animal farm

my dear friend bon ton founded the ethicurean, and if you have any interest in ethical eating, you should definitely read it.

as someone who was raised in a fairly rural area, the whole factory farming thing was a real wake-up call to me. i can only remember coming across one factory farm in my entire twenty-two years in south carolina, and that was a chicken farm that i encountered a few months before i moved to california. in fact, i think my second encounter with one was passing harris ranch on the 5 on my first trip from san francisco to l.a. that's not to say they weren't all over the place in s.c. (in fact, i know now that they were), but i was just lucky enough to have limited exposure to them (though i'm sure our meals often centered around meats from these farms, we also ate lots of what my father killed -- which is another story for another time. but let's just say i don't eat duck, quail, deer or -- gulp -- dove, as an adult).

most of the farmers i knew were like the guy profiled in this story, the link for which was featured on the ethicurean's site. not in a direct comparison way, but in terms of size and type of farm. his comment about the link between animal rights abuses and human rights abuses struck me as dead on. i think there really is such a thing as 'happy meat.'

(photo by jeremy lange)