Spokesmen for industrial agriculture are fond of describing the benefits of their economy of scale. I’m sure Tyson, Purdue, Conagra, National Beef, Cargill, Smithfield, and other Fortune 500-ranked meat producing companies are quite jazzed about their bottom lines. After all, they’ve certainly developed the most profitable method of meat production on the planet.

For these companies and plenty of others, that bottom line–the profit–justifies everything else: the way the animals are treated, the impact on public health and the environment, and the fact that smaller farmers can’t compete in the same market. The bottom line is king (along with corn).

But a person or a company can’t be ethical by looking only at the bottom line. You can’t make all your decisions based on the final row on the ledger. So I’ve developed some new personal bottom lines to guide my dietary decision-making:

The animals I eat must be able to engage in their natural behaviors–grazing, foraging, mating, frolicking, lying down, stretching their wings, nursing their young, and all the other birthrights of every living creature. This includes not only animals that ultimately give their flesh, but also the cows that give milk and the hens that lay eggs.

The animal must come from a place I’d like to visit. (This one is courtesy of Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop). A corollary is that the farmer or manager would allow me to see the animals and how they live. Getting anywhere near animals in a factory farm (and most slaughterhouses) is like being granted access to the double-double top secret rooms of the Pentagon.

I realize I’ve named two bottom lines, which doesn’t make much sense if one is supposed to be at the bottom. But maybe they shouldn’t be at the bottom at all, but rather the top, to guide everything that follows.

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.