Animals selected for obesity cause obesity. By then they are often crippled by their weight. The growth rate of broiler chickens has quadrupled in 50 years: they are now killed at seven weeks(2). Most chickens and turkeys eat corn, and it’s a bad thing, not a good one.

Perhaps the most blatant diversion is “corn-fed”.

Meaningless labels such as “natural” and “farm-fresh” and worthless symbols such as the little red tractor distract us from the realities of broiler units and intensive piggeries. As Philip Lymbery points out in his book Farmageddon(1), while the production method must be marked on egg boxes in the EU, there are no such conditions on meat and milk. This is just one instance of the sanitisation of childhood, in which none of the three little pigs gets eaten and Jack makes peace with the giant, but in this case it has consequences. The petting farms to which we take our children are reifications of these fantasies. Many of the books written for very young children are about farms but these jolly places in which animals wander freely, as if they belong to the farmer’s family, bear no relationship to the realities of production. We deceive ourselves so effectively that much of the time we scarcely notice that we are eating animals, even during what were once rare feasts, such as Christmas, which are now barely distinguished from the rest of the year. We conspire in this concealment: we don’t want to know. What can you say about a society whose food production must be hidden from public view? In which the factory farms and slaughterhouses supplying much of our diet must be guarded like arsenals to prevent us from seeing what happens there? By George Monbiot, published in The Guardian on 17th December 2014.Įvery child should visit an abattoir.

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