A Consumer Guide for Boycotting Factory Farms: Part One By Alexis Baden-Mayer Organic Consumers Association, November 20, 2013 For related articles and more information, please visit OCAs Factory Farming page, Food Safety Research Center page and our Health Issues page. Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles on how to boycott factory farms. Following the introduction, this first installment focuses on how to find alternatives to the milk produced by large CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) dairies. There are plenty of reasons to boycott factory farms, including the top two: your health and animal welfare. But the big-picture reason is this. The only way to feed the world and restore climate stability is to restore efficiency to our food system. When we were hunters and gatherers, eating animals was inherently efficient. Animals ate the grasses and shrubs we couldn’t digest and turned them into meat, milk and eggs that we could eat. Today, our factory farm food system is inherently inefficient. We take food and farmland that could be used to feed many people and use it to feed animals that feed fewer people. This all started when we enclosed the commons, started plowing up the pastures and planting crops on hunting grounds. The trend continues today as we continue to replace rangelands with millions of acres of genetically engineered grains destined for factory farms, where we cram millions of animals into confined spaces, under unnatural, unhealthy and inhumane conditions. We must end factory farming. And the only way to do that is to boycott foods produced from animals raised on factory farms. That can be challenging given how dominant factory farming has become. But it’s possible.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 03:05:52 +0000
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