Read It: Project Animal Farm

ReadIt!

by Bruce Mason

• Unlike many issues related to modern life, in terms of our food, the future is fundamentally in our hands. Deciding to put our money where our mouths are constitutes an important factor in personal and planetary survival. And more and more people are aware of an incessant, essential wake-up call.

One of most important voices emerging in this exponentially growing chorus of global awareness is Sonia Faruqi. Her book, Project Animal Farm: An Accidental Journey Into the Secret World of Farming and the Truth About our Food, is unprecedented. Sonia shared her insights with Common Ground and has offered to answer any questions our readers may have.

First, high praise: Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet) says, “Brave, captivating, enlightening and impossible to put down, this remarkable true story pries open hearts and minds and exposes the travesty of industrial farming like no other.” Nobel laureate (literature) J. M. Coetzee writes, “Engaging adventures to smuggle a body of useful – and disturbing – information about this most secretive global enterprise.” Prominent food activist John Robbins (The Food Revolution) adds, “Every so often, a book comes along with power to alter the course of history. Project Animal Farm is that potent. People will be talking about this book for decades.”

After graduating cum laude from the prestigious ivy league Dartmouth College (Economics/Public Policy), Faruqi was immediately scooped up as an analyst by a Wall Street investment bank. After several years of cab hopping, success and excess and 70-hour workweeks – eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at her cubicle – it all came to a screeching halt in the 2008 crash. Her dream job and hyper-urban existence ended abruptly and she reunited with her family in Toronto.

On a whim, she volunteered for a two-week working vacation at a dairy farm near her home. What she saw there shocked her to the core and catalyzed her four-year adventure and mission of visiting 60 farms in eight countries, but she had no intention of writing a book or a militant exposé. Often showing up unannounced, always pleasant and non-threatening, but insistent, she hitchhiked, risked her life and kept a journal about her journey. It led to her becoming an exceptional storyteller with a tale unlike any other.

CG: Can you put all of this in context?

SF: More than 70 billion animals are reared in the world for food, annually. In 2013, 8.5 billion chickens, 239 million turkeys, 112 million pigs, 32 million cattle and 2 million sheep and lambs were killed for human consumption in the US and Canada. According to government, individual Canadians now eat, on average, 255 pounds of meat, eggs and fish a year. That doesn’t include dairy, which adds up to 300 pounds, a huge number. Unquestionably, there’s a toll on the Earth and human health.

CG: Many of us have some sense of the “deepest, darkest recesses of international animal agriculture,” but were you particularly naive?

Sonia Faruqi

SF: I had never been on a farm, certainly not an industrial farm or slaughterhouse. I was curious about food and fond of cows grazing on green, rolling hills with idyllic, quaint antique barns and homes in the background, like ubiquitous scenes on labels and websites. But my plans for a picnic got caught in a thunderstorm. I had no idea what I was getting into: a foreign country with its own customs and rituals. Cows were tethered in stalls at the neck and trained with electric shocks to defecate in a gutter. Part of me was repulsed, but another side, seeing comparisons and solutions, won out.

CG: What is what you call “confinement agriculture”?

SF: It sums up our situation. Learning in a sensory way is completely different than being aware, generally. I was already vegetarian and had some inkling, but actually smelling, hearing and feeling is very different than say, disjointed videos and photographs. The smells built up from all the manure are unimaginable, an overwhelming sensory experience. The ammonia gets to the back of your throat. You cough, your eyes start tearing. A regular person would likely vomit outside tightly closed doors. But I stumbled into this highly secretive world and industry, previously under-reported, if at all, certainly without recommendations for change.

The worst are egg-laying hen cages and sow crates; animals can hardly move, trapped firmly in place, in human terms, like being glued to a chair for a lifetime. At an egg factory farm where I stayed, hens were trapped in thousands of cages, the size of a microwave, and this cage confined four or five hens, de-beaked, bare of feathers with wings like lumpy stumps. Their large feet flailed through the air comically as they shrieked in my hands. They were ghostly caricatures, harmless, but terrifying to witness in their harmlessness.

For all practical purposes, North America has become Asia’s pig factory farm. Inside, when lights are turned on, gestating sows rise, biting the bars of their crates, smashing their heads against them, sentient, but claustrophobic – insane sows, confined so their flesh extrudes through bars and legs poke into neighbours’ flesh. Their screaming rang through the fecal fog and still haunts me.

As well, antibiotics are very commonly used to balloon growth, mixed into chicken feed, a serious problem and grave concern, especially in Asia, where long-term consequences are already more commonplace. The industry claims to be strong and healthy, but rather than a vigorous young man bursting with life, I found a paranoid, senile old man living in terror that encounters with outsiders would spell his death.

CG: You wrote an article for Atlantic magazine entitled “Agriculture Needs More Women.” What’s the “grass ceiling?”

SF: Gender diversity is good in and of itself, but there are far too few women in agriculture, most notably in management. I’ve studied lots of data about biological and psychological differences. Women have more compassion and empathy, a different mindset. They’re more likely to search for healthy food and be concerned about animal treatment, food safety and security.

CG: What makes high meat consumption not only unhealthy, unsustainable and inhumane, but also entirely unnecessary?

SF: The future is already here, but not evenly distributed. Animals are treated well in some places. I’ve seen it in Indonesian villages, on farms in Belize and on what I term ‘pastoral farms.’ Different countries are at very different stages, evolving and transitioning, as well as painstakingly copying US fast-food outlets and suppliers.

I’m the first to conclude large pastoral farms are the answer. They have economies of scale, but can’t match the extreme volume – or violence – of factory farms. We must also reduce meat consumption as we transform production.

Cutting costs for profit currently determines animal conditions. The industry is one of the biggest and most destructive on the planet, but environmentalists have focused on fossil fuel. People think they have no choice. The reality is millions of people live entirely plant-based lifestyles and are thriving. Still, politicians subsidize factory farms and feedlots, pass ag-gag laws instead of regulations. And inspections and labels are meaningless, a deliberate strategy of agribusiness.

The single, biggest action to fight climate change – more than not driving, taking shorter showers or living without electricity – is to modify our diet to [eat] less industrial meat. I have no doubt veganism will eventually replace meat. Like other fallen ‘isms’ such as sexism and racism, carnism is contrary to human values and nature. Each of us is endowed with the power of choice; we just have to make right ones. It starts with consumers agreeing to eat lower on the food chain.

CG: Easier said than done. Let’s give Common Ground readers an opportunity to ask questions and highlight your recommendations and advice next month.

—

Email questions to brucemason@shaw.ca For more information, visit www.soniafaruqi.com

The post Read It: Project Animal Farm appeared first on Common Ground.