The Ugliest Acronym on Earth

CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feed Operations) has that undistinction, just awarded after reading Jonathan Franzen Foer’s (1977-) ”Eating Animals” (Penguin, $31.99). With a Princeton degree (Philosophy and Literature) and two successful novels, ”Everything Is Illuminated”(2002) and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (2005), he took three years off to research a nonfiction book on “Eating Animals” (2009). To influence his own children—although he was a now and again Veggie in his own youth. His conclusions are devastating!

Take this stat. “All told, farmed animals in the U.S. produce. . . roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second.” Smithfield, the largest pork producer, makes as much fecal waste as the entire populations of California and Texas combined. Since there is no waste infrastructure provided, our rivers are polluted with dangerous elements and a dangerous fecal mist envelopes the adjacent population.

A UN report (2006) established that these eliminations put more climate changing materials into the atmosphere than all forms of our transport combined. And it’s wasteful. Even industrial fishing has what they call “bycatch”—80-90% is thrown back in the sea.

Industry flacks describe hens as free range when in fact there is a single hatch, mostly closed. “Cage free” translates to tens of thousands birds unmoving, debeaked, and drugged. The industrial processes involved in disassembling large animals is a trip through the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno, especially to the many who don’t lose consciousness during the process.

Broiler chickens, laying hens, turkeys, and pigs are over 90% factory farmed. Beef cows are only 78.2 percent. Dairy cows, 60.16. But They have to remain pregnant to give milk, and live only four to six years. Their calves are caged within 24 hours, away from their—and swiftly “vealed”!

Foer philosophizes from three premises. 1. We don’t need to act this way. And the American Dietetic Association has long since proven that vegetables are better than meats which lead to cancer and heart disease. 2. Factory farming institutionalizes unimaginable suffering. 3. Factory farming is accelerating catastrophic environmental damage. There are moral and prudential reasons for doing away with CAFO.

But such ideals are rarely contemplated in Casino Capitalism. The toxic bonds of factory farming are every bit as lethal as phony mortgages. The damage is physical rather than fiscal.

Foer is right to warn his children. Politicians today are trying to create careers over federal debt. At long and fancy Congressional lunches they ignore the real threats to our “advanced” industrial civilization! Food, of course Foer concedes, is not rational: ”Food is culture, habit, identity.” Slow Food may decelerate our madness. Public schools should make Diet required, as they ban snack foods.

It is as important in a democracy of abundance to teach children how to eat as how to vote. Vote Good Eats! Good for Foer’s kids. May in their generation everything important be illumined as he teaches extremely loud and incredibly close! CAFO. Ugh!