Boneless skinless chicken breasts. Turkeyburgers. Lean ground beef. Many people consider these healthy foods - and if they’re orgainically raised, they probably are. However, if you’re eating any food coming from animals that have been raised on factory farms, also known as animal factories, you might be real surprised at the food these animals are fed.

“Factory farms? Animal factories? My supermarket doesn’t sell any of that stuff!” Wanna bet? Almost all the beef, turkey, chicken and ham sold in supermarkets comes from these types of operations. while there still are Farmer Browns raising their animals one by one using traditional methods, it’s not likely you’ll find their products on your supermarket shelves.

These factory farms can be massive in size. As you might imagine, the animals they harbor can create immense quantities of waste, which are stored in what the farms refer to as “lagoons”. Hmmm. I think we used to call those cesspools. Anyway, these lagoons are vulnerable to leaking or actual breakage of the walls. You can imagine the health threat this poses to surrounding communities if the leakage makes it into local waterways. Not to mention the smell, even if nothing breaks.

Well, ok, these places are not very healthy for the people who live around them, but what’s that got to do whether or not the food they produce is healthy? The same production line mindset that leads the operators of these farms to cram all the animals into pens or cages and create massive poop lagoons also allows them to feed the animals:

• Same species meat (think Mad Cow)
• Diseased animals
• Feathers
• Hair
• Skin
• Hooves
• Blood
• Manure
• Plastics (What the? Oh wait - it’s for “roughage”. Of course!)
• Drugs and Chemicals
• Excessive amounts of grains

That last one may surprise you. What’s unhealthy about feeding grains to farm animals? In moderation, nothing. However, the animals digestive systems cannot handle the large amounts of grains (mostly corn and soybeans) they’re fed, which creates health problems, which causes the animals to need more drugs - and feeding these drugs to animals in large quantities causes the drugs to be less effective in humans.

If you eat animal foods, try to buy organic or from a local family farmer whenever possible. To read more about the reality of feed at animal factories, check out UCS.