Factory farms still factories

Every year the fast food industry spends billions marketing their products. They show a lot of attractive, happy, skinny people having fun. What they don’t show you is where the food comes from, how it’s made and what it contains. Tyson ads don’t show chickens crammed together at their factory farms. Wendy’s ads don’t mention that their suppliers confine pregnant pigs in gestation crates that are so small that the pigs can’t even turn around or that their egg suppliers confine their hens to tiny wire cages. KFC doesn’t mention that five members of their Animal Welfare Board have quit because their recommendations have been ignored. That’s because once you learn how these companies operate, how they harm people, how they mistreat animals and pollute the land, you may become highly motivated to eat something else.\nObesity is a serious problem among children as well as adults. This problem is caused by the fast food industry marketing directly to children and advertising such foods as appropriate for consumption at all times, and parents who give into their child’s demands and allow their children to consume fast foods on a regular basis. Adults are fair game for marketers, but children are not. \nEighty percent of the agricultural land in the U.S. is used to grow food for factory farms. Factory farming is the biggest system of cruelty to animals ever devised. Every year, nearly 10 billion animals live out their entire lives confined indoors. 20,000 chickens are raised in 20-by-100-foot buildings where they are fed antibiotics in order to keep them from getting sick due to the overcrowded, filthy conditions. Baby pigs are crowded into pens where they live over pits of their own manure until they are ready for slaughter. \nMost people think that the best thing they can do to help end global warming is to buy a fuel efficient hybrid or one of those E-85 flex-fuel cars; however, the EPA lists factory farms as a leading cause of global warming, land and water pollution. Therefore, we can reduce the pollution by buying only freerange, organically-raised meats, milk and eggs or by switching to a vegetarian diet. The bottom line is this: Fast foods are convenient, but the cost to your health and the environment is too high.