A Quick Primer on Factory Farming and the Human Microbiome

***DISCLAIMER: Everything here is true, but some of it is strongly worded. I wrote this years ago when I was a vegetarian, and I don't feel like editing it. For those interested, now I buy organic meat to prepare at home, but I do eat non-organic meat when I eat at restaurants. Factory farming is still a big microbiological issue here in the States, though, so I try to be extra mindful of my meat consumption habits. L

Concentrated animal feeding operations, also known as factory farming, are a method of raising and keeping animals for slaughter. Most of the meat in the United States comes from factory farms. The model is profit-based, so generally the amount of animals per unit of land is maximized as much as possible. While this has provided affordable meat to American consumers for years, these types of farming practices do not come without cost.

There are a few issues here; many of them are purely organismic. Animals need things like clean food, fresh water, a place to relieve themselves, space to move, and sunlight. The more a meat company is concerned with profit, the larger a factory farming operation becomes. The larger an operation gets, the harder it is to provide all of those essential things. When those things are not provided to an animal-- that is to say, when conditions are not biologically sound or sustainable-- things start to stink. Really. The smell comes from the buildup of excrement of thousands of animals, kept in close quarters. It also likely comes from bacteria, multiplying exponentially in the wounds and bodies of these animals. It is no secret that antibiotics are fed to these animals "non-therapeutically"-- that is, regardless of whether or not the animal is sick. Sadly, the conditions in which these animals live make it necessary to do so. The use of antibiotics in livestock feed is a double-edged sword: it keeps the animals from getting too sick while being raised, but in the long run it contributes overwhelmingly to antibiotic resistance across metacosms.

To eat meat-- or anything, really-- is to assimilate that food into your body by breaking it down and using its component parts for fuel. We do not only assimilate nutrients, however; we assimilate the bacteria of our food and their genes into our systems. This is due to a unique property of bacteria called conjugation, which is a form of horizontal gene transfer. Because the bacteria doesn't have to reproduce to share genes, a gene becomes a piece of information that can be shared with friends. This is not so great when the gene in question enables survival in the face of antibiotics; it is even worse when the "friends" are the bacteria in your stomach.

It's strange to think about, but completely viable: the bacteria in your body can be resistant to an antibiotic you've never been on. The microbiotic pitfall inherent to factory farming is that it is an optimal breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Besides altering the very genome of your microbiome, consuming meat from factory farms can also likely introduce new, unwanted species into your system.

And what can you, as a microbiota-containing human, do?

If you want to learn more about factory farming, I suggest reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

If you're more interested in the microbiome aspect of this whole debacle, you should check out the book Good Germs, Bad Germs by Jessica Snyder Sachs.

You can reduce your meat consumption, buy organic meat (which may or may not help), or if you're really in a bind you could always go for one of these.