Author and former Wall Street banker Sonia Faruqi investigated corporate greed and cruel practices on farms
This article was originally posted on July 10, 2015
For most of her life, Sonia Faruqi didn’t give much thought to what she ate, or where it came from. But after losing her Wall Street investment banking job in the 2008 global financial meltdown, Faruqi moved to Toronto, and embarked on a quest to get to know her dinner. Her 2015 book, Project Animal Farm: An Accidental Journey into the Secret World of Farming and the Truth About Our Food charts her global voyage of discovery. It provides some shocking insights of how animals are treated on small and large farms alike.
A: I was looking for a vacation. I thought: I like travelling, I’ve never been to rural areas much, I’d never visited a farm before, so why not try something new? I was expecting something like a picnic in a way, and it ended up being like getting caught in a thunderstorm. My vision was very naive and pastoral. I didn’t realize how very outdated it was.
A: These videos that you watch online are very brief. In a way that’s good because you don’t really want to watch two hours of that. But the videos are very disjointed, and I didn’t really think too much about it. [Being vegetarian] was working for my health and I liked it. But it wasn’t really as deep a decision as it later became, once I started investigating farms.
A: It happened when I realized that I was learning so many things that most other people didn’t know. I had my foot in the door and I was meeting all these people and going to all these farms that were in many ways disturbing and surprising. I wanted others to know that as well. So it grew very organically for me. But I only found a publisher long after I had done all the research.
A: The egg-laying hens, I would say, in their tiny cages. It’s just such a stark sight. You go in and you’re seeing rows upon rows of cages, stacked up to the ceiling. Even if you’ve seen photos before, it’s very different—an overwhelming sensory experience. You’re hearing the sounds and smelling the smells. And the pigs, too. That was even more emotional. Hens aren’t that expressive, but with the pigs you can seen how unhappy they are; slamming their heads against crates. It was quite jarring. The smells are unimaginable. A regular person might throw up before they even got inside. In Canada, I visited a factory farm with 13,000 chickens, but I’ve seen 50,000 in other places, all under one roof. The smell that builds up from all the manure—it’s ammonia and it gets to the back of your throat. You cough, your eyes start tearing. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life.
A: There’s very much a hierarchy. There’s a term that I use in the book—confinement agriculture. Egg-laying hens in cages, sows in small enclosures, veal calves in crates where they can’t move at all. We wouldn’t allow our cats and dogs to be kept in tiny enclosures hardly bigger than their bodies. But farm animals live in those conditions; thousands of them all packed under one roof.
A: I didn’t have a sense of what might come out of it. I just wanted to follow my curiosity. I got lucky and met one farmer—Brick. If I hadn’t gotten to know him the project would have ended at the beginning. But it grew from there. I changed the names of the people in the book because their privacy is important to me. These are people that I really like, I admire most of them, and I came to view them as friends. It all happened because Brick and I got along so well, but it wasn’t as planned out as people might think.
A: It’s pretty good in Canada, because this topic hasn’t been discussed as much as in the U.S. The factory farms there are much bigger and with the “ag-gag” laws [laws that restrict hidden-camera reporting stings], there’s a much greater level of secrecy. Here it’s not to that extent and it’s not as corporate either. In Canada, I stumbled into a farming community, and I met a lot of people in social settings. It wasn’t like I was approaching people with a cold call or email. I was already a part of things, so it was okay.
A: They don’t do the marketing. Brick, for example, produces eggs. A truck comes in the morning and picks them up and they are packaged and sold. So his connection ends there, he’s completely cut off from the retail, the distribution and promotion.
A: It can be very limiting, especially with the larger companies. There’s less of an ability to do your own thing. And more so in the U.S. than in Canada. With broiler chickens, or turkeys, for instance, they get the chicks when they are a day old, and house them in a facility that has been built to very precise specifications. The temperature is within a set range. It’s not that they can say, “It’s hot in here, let me open a window.” They fill out forms and let the company know how many chicks lived or died, but the company is telling them what to do. They’re not supposed to vary from those instructions.
A: The U.S., I would say, because that’s the model everyone else is following. Malaysia was fascinating because there’s so much fast food, and all the suppliers are working for KFC or McDonald’s. These U.S. factory farm companies like Tyson, are being imitated with turnkey-type projects that use the same breeds, the same feed, the same antibiotics as you would find in the States. It’s often viewed as a form of development. Like, we have more cars and cellphones, and now we need factory farms too.
A: It can be better. I visited other slaughterhouses abroad and they were noticeably better. Like with farms, there are degrees of standards. If there is little oversight, and the inspections are meaningless, then they won’t be good. Death is obviously dark, but it doesn’t have to be violent and cruel.
A: That can be the case, but I’ve also met some farmers who do want to have a connection with these animals that are going to be slaughtered. That the quality of their life matters even if they are going to end up on the dinner plate. I saw it in Belize, where there was respect for the animals, with the farmer giving them names and caring how their lives were.
A: I was looking for books to take to the veal farm with me, because the couple who owned it were about to have a baby. I think you have to tell the truth and that’s very important. The truth doesn’t have to be graphic. But, at least the basic facts do need to be conveyed. We shouldn’t give kids fairy-tale versions of things that are important. I wouldn’t lie to them. I wouldn’t say, “These animals are living awesome lives, let’s eat them.”
A: Nothing. I think many parents don’t talk about it. Maybe they don’t know anything. If I hadn’t done this book, I wouldn’t know much about this either.
A: A lot of people, including myself, viewed the organic label as being better than it is. On things like fertilizers and pesticides it does a good job, but when it comes to animal welfare, it could be a lot better. For instance, the organic standard in the U.S. and Canada is a minimum of 120 outdoor access days a year. But that’s often treated as the maximum. It could be higher than that; it should be higher than that. Even if the animal is indoors, it should never be chained down. Organic definitely has a way to go.
Local is a term that gets a lot of traction; it’s popular. But sometimes it can be appropriated. I saw a factory egg farm in the U.S. that was having trouble, and then rebranded itself as “local” and is now doing really well. All they are saying is that the factory farm is in the neighbourhood, but consumers assume that local also means humane and sustainable, and really it doesn’t. Free range is also ill-defined. How often? In how much space? It’s completely at the discretion of the contractor or the farmer.
A: There’s very little policing, and that’s a huge problem. More inspections and more regulations are needed. It would be relatively simple to fix. There are no technological barriers. We just need basic standards about how farm animals can and should be treated.
A: Government is the natural choice. Because the way things work now, farmers are often paying for their own audits—so they’re the subject and the clients. It’s a conflict. But that being said, slaughterhouses are overseen by the government, and those inspections aren’t being done well, or sometimes at all.
A: I looked at lots of data and studies and surveys about the biological and psychological differences between men and women. On one level, it’s like any other industry—gender diversity is a good thing in and of itself. But if you look at it in more depth, like the difference in attitudes between male and female farmers, you find that women have more compassion and more empathy. It’s a different mindset. There’s less distancing. It’s a noticeable difference.
A: Yes, I do think so. I’ve seen that time, as well. One thing I say in Project Animal Farm is that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Different countries are at very different stages, in transition, or deciding whether to copy U.S. factory farms. But animals are treated well in some places. I’ve seen it in Indonesian villages and on farms in Belize. Those type of small, village farms were the norm in North America and everywhere else until a century ago. So there was a time when animals were treated better, when there was more of a relationship and they were given more respect. Now it’s objectification, watching the numbers and cutting costs. It’s a very different mindset than husbandry.
A: In Canada, according to the government, we’re now eating 255 lb. of meat, eggs and fish a year, per person. And that doesn’t include dairy—milk, ice cream, cheese—which would bring it up closer to 300 lb. a year. It’s a huge number, like six pounds a week. And that takes a toll on the earth and human health as well. Large-scale pastoral farms can produce large volumes, and they do have economies of scale, but they can’t match the extreme volume of factory farms, with tens of thousands of animals in the same location. So we would have to reduce meat consumption as we changed the production practices.
A: We’ll always have an environmental footprint. But with vegetarianism, it’s smaller. The amount of water and land needed for beef cattle is much greater than is needed to grow vegetables. The California governor has told people to eat veggie burgers during the drought. There are ethical issues, but certainly the footprint is less than if you’re eating 300 lb. of meat products each year.
A: No, I don’t think so.
A: That’s a tough question. I have been as honest as possible. There are so many people that I really liked. But whether I liked their factory farm is different. I can’t do anything about that.