Like many people who pay attention to how food is produced, I've come to abhor factory farming and the environmental and welfare problems that accompany it. My personal choice to eliminate factory-farmed animal products from my diet largely reflects this abhorrence.
Where I break from most conscientious consumers is in my decision to avoid meat from free-range animals and other alternative sources. This position hasn't won any popularity contests for me. My occasional critiques of free-range animal farming have led to, among other things, threats by a butcher to separate me from a particularly valued appendage as well as frequent charges that I'm a hired gun for agribusiness. Both concepts are equally difficult to contemplate.
My typical line of attack on free-range systems has been to illuminate hidden or unpublicized environmental and health-related pitfalls—some minor, others not so—in an attempt to persuade ethically-minded consumers that although free-range might be better than factory-farmed, it is not the panacea so many make it out to be. But this approach, for a wide variety of reasons (many of them my own fault), has been a bust.
To read the rest of this story please go to: The Atlantic