This includes breeding chickens with breasts so large they can hardly stand. Humans view animals as disposable commodities. And people have fewer and fewer options not to eat this 'engineered' meat and also to afford it.
The ideal situation for all animals raised in agriculture would be to live in the conditions of Polyface Farm. However, the solution to improve the lives of animals in the film is not an easy one. Although it would be nice if every film functioned like Salatin's, it would be difficult to feed the world's burgeoning population using such small-scale farming techniques, or at least to do so at the current cost of food. We will, the film suggests, have to allow food to cost more. But many families are already cash-strapped as it is, in terms of putting food on the dinner table. The film acknowledges this, showing how for some families shopping at Wal-Mart and buying inexpensive, processed foods such as corn-fed meats seem to be the only viable alternatives.
The 'answer' may well be to simply eat less meat -- eat as much ethically-produced meat as you can afford, which is likely to be vastly less than the mainstay of most American diets. While not every person feels healthy or comfortable with a vegan or vegetarian...
In many food cultures, meat is a 'sometimes' food and seen as a condiment, not as the focus of the meal except on feast days. There is a reason that meat was often seen as the food of the rich. Unfortunately, this also means that if one is to eat ethically, the wealthier one is, the easier it is to be 'ethically pure' about the meat one consumes. Quite simply, the rich need to make fewer personal sacrifices than the poor to put pressure on the food companies to improve their farming practices.
Almost none of the animals in the film seem to have benefitted from their relationship with humans: animals suffer on factory farms because of their confinement, the misery produced by husbandry that focuses only on a quick sale, and breeding that makes them innately unhealthy. And ultimately even humans suffer by treating animals this way, as they are eating more disease-ridden meats and are eating highly processed foods that make them fat and sick. The film counsels that we ignore the natural world at our peril -- by inflicting suffering on animals and going against
nature in pursuit of saving money, we are costing ourselves
money by hurting our bodies and the
environment in the long run.
