Meat, dairy, and eggs—indeed, the whole gamut of animal-derived foods—are woven into the fabric of American life and have been for as long as most will remember. But what’s on our plates will change significantly when factory farming is taken off the table, a once-unthinkable scenario that may soon become reality.
A 2017 survey of U.S. attitudes towards animal farming showed that as nearly half of U.S. adults support a ban on intensive, or ‘factory’, farming, a figure that would surely become a majority were the scale and horror of the industry fully understood. While it’s tempting to imagine factory farming as an aberration, something far from the cozy images of green fields filled with happy cows, the brute fact is that most foods at the heart of our cherished memories, traditions, and everyday lives are born of intensive animal agriculture.
