Factory Farm
The United States is a meat eating nation. According to Melanie Joy, the author of Why we Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, the average American eats 223 pounds of meat each year including 87 pounds of chicken, 17 pounds of turkey, 66 pounds of beef and 51 pounds of pork (37). If you multiply that by the 300 million citizens of the United States it equals a lot of meat and a lot of animals. The business behind the slaughter of these billions of animals is kept well hidden, but it needs to be brought into the light. Melanie Joy states that in order to grasp the enormity of this clandestine business one must know that the number of animals agribusinesses slaughter reaches 10 billion every year, and that is excluding fish and other sea animals. Also, the farm population in the United States is double the world's population (37). Although society has closed its eyes to the horrors of the meat industry, they are not immune from the effects this industry has. The inhumane treatment of animals, dangerous working condition for workers, pollution of the environment and health scares of consumers all happen behind the scenes at factory farms. Public attention to the meat industry started in 1906, when Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle was published. The Jungle was a tell-all novel revealing the horrors of the meat industry. People were outraged at the truth behind their food which led the government to realize that something must be done. As Melanie Joy, professor at the University of Massachusetts, states in her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows; "public indignation led to the passing of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which mandated regular inspections of slaughter houses and meat packaging plants"(75). These acts introduced the regulation of the meat industry by the government. As Jennifer Weeks states in her article Factory Farms; the Pure Food and Drug Act barred interstate sales of mislabeled or contaminated food items and