanely raised meat. Many small-scale farms are doing their best to work towards this goal, and they need our support.
3. Be suspicious of labels. Animal Welfare Approved, a standard set by AGW (A Greener World), is the only certification that currently ensures high standards for humane treatment. Many other labels have no clear legal definition and are grossly misleading. Lack of oversight lets companies apply nice-sounding labels such as “certified humane” and “pasture-raised” on packages of meat from animals raised in conditions of abuse only slightly different from those of a factory farm. Even the “organic” certification for meat can be problematic as it doesn’t address animal welfare. Visit Farm Forward’s Animal Product Labeling Guide for the story behind the labels you see on meat products or Consumer Report’s Guide to Food Labels.
4. Try not to waste meat. If an animal died to feed us, the least we can do to honor that sacrifice is nourish our bodies with the meat, not throw it away. Of all the meat that Americans buy, twenty-two percent is discarded, mostly because people think it has gone bad due because they misunderstand labels. “Use by” and “best by” dates suggest peak quality. They do not mean that meat is bad past those dates. The easiest and fastest way to tell if meat is bad is to smell it: the scent of fresh meat is barely perceptible. Rancid meat, on the other hand, has a nasty, unpleasant smell and should not be eaten. Here are three other changes to stop waste—they just take a bit of planning.
   • Encourage your family to plan menus so all meat purchased is eaten.
   • Freeze meat before it spoils if it isn’t going to be eaten right away.
   • Store leftovers from a meal and eat them later.

Remember, when you first make a significant change in how you eat, it is easy to get discouraged; the first steps are always the hardest. Remember the saying, “Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.” We all face situations where the options for food are limited, or someone has made us a special meal and we are pretty sure it is with factory-raised meat. Then, we might make the choice to eat meat that we ordinarily would not. Just keep coming back to thinking about the animals. Cultivate gratitude and respect toward the animals that give us the gift of their lives for our food.

Every time you explain why you refuse to eat factory-farmed meat, you educate the people around you about how you think animals should be treated. If they knew how bad it was, most people would not want to participate in a food system that is cruel and unhealthy. So, help spread the word. Every individual person’s decision is important. You can make a difference—one bite at a time!

Download Action Steps / Where to find Ethically Raised Meat (PDF)

Factory farms are also known as CAFOs (which stands for “confined animal feeding operation” or “concentrated animal feeding operation”). Their goal is to bring animals up to slaughter weight as quickly as possible—without regard for the animals’ health or quality of life, the impact on the environment, or the health of the consumer.

Quality of life

As anyone who has ever lived with a pet knows, animals experience emotions such as pleasure, pain, fear, and curiosity. After many years of saying that humans feel emotions but animals do not, scientists have now realized that the parts of the brain that experience and process emotions and pain have evolved similarly in both humans and other vertebrates. Of course, animals experience emotions and pain. It is no longer possible to excuse the conditions in factory farms by pretending that the animals aren’t aware of their conditions. Factory farms operate on the principle that animals are “living machines,” and the quality of their lives is not worthy of our consideration. Similar arguments have been used in the past to justify the dehumanization and mistreatment of marginalized groups. However, most people now believe it’s morally wrong to keep any living creature in a state of constant pain and suffering.

Here are a few examples of life on typical factory farms.

• Pigs are sociable, friendly animals who many researchers think are smarter than dogs. They like to live in groups and root in the dirt with their snouts for food. But on a factory farm, a mama pig is kept isolated for her entire life in a metal cage so small she cannot roll over or turn around. She is treated as if she is a machine whose only job is to birth piglets.
• Consumers tend to prefer the white meat of chicken, so chickens have been selectively bred to grow enormous breasts in a short time. They become so heavy so fast that their skeletons cannot support their weight; up to forty percent of the birds will have broken or deformed legs by the time they are slaughtered. If humans grew at the same rate as factory chickens, in two months they would weigh 660 pounds!¹
• Egg-laying hens are crammed together into cages so small that the hens can’t move. To keep the hens from hurting each other in these tiny spaces, factory managers cut off part of their beaks. This is painful, as bird’s beaks are filled with pain receptors, and it deprives the birds of sensory input from their beaks during eating, drinking, and preening.^2,3
• Cattle raised for meat in large-scale commercial operations are kept outdoors on pasture for approximately the first six months of their lives. The problems arise after they are transferred to feedlots. Most feedlots feed cattle a diet of ninety percent grain (which is analogous to a human diet of just cake and ice cream) along with hormones to make them grow faster so they reach their slaughter weight more quickly. A cow’s digestive system is designed to break down grass but not corn, which is the bulk of what they are fed. Cows forced to eat corn develop excess gas in their stomach, causing them to burp and fart a lot to relieve the discomfort in their stomach. Also, this gas is methane, which contributes to global climate change. As if that weren’t bad enough, the high-grain diet also makes the steers very sick. They survive to the age of twelve to fourteen months only because they are given antibiotics to keep them alive and hormones designed to make them grow fast. Without antibiotics and other drugs, they wouldn’t be able to be fattened on corn. ⁴

Environmental impacts

Factory farms (CAFOs) are major contributors to climate change. They are among the biggest air and water polluters on the planet due to the untreated manure from so many thousands of animals in one spot. For example, a cow poops out 50 pounds of manure a day; if a factory farm has 1,000 cows, it creates 50,000 pounds—twenty tons—of poop per day. This is the weight of a small house! While human poop that we flush down the toilet is treated so it doesn’t pollute our air or water, animal waste from factory farms is not. It is stored in big ponds, which frequently leak and pollute the water supply, or it is sprayed on nearby fields. People living near CAFOs often can’t sit outside because the smell is so bad, and the air makes them sick. A single factory farm can generate as much waste as a medium-sized city, but without the kinds of regulations that govern waste management in cities. While composted manure can act as fertilizer, liquid manure from factory farms contains viruses, bacteria, antibiotics, heavy metals, and other toxic materials. The amount that is sprayed often overwhelms the land’s capacity to absorb it, so the liquid waste runs off the fields, contaminating the groundwater and any nearby bodies of water.⁵

Growing beef with feedlot cows is very inefficient in terms of global resources. It takes seven to sixteen pounds of corn to make only one pound of hamburger. Scientists have determined that CAFOs actually reduce the total amount of food available to feed the world’s population because it is so inefficient to grow grain to feed meat animals.⁶

In contrast, on a traditional farm like Snug Valley, the manure from the cows is used to fertilize their pasture, improving the quality of the soil and encouraging healthy growth of grass to feed the animals. There is a cycle of energy exchange between the soil, the plants, and the animals. The Nottermanns don’t need to waste land and water to grow corn. All that is needed to raise a beef cow is energy from the sun and healthy soil to grow the grass. Grass-fed, or “pasture-raised,” cows don’t burp or fart nearly as much as cows in feedlots, and a well-managed pasture can actually trap greenhouse gases and put them back into the soil. The Nottermanns, as dedicated stewards of the land, were one of the first farms in their area to install a windmill to harness the renewable energy of the wind. They currently produce all of their electrical needs with wind and solar energy.

Impact on the health of the consumer and other animals

Four-fifths of antibiotics in America are fed to factory-raised animals in constant low doses simply to keep them alive in terrible conditions.⁷ Of particular concern are the growth hormones that factory farmed animals are fed as a regular part of their diet. Any food or drug given to a meat animal is likely to end up being part of the meat on our plate. Some scientists speculate that antibiotics that enter our bodies when we eat meat can cause us problems by upsetting the balance of our gut microbes. The growth hormones given to animals at CAFOs can also make us sick and can cause premature onset of puberty in children, particularly girls. ⁸

A well-documented and deeply concerning problem is that because of their continual exposure to antibiotics in factory farms, bacteria have become “antibiotic-resistant.” This means that antibiotics we rely on to cure us when we are sick no longer kill the bacteria inside us. If that happens, we have to move to even stronger drugs. However, humans are running out of options for antibiotics and might soon be in a situation where diseases that used to be easy to treat will become debilitating or untreatable. We would be healthier if we used antibiotics only to cure disease. These drugs can also show up in the kibble that we might feed our cats and dogs.

A further problem is that all types of dead animals—cattle, dogs, cats, pigs, and chickens—are mixed together in rendering plants before being turned into the ingredients added to animal foods. That means many domestic animals end up eating other types of animals. Believe it or not, cat and dog food might be made from the bodies of other cats and dogs. This raises ethical and health concerns for pets who are fed kibble.

Feed products made by rendering plants are fed to cows. Of particular concern is the possibility of passing on “mad cow disease.” People think that since mad cow disease was discovered in 1986, feeding cows’ meat to other cows has been prohibited by federal law. But actually, the law contains a provision that allows exactly that—so long as the cows are under thirty months of age.

Cost

Some people argue that because CAFO, or factory-raised, meat is cheaper than pasture-raised, it is therefore better. But the only reason factory-raised meat is cheaper is that our government subsidizes the cost of growing the corn that is used to feed animals in CAFOs. Corn prices are heavily subsidized by the government, keeping the price of feed artificially low. Further, the government permits the companies owning factory farms to pollute our air and water. If these operations had to pay the real cost of producing corn and clean up the air pollution and water pollution they generate, the price of the meat they produce would be much higher. And if they were financially responsible for the health impacts on people, it would be higher still. In addition to the tremendous environmental damage created by factory farms, they use more food feeding animals than they ultimately produce. Clearly, this is not a smart way to raise food.

What can we do?

Some people say the solution to factory farms is for everyone in the world to stop eating meat. However, only a small percentage of people choose not to eat meat; in the United States, it’s only four to five percent. People’s reasons can be culture, habit, or taste. Additionally, in many parts of the world, the soil is too thin, or there isn’t enough rain to grow vegetables or grain. Yet that same land can support grazing animals feeding on native grasses. I wrote another book on Mongolian nomads; their diet is primarily meat and dairy because those are the kinds of food that the land of Mongolia is best suited to produce. In other parts of the world, people keep chickens and pigs who can forage for themselves, thus providing a source of protein for people who can’t afford to buy food in a store.

Eating is a political act. Choosing food which is produced with animals’ and people’s welfare in mind is like voting for a better farm and food policy. I hope you will be willing to pay a bit more for meat until our food system changes. Right now, farm-raised meat is more expensive because it reflects the true cost of raising meat. In buying humanely raised meat, you are participating in a food process that honors each animal and increases the health of our soil. Small-scale farmers are not being subsidized by our government, even as they are doing the important job of providing healthy alternatives to factory-raised meat. They need our support!

We don’t have to stop eating meat—although some people choose to—but we do need to eliminate factory farms and promote an ethical system of raising meat.

Footnotes

1. Kristof, Nicholas. “The Unhealthy Meat Market.” The New York Times, March 12, 2014.
2. Capps, Ashley. "Debeaking Video Shows Standard Practice on Free Range Egg Farms." Free From Harm, June 11, 2013.
3. American Veterinary Medical Association, Literature Review on the Welfare Implications of Beak Trimming, 2010.
4. Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.
5. Environmental Working Group (EWG), "Animal Feeding Operations Harm the Environment, Climate and Public Health," EWG, March 19, 2024.
6. Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.
7. Kristof, Nicholas. “The Unhealthy Meat Market.” The New York Times, March 12, 2014.
8. Joel Fuhrman, M.D., “Girls’ Early Puberty: What Causes It, And How To Avoid It,” HuffPost, May 6, 2011.