"WHY HAVEN'T WE HEARD ABOUT THIS BEFORE?"

In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer notes that “upwards of 99 percent of all animals eaten in this country come from ‘factory farms’” (12). And yet the vast majority of consumers are unaware of what this means in terms of the stories behind factory farming: the life and death that a factory- farmed animal experiences, the working conditions of factory farm laborers, the health effects of eating animals and their byproducts, and the overall impact of factory farming on the environment.

As one of you said in class after learning that animal agriculture accounts for 51% of the global greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming, “Why haven’t we heard about this before?” This is a great question that has no one simple answer, but it’s worth exploring. Indeed, why are so many people uninformed about factory farming?