If you want to understand how intensive animal agriculture harms animals, there’s a large literature to peruse. For the many ways in which intensive animal agriculture pollutes and degrades the environment, you can look at Lisa Kemmerer’s Eating Earth (OUP, 2015). And if you’re curious about how it uses and abuses workers, you can read Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds (Yale, 2011). But until now, there hasn’t been a volume dedicated to detailing the public health crisis for which intensive animal agriculture is responsible. Ellen Silbergeld’s Chickenizing Farms & Food fills this important gap.

Here, in short, is the problem. The vast majority of the meat that’s currently available derives from animals that have been fed antibiotics at subtherapeutic levels–i.e., not at levels sufficient to treat disease. Ostensibly, this is because it improves feed conversion rates and reduces mortality. However, this creates the ideal environment for bacteria to evolve various forms of resistance against these drugs, and that’s exactly what’s been happening. The grow-out facilities where these animals are raised are porous: antibiotic resistant bacteria have many opportunities to get out into the air, local waterways, and the land. This is due to, among other things, the powerful ventilation systems that keep animals alive, poorly managed waste, and open-air trucks that transport animals to slaughter. Moreover, these bacteria are distributed throughout the country thanks to our food system. The fallout is disastrous. We are at risk of ending the age of antibiotics, which are the bedrock of so much of modern medicine. Without them, minor cuts and undercooked food can become life threatening affairs, and hospitals can become more dangerous than the diseases that send you there.

You’d think that state and federal officials would be trying to combat this potential catastrophe. To the contrary, they’ve opted to weaken regulatory oversight, ceding this responsibility to industry. One particularly vivid instance of this is the Hazard Assessment and Critical Control Point program (HACCP). HACCP is supposed to ensure both food and worker safety, and the thought is that you can identify certain points in meat processing, perform checks at those junctures, and thereby prevent worker illness and the dissemination of contaminated food. However, the program seems to be useless by design. When animals are slaughtered, the last check for bacteria occurs before most processing occurs. That processing provides ample opportunity for bacteria to spread even to previously uncontaminated carcasses, to infect workers, and to be packaged and sent to consumers. This is as unfortunate as it is predictable: the potential consequences for public health are dire, but thanks to scant regulation, the industry has no incentive to police itself more aggressively.

As Silbergeld argues, the rise of the antibiotic resistant bacteria is particularly discouraging because it doesn’t have to be this way, even from the industry’s perspective. The industry knows that subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics are minimally effective at promoting growth and reducing mortality, and there are safe alternatives that appear to be even more effective. In the 1920s and 30’s, Lucy Wills did research on the nutritional value of yeast extract, which promotes growth, and Perdue–a major chicken producer–did a study that found that cleaning out chicken sheds after each flock was far better at reducing mortality. It looks like some combination of inertia and dogma explains the current reliance on products that are known to be hazardous.

Silbergeld’s book doesn’t merely provide a powerful overview of the challenges we face, but also proposes some striking solutions. Chief among them is changing our view of agriculture, abandoning the bucolic images of small family farms dotted across rural landscapes. Instead, Silbergeld argues that agriculture is technology, and that we won’t regulate it well until we accept that industrialized agriculture is here to stay (and, in her view, is necessary for providing food security in both the developed and developing worlds). So, for example, she argues that we ought to reject the view that agriculture is exceptional, as it is in so much US regulation, instead treating it like any other industry: making agribusinesses subject to antitrust laws, making them responsible for their waste streams, making them obey standard labor laws, and–crucially–making them fully liability for producing and distributing dangerous goods.

It is, however, striking that she doesn’t argue for one solution that might seem obvious: namely, not supporting intensive animal agriculture. Her rejection of this option stems from a certain strain of pragmatism. She doubts that we’ll ever move the population away from animal products, and she claims repeatedly that we face a moral imperative to provide reasonably priced and accessible foodstuffs to all. In such circumstances, she decries small-scale animal agriculture as a faux solution for the economically elite, and she insists that it’s a poor solution from the perspective of self-interest: antibiotic resistant bacteria don’t only affect those who eat the products of intensive animal agriculture; they affect everyone, everywhere. So, as long as intensive animal agriculture exists–and she thinks it’s here to stay–we have reason to work to reform it, not opt out of it.

Of course, these two moves aren’t mutually exclusive. You can work to reform an industry that makes products from which you abstain. Given the frightening pathogens that contaminate so much meat, that may well be the best advice to follow. But however we sort out such issues,Chickenizing Farms & Food is essential reading for anyone concerned about food safety, about worker safety, and the industry that has far too little concern for either.

© 2016 Bob Fischer

Bob Fischer is an assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University. He is co-editor of two volumes–The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Modal Epistemology After Rationalism (Springer, 2016)–the sole editor of College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues That Affect You (Oxford University Press, 2016), and the author of Modal Justification via Theories (Springer, 2017).