Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Robert S. Lawrence, MD, Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205, 410-614-4590, rlawrenc@jhsph.edu

Over the past 60 years, the entire process of meat production for human consumption in the United States has been transformed into an efficient, industrialized system from producing feed grains and raising animals to processing and selling the final product. While this has provided plentiful, cheap animal protein, the human rights costs are unacceptable. Currently, almost all food animals are grown in huge, concentrated, vertically integrated production facilities not noted for their labor standards or environmental practices. The use of this system is increasing worldwide. Many of the actual costs of this system are borne by workers in the form of low wages, high occupational injury rates, and poor health care; by immigrant laborers with few economic alternatives; by contract growers who share few of the profits but much of the risk; by rural communities that lose small farms and families, and by future generations who will inherit polluted soil and waterways as well as depleted aquifers. These and other externalities are not included in the price we pay for meat and dairy products. The costs to the environment are exacerbated by the inefficient conversion of grain protein into animal protein. Current meat consumption in the US is in excess of nutritional needs. What we choose to eat is a moral act - inherent in our choices are the workers and communities who produce the food, the land that sustains its production and the consequences of that production.

Learning Objectives: