Factory Farm Presentation

I learned a few new things today.

I've never given much thought to animals in the past but I learned in AP Bio and from my vegetarian/vegan friends what the scale of factory farming is like, so I knew conceptually that factory farming has a large impact but never the true numbers. (For example, in AP Bio, we learned that cows produce a lot of the methane gas that contributes to global warming, but I hadn't realized that animal waste is the #1 cause of water pollution.)

I found Nick's statistics to be a little weird and random. I guess it was to give the presentation some extra flavor, but "how many showers could you take with the water used in one hamburger?" just brought up way too many questions for me. For example, what if you're a gross teenager boy who only showers once a month or something? Something like "A hamburger takes 600 liters of water to create" would have made a LOT more sense to me but I guess that is just how my brain works, and even though the statistics made no sense, they added interest to the presentation.

I also was kind of amused that Nick asked how many of us had ever seen a farm animal... I grew up in a town in Utah where you'd drive by cows, deer, moose, elk, whatever, every day and we regularly saw wildlife in the backyard such as foxes, porcupine, and Canadian geese. But then again his presentation was geared specifically for a Philadelphia audience and it seems like people from this part of the country never leave it so that makes sense that he asked that question.