This week, Vox is releasing Future Perfect How Factory Farming Ends, A package of stories about the past and future of the movement against factory farming, the struggle to change our culture, politics and palate, and how it can still make real progress.
Billions of animals raised for food are treated inhumanely. They are, to name just a few standard industrial practices, caged, mutilated without pain relief, and intensively bred such that they are in chronic pain and struggle to even stand before slaughter, often painful.
Every year, humans kill 80 billion land animals – 10 times more than there are humans on Earth – and an even larger, poorly tracked number of fish.
However, factory farming is only expanding its global reach, despite decades of efforts by the animal side to stop it, because humans want to eat meat, and it’s the cheapest way to produce large quantities for a world of 8 billion.
This package aims to explore the progress of the animal movement, building coalitions, finding mainstream support and how it can learn from its failures and move forward.
The package includes the following stories:
- Kenny Torella Investigate 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 accept it as a climate threat. In another piece, Torrella presents a visionary policy agenda for expanding the use of plant-based foods, suggesting creative solutions such as increased public 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 slow progress resulting from the increasing scale of factory farming and the movement against it, and suggests that the animal welfare movement should see itself as an early moral vanguard that will help build a future that people alive today will never see.
- Jonathan Safran Foyer And Aaron Gross Argues that the animal welfare movement must expand its focus beyond animal welfare and build a coalition with the environmental and public health communities to highlight the threats factory farming poses to humans, including zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance. They highlight a groundbreaking recent study that found that behavioral nudges, such as making plant-based foods the default option in settings like university dining halls, can significantly reduce meat consumption while maintaining diners’ satisfaction.
- Astra Taylor And Sunaura Taylor Arguing that if progressives are serious about saving our democracy, they must acknowledge how the meat industry is responsible for undermining it, a 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 provoked backlash, but at the same time, the group has played an important role in fueling a broader conversation about animal rights and championing the cause in less public ways. How does the most well-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 down factory farming by changing the eating habits of the larger public, it is essential and should be at the heart of the movement’s goals and strategies.
- Noella Williams Explores why the animal movement, despite black Americans being the fastest-growing vegan demographic, remains predominantly white, highlights the racial discrimination that undermines the movement’s effectiveness, and suggests ways to address it.
- Crystal Heath How the meat industry’s political influence has displaced consumer choices by flooding the market with subsidized meat and limiting alternatives, such as successfully requiring dairy products to be provided to US schools, and proposing a vision for “Animal Rights 3.0” that involves enlisting only veterinarians and other Professionals to fight factory farming without relying on individual dietary changes.
- Kelsey Piper How the effective altruism movement helped animal advocates overcome their differences and make meaningful, measurable progress that helped phase out some of the worst factory farm practices.
Read more about the package and all the pieces here.
