By Jenny Kalish and Carolyn Sundquist
Every Monday Great Lakes Echo runs video clips of random people answering questions that experts believe environmentally literate citizens should understand. In the last clip an expert explains the correct answers.
This week’s question is “What is factory farming?”
This week’s expert is Laurie Thorp, director of the Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment (RISE) at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich.
RISE provides students interested in environmental studies a chance to work on community projects that promote sustainability.
No it is not pretty. My point was, and is, that most people have no idea how ugly it is. If they did, they may make some dietary changes. It is a pretty well-kept secret though, unless one notices the uptick in meat recalls because of salmonella, or the size and color of the chicken breasts at the meat market. How do chickens stand up with those big breasts? The answer is, they don’t. And whatever happens to be on the floor of that massive feeding operation is what the chicken sprawls in. Yuck.
Factory farms are the only way millions upon millions of people can crowd into cities and rely on the tiny percentage of America’s workforce still in production agriculture to produce enough food, arguably the most wholesome food in the world, at affordable prices to stave off mass starvation. Anyone who thinks America’s food supply can be produced by ma and pa farms, free range animals and hand picked produce is in la-la land. It may not be pretty. Most things aren’t.
That was a superficial explanation for a system that crowds animals in an unnatural way, feeds them antibiotics and then spreads their poorly or non-treated waste (in massive quantities) over farm fields. The runoff pollutes our water from the tributaries to the Great Lakes and on.
Most people have no idea where their food comes from. Factory farmers like it that way.