This package took a marathon of reporting, writing, and editing over the last several months; it includes work from three Future Perfect staff members and eight outside writers from diverse academic, advocacy, and journalistic backgrounds. We hope you’ll take the “green pill” with us, and read, share, and send us your thoughts.
Some stories delve into the animal movement’s fraught relationship with the climate and public health communities, and the prospects for building meaningful coalitions — including a blockbuster investigation by Future Perfect’s Kenny Torrella into how the world’s most powerful environmental groups, like the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, greenwash the meat industry, and how the environmental movement could instead be pushed to challenge Big Meat as the climate threat that it is.
An essay by Jonathan Safran Foer, the novelist and author of Eating Animals, and Aaron Gross, founder of the anti-factory farming nonprofit Farm Forward, argues for a grand coalition among the environmental, public health, and animal advocacy communities that can move society away from factory farming through behavioral nudges.
Other pieces scrutinize the animal welfare movement itself — from its 19th-century glory days, when vegetarianism was popular among utopian social reformers, to its present-day alienation from other progressive causes, to the messy, often maddening, but essential legacy of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Writer and political organizer Astra Taylor, along with academic and animal and disability rights advocate Sunaura Taylor, contributed a incisive, thoroughly original piece arguing that progressives must take on the meat industry if they’re serious about preserving our democracy, while political theorist Jishnu Guha-Majumdar authored a deeply felt commentary on why he believes veganism should remain at the heart of the animal movement’s ambitions.
One of humanity’s greatest moral tests
At bottom, what our writers found is that the fight against factory farming sits at an uneasy inflection point: Animal rights activism and plant-based eating are more visible than ever; a handful of animal protection groups have managed to win major state and local animal welfare laws and extract meaningful concessions from mega-corporations. And yet the exploitation and abuse of animals is rapidly increasing in scale; industrialized meat consumption is quickly rising in the US and around the world. By this measure, animal advocates are losing the fight.
These trends reflect a tragic irony of human development: As our numbers and material wealth have swelled, so has the population of domesticated animals that we warehouse in brutal conditions. Animal advocates who attempt to change these conditions are up against centuries of entrenched cultural norms and identity, combined with ruthless agribusiness interests and captive political actors that tell us today’s unprecedented levels of meat consumption are natural, necessary, and above all else, inevitable.
If you were an alien who knew nothing about our species, you might expect a civilization that does what we do to other creatures to be filled with people who hate animals or, at least, are indifferent to their suffering. And yet the vast majority of people care deeply about animals and hate to see them mistreated, so much so that the meat industry in the US and elsewhere has pushed to make it a crime to film conditions inside factory farms.
This contradictory truth about our species may be our greatest refuge against despair. We do have profound capacities for compassion and moral courage, and so many of us already do know there’s something broken in our relationship with animals. As living standards rise around the world and American-style factory farming proliferates across not just the Global North but also Latin America, Asia, and Africa, a growing, global movement of people is recognizing that our treatment of animals is a stain on the human conscience that must be wiped away. One of the greatest moral tests we’ll face over the next century will be whether we can heed these voices, and decouple human prosperity from tyranny over animals.
You’ll find lots of great ideas to wrestle with in this package — but they represent a small sliver of the diversity of thought found in today’s movement against factory farming. Our hope is that they can help seed a larger conversation about how to build a kinder, saner, truly sustainable food system.
– Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor
Questions? Comments? Tell us what you think! Email us at futureperfect@vox.com.
PS: Want more Future Perfect in your inbox? If you love this package, and Future Perfect's coverage on the meat industry, check out our new newsletter: Processing Meat. Every two weeks, Kenny Torrella and I will break down how Big Meat impacts human and animal lives, from health and environment to politics and culture. Sign up here!
