Responding to consumer pressure, the fast food giant McDonald’s recently announced that it would remove eggs laid by caged hens from its food supply chain. Since less than ten per cent of the 45 billion eggs that Americans annually consume are from cage-free birds, the market pressure exerted by a policy like this (the company uses 2 billion eggs each year) is enormous. Burger King and Walmart have made similar commitments. Together the changes could overhaul North American egg production within a decade.
The new policies come in the wake of an avian flu outbreak that wiped out millions of birds that used to supply the North American market. They have also been spurred by growing awareness and concern over the mistreatment of animals in industrial farming. For years critics have argued that markets would not sustain the extra costs associated with humane farming techniques. In fact, when the transition is properly handled, the reverse seems to be true. Cage-free eggs, which used to sell for a premium, have never been more affordable. Several large suppliers have used the crisis to begin their transition to less constrictive environments, and supermarkets have decreased their mark-up to encourage sales.
“Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity,” writes the anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari. We eat food harvested by unethical practices because we avert our gaze from the heartless industrial processes that keep our larders and freezers so well-stocked. Our consumption is “fuelled by indifference.” We tell ourselves that the farm animals which produce our dairy – or are slaughtered, in staggering quantities, to provide cheap meat – are “little different from machines, devoid of sensations and emotions, incapable of suffering” even though modern science has shown “beyond reasonable doubt that mammals and birds have a complex sensory and emotional make-up” and experience fear, pain, and distress just like we do.
The shift in McDonald’s egg supply policy is expected to affect 8 million birds. To put this in perspective we should consider the nearly 25 billion other chickens in the world today – and the billion pigs, billion cattle, and billion sheep that are often subjected to ravages of industrial farming. In the wild, chickens live between seven to twelve years, but we typically kill them after just a few weeks or months, to keep our gargantuan supply chains moving. We do this even though, according to a recent UN report, we waste nearly a third of the food we produce. In addition to food waste, Harari notes that in the modern poultry industry hundreds of millions of “male chicks and imperfect female chicks are picked off the conveyor belt and are then asphyxiated in gas chambers, dropped into automatic shredders, or simply thrown into the rubbish, where they are crushed to death.”
Large dairy farms permit similar cruelties. During the five years of its life a modern dairy cow is often confined like a prisoner, continuously impregnated – to keep milk production at a peak – and her calves are taken away shortly after birth (males for meat production, females for a life of confinement.) Anyone who has watched footage of the abuses documented by animal rights activists in Europe and the United States will know that public opinion would never tolerate the reality of industrial farms if it knew more about their callous mistreatment of animals.
Guyana and the Caribbean should take note of this shift towards the humane treatment of farm animals. Fortunately, few of our farmers face the market pressures that have driven European and North American food suppliers to their various Faustian bargains. Nevertheless we could be better consumers. We tend to prefer imports, even when local substitutes are healthier, and have been raised more humanely. We take for granted fruits and vegetables – many of them pesticide free – that would be the envy of shoppers in much richer countries, not to mention our grass-fed hormone-and-antibiotic-free cattle.
We should learn from industrialised nations that are now, belatedly, overhauling their flawed food supply chains, that there is no justification or need for chickens, cows and pigs to be confined throughout their already shortened lives, nor for them to be treated as though they were nothing more than food-producing automata. And we should realise that animals reared in inhumane environments, forced to endure lives of appalling misery, pumped full of chemicals and medicines, are not worth eating.
