Factory farms
Illustration by Anna Loveday-Brow
Industrialized food production: the base of the junk food system.
There is no more potent symbol of the almost absolute control wielded by the international agri-food system (from landgrabbing to retailing), than the factory farm. These industrial complexes cause extensive pollution and disease in entire regions and emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases, all in order to produce food destined for the poor: “cheap” meat of dubious quality, whose true costs are never measured. This system is imposed on us, on humanity, and represent in one crisis the sum of multiple crises. In the almost endless list of calamities caused by factory farms, the genetically modified soy bean monoculture – farmed with pesticides and then used to feed imprisoned animals – means that everything returns to the same pockets at a harsh cost to the planet. However, the people are organizing and having more and more conversations and debates in an attempt to comprehend this together. This is very subversive, because our collective memory, and continuing to produce our own foodstuffs, according to our own peasant traditions, represents essentially the most fundamental basis for our autonomy – allowing our peoples, with all our ways and wisdom, to persist, and even to cool the earth, and attain lives of justice and dignity in the present and into the future.
GRAIN
