Mondays can be miserable, but if you’re in a decent enough mood, you can look at them as new beginnings, opportunities to get on track for the week. It’s like every seven days there’s a mini version of a New Year’s resolution. Enter the Meatless Monday campaign, recommending a resolution you only have to keep for a day!

It’s a non-profit initiative from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the goal of which is reducing meat consumption by 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.

The personal health benefits include reduced risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. The environmental benefits include reducing one’s carbon footprint, saving the fresh water and fossil fuels required for industrial meat production, and reducing toxic runoff from factory farms. The humane benefits… well, I’ve said plenty about those already.

The concept of meatless days isn’t new. Wilson, Truman and Roosevelt recommended voluntary meatless days during both world wars, albeit for different reasons. Now Paul McCartney’s campaigning for it in Europe, and San Francisco just approved a resolution endorsing it. The Huffington Post’s on board, too, with weekly guest columns and recipes. Of course, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association are not big fans of the idea.

There are plenty of things I do exactly once a week. I brush the cats, I walk in the park with my friend Katherine, I make granola, I organize my desktop files. Now there’s something I don’t do once a week. Easy enough.

Have a great week.

I recently wrote about how good meat is more expensive. As I noted then, the price of the cheaper stuff–the factory-farmed meat–doesn’t account for the hidden costs.

Here are those costs.

Tax Dollar Costs

Our tax dollars provide significant government subsidies for agribusiness. Between 1995 and 2006, corn subsidies alone totaled $56 billion. These subsidies lower the cost of factory-farmed meat (corn subsidies exist in large part to reduce the cost of animal feed).

Health Costs

Of course, we also pay a price with our health. We ingest the antibiotics fed to industrial farm animals (antibiotics fight the disease caused by their living conditions), lowering our own resistance to bacteria (antibiotics no longer fight human disease as effectively). We ingest the hormones that farm animals are fed to make them grow faster, increasing our risk of prostate, breast, testicular, and colon cancer. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol are all related to overconsumption of meat (and we overconsume because it’s relatively cheap to do so). As Michael’s Uncle Al used to say, “If you have your health, you have your wealth.” In this respect, many of us are dirt poor.

Environmental Costs

We also pay the price with the health of our environment. Manure and urine runoff from factory farms pollutes air and poisons water supplies. A 2006 United Nations report found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation combined.

Karma Costs

Finally, we pay the price in bad karma. Factory farm operations exploit a low-paid, disempowered labor force. And I don’t need to describe again how factory farms treat animals.

We not only get what we pay for, we pay for what we get.

David Kirby, author of Animal Factory, said something funny at the AWA panel last week. He recalled the old Delta slogan, “Delta gets you there.” Then he said, “Well, isn’t that the very least you expect from an airline? To get you where you’re going?”

He wasn’t there doing stand-up; he was talking about industrial food production and the environmental havoc it is wreaking. So he added, “The least we can expect of the future is that it will be liveable.” Let’s hope the next generation can actually survive on this planet of ours.

To that aphorism I would add four more “the least we can expects”:

The least we can expect of a supermarket is that there is food within. As Michael Pollan says in In Defense of Food, “We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances… highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals… but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.” Most of these products involve some derivative of corn.

The least we can expect of labels is that they don’t require an oracle to decipher. Labels are written in the language of half-truth, misdirection, and obfuscation. Ultimately, most companies use packaging to sell product, and do everything they can to conceal or obscure the bad news.

The least we can expect of farms is that they will use air, sun, grass, and soil. Livestock and crops should be connected in the mutually beneficial loop that has sustained us for 10,000 years, but factory farming has little to do with nature. Many animals on CAFOs never see the sun or breathe fresh air, and none actually eat grass. On a real farm, manure would fertilize the soil. On a factory farm, it’s toxic waste because of what the animals are fed.

The least we can expect of food is that it will nourish us. ‘Nuff said.

If you’ve seen Food Inc., you probably remember Carole Morison, the chicken farmer who stood up to Perdue. Under Perdue’s restrictive contract, farmers are forced to pack chickens, sardine-like, into long, low warehouses without natural light and feed them diets that include antibiotics and arsenic (kills parasites, promotes growth). In the movie, she memorably explained her reason for speaking out:

“It’s not right what’s going on. And I’ve just decided I’m going to say what I’m going to say. I understand why others don’t want to talk. I’m just to the point that it doesn’t matter anymore. Something has to be said.”

Morison had been raising chickens for big corporations for 23 years as a “contract grower.” Contract growers provide land, chicken houses built to company specs, fuel, water, labor, and disposal of manure and dead chickens. The poultry company provides the chicks, feed, and additives. In this vertically integrated system, the company owns the chicks from start to finish (they also own the breeder flocks, the eggs, and the hatcheries). They hire “catchers” to collect the chickens. Then they slaughter, process, and package.

But Morison didn’t want to take away the screened-in buildings her chickens lived in and replace them with airless, lightless warehouses. She struggled to finance the “upgrades” Purdue was constantly requiring. She also wasn’t happy about the waste that was polluting her beloved Chesapeake Bay (the arsenic in the feed doesn’t just disappear), and she didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t bring her grandson to see the baby chicks. (Company regulations prohibit “unregistered” guests, so you can imagine how they felt when they found out the filmmakers of Food Inc. were spending time there.)

“I was being forced to be something that was not a farmer,” she said. After she failed to make the required upgrades and then spoke out about Purdue’s business practices, Purdue terminated her contract.

Morison’s story haunted me until I attended Animal Welfare Approved’s panel last week, Green Pastures, Bright Future: Taking the Meat We Eat Out of the Factory and Putting it Back on the Farm. There I discovered that Morison went on to found the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance, organizing a coalition of farmers, religious leaders, workers and others to advocate for better working conditions. She now works as an agricultural consultant specializing in local food systems. The 17-group alliance addresses health issues, unfair labor practices, and environmental pollution stemming from chicken production methods.

Morison spoke about the broad meaning of local and sustainability. “Consumers need to get more involved in their own communities,” she said. “You’re not only sustaining farms, but the communities as well.” She pointed to the economically unsustainable state of family farming: “Why would farmers raise chickens when they have to go out and get another job to raise chickens?”

When asked the common question about whether organic, sustainable farming can be scaled up to meet the needs of the growing global population, she replied “We need to learn to feed ourselves and our neighbors. The global economy doesn’t work for food production.”

That never occurred to me: Why are we trying to feed the world? We don’t even know how to feed ourselves. If feeding the world means spreading a diet linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and propagating a food production system that’s killing the planet, maybe we should think twice about it. “We’re putting farmers in other countries out of business,” Morison said. “How is that feeding the world?” (Another panelist, farmer and veterinarian Dr. Patricia Whisnant, president of the American Grassfed Association, added, “And we’re suing them in international court for not accepting our GMO’s!”)

Yet another panelist, Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop, cited a Compassion in World Farming report that proves that, with a modest reduction in meat and dairy consumption in the western world, the planet can, in fact, sustain itself using grass-fed and pasture based system.

After the panel, I had the pleasure of sitting across from Morison at dinner. She was just the kind of company I’d expect her to be: brash, funny, and smart. She gave me lots of good advice about raising backyard hens. I’m so glad this woman has a voice.

Carole Morison, front center. From left to right: Nicolette Hahn Niman, David Kirby, author of Animal Factory, Dr. Patricia Whisnant, and Andrew Gunther, AWA Program Director.
[Photo courtesy of Animal Welfare Approved.]