human health as well. Other innovations
involve the animals’ living conditions, which
have become increasingly artificial and
crowded, and their feed, which often includes
reprocessed waste materials from various
agricultural industries, and which contributed
to the origin of mad cow disease and the
persistence of salmonella in chickens. The
scale and concentration of modern meat
production, with hundreds of thousands of
animals confined in a single facility, have
caused significant water, soil, and air
pollution. Enough consumers and producers
have become uneasy about these
developments that there is now a modest
segment of the industry devoted to meats
raised more traditionally, on a smaller scale,
and with more attention to the quality of the
animals’ life and meat.
Invisible Animals
Historian William Cronon has written