Advertising and the mass media portray the U.S. food supply as an almost magical system delivering the safest and cheapest food in the word, thanks to space-age technology and the world’s most efficient agribusiness industry. Unfortunately, a closer look reveals a food and agriculture system that puts products on the shelves of supermarkets at blinding speed but poisons land and water and damages the health and happiness of farmers and food workers. The current industrial agriculture approach is to replace smaller family farms with large-scale factory farms, all in the name of efficiency. Proponents of industrial agriculture in the Clinton administration and elsewhere argued that it takes fewer people to raise crops and livestock in an industrial-style system. However, like many seemingly efficient systems, factory farm agriculture externalizes significant environmental, social, and political costs.
