Vox Launches In-Depth Exploration of Factory Farming

This week, Vox’s Future Perfect is publishing How Factory Farming Ends, a package of stories on the past and future of the movement against factory farming, its struggle to change our culture, politics, and palates, and how it might yet make real progress. 

Billions of animals raised for food are treated abysmally. They are, to name just a few standard industry practices, caged, mutilated without pain relief, and intensively bred to the point that they live in chronic pain and even struggle to stand up before being slaughtered, often painfully.

Every year, humans kill 80 billion land animals — 10 times more than there are people on Earth — and an even larger, poorly tracked number of fish. 

However, factory farming is only expanding its global reach, despite decades of animal advocacy striving to stop it, because people want to eat meat, and it’s the cheapest way to produce lots of it for a world of 8 billion. 

This package aims to examine the animal movement’s struggle to make progress, build coalitions, find mainstream support, and explore how it can learn from its failures and move forward.

The package features the following stories:

• Kenny Torrella investigates why the world’s most powerful environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, help greenwash the meat industry and are reluctant to take it on as the climate threat that it is. In another piece, Torrella presents a dream policy agenda for expanding plant-based food consumption, advocating for creative solutions such as increased government procurement in public institutions and better access for low-income individuals, treating plant-based foods with the same urgency and support as renewable energy.
• Marina Bolotnikova examines the worsening scale of factory farming and the slow progress made by the movement against it and suggests that the animal welfare movement may need to see itself as an early ethical vanguard helping build a future that people alive today will never see.
• Jonathan Safran Foer and Aaron Gross argue that the animal welfare movement must expand its focus beyond animal welfare alone and build a grand coalition with the environmental and public health communities that can highlight the threats that factory farming poses to humans, including zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance. They highlight a groundbreaking recent study finding that behavioral nudges, such as making plant-based dishes the default option in settings like university dining halls, could significantly reduce meat consumption while maintaining diner satisfaction.
• Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor argue that if progressives are serious about saving our democracy, they must recognize how the meat industry has led the charge to undermine it, including in the recent US Supreme Court case that struck down Chevron deference, a cornerstone of federal regulatory law.
• Jan Dutkiewicz examines PETA’s paradoxical legacy: Its outlandish tactics have sometimes drawn backlash, but at the same time, the group has played a vital role in forcing a broader conversation about animal rights and supported the cause in less public ways. How does the best-known and most divisive name in animal welfare fit into the modern movement?
• Jishnu Guha-Majumdar argues that despite the vegan movement’s failure to slow factory farming by changing the diets of the broader public, it remains essential and ought to remain at the heart of the movement’s goals and strategy. 
• Noella Williams explores why the animal movement, despite Black Americans being the fastest-growing vegan demographic, remains predominantly white, highlighting the racial inequality that undermines the movement’s effectiveness and proposing ways to address it.
• Crystal Heath explores how the meat industry’s political influence has removed consumer choices by flooding the market with subsidized meat and limiting alternatives, such as successfully requiring dairy products be offered in US schools, and proposes a vision for “animal rights 3.0” that involves enlisting veterinarians and other professionals to combat factory farming, rather than relying solely on individual dietary changes.
• Kelsey Piper examines how the Effective Altruism movement helped animal advocates overcome their differences and make meaningful, measurable progress that has helped phase out some of the worst factory farm practices.

Read more about the package and all of the pieces here.