Ditching factory farming can help prevent another pandemic

The most ambitious goal of the animal movement has always been to eradicate factory farming and inspire people to eat more plants and fewer animals. This only makes sense, as the scale of the violence endemic to industrial farming radically dwarfs all other forms of animal suffering.

Beyond the problem of the inevitable suffering involved in the slaughter of animals we consume, factory farming necessitates new forms of animal abuse such as intensive confinement, drugs that keep sick animals just alive enough to be profitable, and genetic modifications that induce diseases. (While genetic modification is often interpreted to mean direct edits to a genome, the USDA’s definition also includes selective breeding, the technique the factory farm industry has used to deform animals beyond recognition.) These harms to animals, as we will see, are tightly linked to harms to humans. 

But the way forward for the animal movement may be less about swelling the ranks of vegetarians and vegans — which has long been its primary ambition — and more about identifying an overlapping consensus between social movements that center animals and those that center concerns like climate change and public health. These movements share an interest in shifting toward a more plant-based food system as never before. We should also share resources and tactics. 

Today, government at every level, from local to federal, actively promotes consuming high levels of animal products and the continued growth of factory farming; large portions of the legal system work primarily to defend industrial farms against ordinary citizens and public advocates rather than the other way around (for one powerful illustration of this, see the documentary The Smell of Money). Only a broad coalition can hope to change this. 

Increased collaboration with the public health movement will be particularly crucial in encouraging a more plant-based food system. In the short term, though, it is emerging collaborations with the environmental movement that show the most promise. The well-known lower carbon footprint of plant-based diets — as low as a quarter of the emissions of meat-heavy diets — provides a particularly powerful form of common ground.   

Let’s consider a rather extraordinary development that resulted from animal and environmental groups working together that occurred in just the last year.    

A groundbreaking experiment suggests reducing US meat eating is attainable

Starting last September, hundreds of American college and university dining halls serving about a million students began to systematically modify how they served food in ways designed to substantially increase the consumption of plants. The schools, which have in common the use of Sodexo as a food service provider but little else, were guided in part by a recent peer-reviewed study finding that the use of “plant-based defaults” could significantly shift diners’ choices toward plant-based foods. (One of us, Aaron, is on the board of and helped launch an organization that partnered with Sodexo on this experiment, but he was not personally involved in the project.)

In the three-month study, a hot meal station in three college dining halls, two in the American Northeast and one in the South, alternated between serving a plant-based and meat-based meal by default. When a plant-based entrée was the default, diners could ask for a meat meal. Depending on how conservatively the results are calculated, on average between 21.4 and 57.2 percent fewer meat-based meals were chosen when plant-based foods were the default. And, crucially, surveys found that diners remained as satisfied as ever (something that the presence of plant-based meats seemed to have helped in this study). A range of other public and private institutions — including governments, hospitals, and businesses — around the world are experimenting with similar tactics. 

The basic insight being employed here is that institutional food service providers already make decisions every day that shape what their customers choose by deciding, for example, what dish to list first on the menu, what entree to make the special, and what products to most heavily promote. We diners are already being nudged by food service providers toward more profitable foods (often animal products) every time we buy food. The strategies being employed at the 400 colleges and universities in one way or another involve a decision on the part of dining services to let concerns about health and sustainability — especially climate change — influence these existing decisions about food order, placement, and so forth. 

This can be thought of as behavior architecture. Just as good physical architecture is aesthetically pleasing and makes it easy to do what we have come to that place to do, good behavior architecture in dining halls, supermarkets, and restaurants helps consumers make prosocial choices — like plant-based foods with lower climate impacts — the easiest choices. Diners do not need to be ethical superheroes, or even be ethically motivated, to eat in ways more in line with their values. 

Two issues raised here seem especially important. The first is to better understand how recent and unique the new overlapping consensus between animal and ecological concerns is and what is making it work. The second is to consider the potentially even more consequential, but less-developed, coalitional possibilities of animal and ecological advocates teaming up with the public health sector to advocate a shift towards plant-based diets and away from factory farming. 

In an era of ubiquitous factory farming, the public health sector has its own reasons to prefer a more plant-based food system — for example, the way that factory farms promote antibiotic resistance, an escalating global crisis associated with nearly 5 million annual deaths and increase the risk of zoonotic diseases like bird flu reaching pandemic proportions. Balanced plant-based diets are also widely regarded to have health advantages (especially lowering risk for heart disease), but since these benefits are well known, here we want to emphasize the distinct advantages of a more plant-based food system, beyond the general healthfulness of plant foods. 

That a more plant-based diet is better for animals isn’t enough to move policy. This same diet shift is already being used to reduce climate impacts; it could also preserve the value of antibiotics and reduce the number of new diseases we face, as well as shore up political will to transform our diets.

The climate science consensus on meat reduction

The nascent alliance between animal and environmental advocates on food system change is not simple. The two movements have often had different agendas. For most of our lives, mainstream environmentalism has not seriously engaged the problems with the food system, especially the problems posed by industrial meat. This is true despite the fact scientists for decades have documented the enormous role meat plays in climate change and virtually every other environmental crisis.      

Some of the reasons for this hesitancy are perfectly understandable: Emissions from the energy and transportation systems had proven technological solutions, which made solving emissions in those sectors comparatively straightforward. Food, by contrast, looked like a hornet’s nest. It’s hard enough to get people to focus on climate change, which until recently has felt so abstract, distant, and slow. To add into the conversation what is one of the most uncomfortable and contentious of all social issues — the ethics of eating — would likely have been an invitation to be ignored. 

But sometimes being ignored is just another way to describe being ahead of one’s time. Addressing the role of food systems in climate change was perhaps ahead of its time 20 years ago when little progress had been made in energy and transport, but no more. Recent years have seen a new willingness and a recognition of the necessity to address the climate impacts of animal products.

The highly regarded EAT-Lancet Commission, a panel of nutrition, sustainability, and agriculture experts, in 2019 concluded that even if we decarbonized everything else, if we don’t address our food system, it will be impossible to meet the emissions target set by the Paris climate agreement. Global food system studies on the interventions needed to address climate change — such as the study led by University of Oxford researcher Joseph Poore published in Science or the study published by the nonprofits GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy — consistently note the necessity of reducing meat consumption. 

Environmental policy advocates still often remain reluctant to push these conclusions in the nitty-gritty of policy work, but this seems to us the natural reluctance before one finally rips off the Band-Aid. While the study of the Sodexo schools suggests that the experience of eating fewer animals need not reduce diner satisfaction, the idea of eating fewer animals remains politically unpopular. Suggesting eating less of anything can be branded as un-American, and conservative news outlets have made a fetish of warning that environmentalists are “coming for your burgers” even before any meaningful policies to shift diets have been enacted.      

It will take considerable movement effort to transform the consensus in environmental science about the need to shift diets fully into organizational practice and policy advocacy, but we believe the case for eating more plants is now so well established that there is no turning back. Advocates in the environmental space who press for meat reduction will still often find themselves resisted; a quiet civil war is raging in the movement. There have been and will be ups and downs in that war, but we believe an invisible threshold has been crossed and that, battle by battle, policy by policy, the environmental movement is integrating the scientific consensus that meat reduction is essential to addressing climate change and many other ecological concerns. 

The crucial third leg in the coalition against factory farming is public health

That said, even when climate change advocates do address the problems with meat, there is the possibility of serious disagreements about the role of poultry and pork. Despite a high carbon footprint compared to plant-based foods and a load of other problems, poultry and pork meat can generally be produced at a fraction of the carbon footprint of beef. This is why we so often hear from environmentalists about the desirability of reducing beef and dairy consumption in particular: By the numbers, these industries have among the worst climate footprint of any food.      

However, in terms of animal suffering, no industry is as horrific as today’s poultry industry; the pork industry is equally nightmarish, if smaller in scale (virtually all commercially available chickens and turkeys and the overwhelming majority of pig meat comes from factory farms). Modern industrial chickens have the disturbing distinction of being so genetically modified to produce more flesh and eggs that their very biology destines them to suffer from a range of diseases and incapacities (which is not to mention that it takes 100 or more individual chickens to produce as much meat as in a single cow). When climate activists suggest an overly numbers-driven approach to reducing food climate impacts, they may drive the production of more poultry and pig factory farms by recommending eating chicken or pork over beef. This is already happening. 

Happily for the animal cause, though, data and research from the public health sector about the dangers of industrial poultry and pig production can ameliorate this tension. Studies show that while risks from different industries vary, if we don’t reduce animal-sourced foods, we will increase infectious disease. From the point of view of public health, the poultry industry is profoundly worrying, both because of the routine use of antibiotics that promotes antimicrobial resistance and the potential to seed a pandemic.

In recent months, the H5N1 bird flu virus, which if it mutates to be able to spread among humans could make Covid-19 seem like the common cold, has leaped from birds to cattle and has infected several US dairy workers. The extreme industrialization of both the poultry and pork industries — with their use of densely packed, genetically uniform, and immunocompromised animals — is a perfect Petri dish for cultivating the next plague.

Just as climate activists have overlapping interests with animal advocates on diet change because of the high carbon footprint of animal products, public health advocates have overlapping interests because of the very basic biological fact that sick farmed animals not only suffer but can pose profound disease risk for human populations. The basic principle here is known in the international public health community as One Health, an approach that optimizes health outcomes by, in the words of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”  

One Health is de rigueur in contemporary public health contexts. It is endorsed and promoted by the CDC, the World Bank, and just about every other authoritative advocate of public health. Theoretically, One Health already guides US law and policy, yet it has very little influence when it runs up against powerful political interests. One Health advocates, like animal advocates, have to contend with the power of industry; so far, sociopolitical factors like entrenched commitments to factory farming (among others) thwart the implementation of One Health frameworks. Ultimately, this means that factory farms benefit from unchecked externalities — the public rather than industry pays the immense cost of lost drugs and the cost of managing or preventing pandemics. Of course, this at least temporarily makes reducing the consumption of animal products that much harder by making them artificially cheap. 

The current crisis of antibiotic use in the US meat industry dramatically illustrates how public health advocates struggle to rein in big meat and could benefit from coalition with the animal movement. For many decades, the scientific community, often emphasizing a One Health frame, has warned about the loss of lifesaving drugs because of the scale at which antibiotics are routinely administered to farmed animals. Despite high consumer demand for meat raised without antibiotics and government regulation of antibiotics in agriculture intensifying since the 2010s, the industry can’t quit antibiotics. In the factory farm system, sick animals are often more profitable than healthy ones, and sick animals need drugs to stay alive and to be profitable. This is why advocating for antibiotic-free meat without arguing for a change in production has ended up playing into the hands of industry. The problem has never been the drugs themselves, but the dismal conditions that necessitate them: The root problem is factory farming itself.

So, unsurprisingly, after a dip due to regulation starting in 2016, antibiotic use in agriculture, according to the latest FDA statistics, is ticking up again. But even this concerning growth in antibiotic sales understates the problem because a mounting body of evidence suggests that even meat labeled antibiotic-free is, illegally, often from animals that were fed drugs. A study published in Science of the US supply of antibiotic-free beef found that fully 15 percent of the meat was from animals illegally fed drugs. New evidence also suggests pork producers are using prohibited antibiotics. Despite the USDA admitting last year that antibiotic-free claims have indeed come into question, it has not yet taken corrective action.

The industry is not all-powerful, but it is often more powerful than any one social movement. Divided we are conquered. 

But what if public health advocates, who have long been frustrated with One Health being officially endorsed while being ignored in actual policy, worked in coordination with the nascent coalitions emerging between animal and climate groups? What if One Health concerns with the creation of antibiotic-resistant pathogens or the growth of new zoonotic diseases were taken up alongside concerns with cruelty and sustainability as a kind of third leg of the case for eating more plants and rolling back factory farming? 

Something like this coalition seems the most promising direction in animal advocacy. We aren’t arguing anything novel; the power of coalitions is well documented in the social sciences, and most animal advocates are well aware of its value. But we are arguing that very recent developments, like the new willingness among environmentalists to take on the meat industry and the rise of One Health as the dominant paradigm for public health (despite failures to implement), are more important than generally understood. 

The future will have to be collaborative

Pulling these thoughts together, here is the paradigm shift we see unfolding: The animal advocacy movement has long argued the ethical case for ending factory farming and moving toward plant-based diets; now is the time to highlight the pragmatic advantage of these diets and to double down on coalitional efforts. A food system less dependent on factory farming and more plant-based is not just a way to advocate for animals; it is, among other things, a partial solution to climate change and to growing public health risks associated with factory farms. 

We have emphasized coalition with environmentalists and One Health advocates in particular, but this is not meant to be exhaustive. As environmental justice activists know, the environmental and health harms we have noted fall disproportionately on BIPOC communities, making the factory farm a major driver of inequality and social injustice. This racialization of industrial farms has been especially well documented in North Carolina’s hog industry and points to the depth of other coalitional possibilities.  

Unfortunately, it does not do much good to advocate for such coalitions generically as we are doing here. That is all too easy. What can do a lot of good — and what already has started a promising trend toward more plant-based eating at colleges and universities — is the pragmatic work of forging real coalitions. Ultimately, the default veg dining strategy employed by the 400 Sodexo schools was adopted because it was pragmatic. Shifting diets in this way achieved the dramatic reduction in climate impact that Sodexo sought in connection with its sustainability pledges, and it kept diners as happy with the food as ever, which was and is crucial to their bottom line.

But even though plant-based defaults work, it is highly unlikely that Sodexo would have adopted them without the support it received from climate and animal activists. Even businesses like Sodexo, which made a climate pledge long before it started using plant-based defaults, often don’t appreciate the climate benefits of shifting diets or fear that it cannot be done without generating backlash. 

This is one reason why advocacy remains crucial. Sodexo considered and finally pursued plant-based defaults only in the course of a partnership with two nonprofit advocacy groups, one coming out of the climate movement, Food For Climate League, and another — the organization we mentioned at the beginning of this essay that Aaron is connected to — out of the animal space, Better Food Foundation. A viable business case is not enough; it also needs champions. 

The environmental-animal movement coalition that helped support the Sodexo changes shows that coalitions can work but not that they are abundant. In our experience, though there is a lot of goodwill toward collaboration on shifting diets among many animal and environmental advocates on the ground, this is still rarely reflected in meaningful organizational partnerships or resource sharing across movements. This is an entrenched situation and, despite the encouragement we’re giving, will not be easy to change. The present animal movement is not collaborative. 

Choosing a vegetarian or vegan diet is an ethical ideal that is profoundly meaningful for some — we highly recommend it if you are so inclined. Jonathan’s book Eating Animals details his own journey into the ethics of eating (and was made into a film). But the animal advocacy movement’s success need not rest on the number of individuals who sign up for this admirable way of eating.

What by contrast is essential to movement goals is the need to collectively reduce the consumption of animal products from factory farms. The environmental movement has helped make an unimpeachable case against beef and dairy, but it is the less-developed alliance with the public health sector that will seal the case against chicken and pig factory farming. Happily, the diet-shifting efforts at colleges and universities in the past year suggest, perhaps in a more visible way than ever before, that this is imminently possible — if we work in coalition. There are still miles to go, but the road to that almost impossibly ambitious goal of shifting diets is getting clearer. The future is collaborative.

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of numerous novels and works of non-fiction, including Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Eating Animals, Here I Am, and We Are the Weather.

Aaron S. Gross is director of the Center for Food Systems Transformation and a professor of religious studies at the University of San Diego, and the founder of the nonprofit advocacy group Farm Forward.

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