Animal Factory

Swine flu, bird flu, unusual concentrations of cancer, food recalls due to deadly E. coli bacterial contamination: our American food system has gone terribly wrong. Recent public-health crises are raising urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is produced and brought to market. In Animal Factory, bestselling author and investigative journalist David Kirby follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. In his thoroughly researched book, Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms and tracks their far-reaching fallout that contaminates our air, land, water, and food.
"A new book explores the hidden costs behind that one dollar burger…As David Kirby illustrates in his new book, Animal Factory, this way of raising livestock has been linked to antibiotic resistant bacteria and food-borne illness. The author explains what's gone wrong and how it all might be fixed."
"Nature did not intend for animals to live and die in a factory assembly line. In David Kirby's startling investigation Animal Factory, he gives a human face to the terrible cost our health and environment pays for this so-called 'cheap food.' This is a story that is seldom told and rarely with such force and eloquence."
"Kirby combines the narrative urgency of Sinclair's novel with the investigative reporting of Schlosser's book-Animal Factory is nonfiction, but reads like a thriller. There's no political pleading or ideological agitprop in this book; it's remarkably fair-minded, both sober and sobering. Like Sinclair's and Schlosser's work, it has the potential to change the collective American mind about contemporary food issues."
"The time has come to end the greedy and destructive practices of animal factories. As the readers of Kirby's book will learn, nature's clock is ticking and much is at stake for the planet and all of its inhabitants. Each page of this book is filled with powerful information. It has all the makings of a number one bestseller."
"David Kirby exposes confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) focusing on the neighbors of these mass producers. They tell of having the smell of fermenting livestock waste drift into their windows and ruin their lives. They describe watching the vast pools of feces and urine drain into waterways, polluting drinking water and the environment. Fish in nearby rivers and estuaries downstream become sickened by opportunistic bacteria, and antibiotic-resistant E. coli contaminate edible crops. William Hughes' narration captures the growing anger of the corporate giants' human victims by giving them personalities and voices. His subtle characterizations keep him in the background, while allowing the grim facts to instigate an appropriate outrage in listeners. Without being unpleasant, writer and narrator personify the formidable reality threatening us all."
"Animal Factory tells how big agribusiness' industrial meat production is leaving our communities foul with unhealthy air, awash in untreated sewage, and increasingly buffeted by bacteria made resistant to the antibiotics. Anyone in search of why America's health care system is going bankrupt will find part of the answer in these pages."
"Ol' MacDonald had a farm-until America's corporate animal factories plowed it under, packing living, breathing, sensate creatures into sewage plant conditions for your gustatory pleasure. Now, you're next. Bon appetit."
"Animal Factory, by David Kirby, documents the scandal of today's industrial food animal production system in the same compelling way Upton Sinclair alerted Americans to the abuses of the meat packing industry in his 1906 The Jungle. The well-being of animals produced for human consumption, the fate of rural communities, the health of farm workers, and the protection of the environment are daily c