Customer Reviews

The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories

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The CAFO Reader is now in stock at Amazon.com. If you're a serious animal advocate, this is a book you'll want to own.

CAFO stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation; it's the industry's term for a factory farm. This book brings together key writings by just about every prominent critic of factory farming, including both conscientious omnivores and animal rights advocates. In its pages, you'll find the writing of Michael Pollan, Matthew Scully, Eric Schlosser, Wendell Berry, Anna Lappé, Bernard E. Rollin, Tom Philpott, Joel Salatin, and many others. I was flattered that I was invited to update and revise an excerpt from my own Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, and Money for inclusion in this book.

Not only are most of the top critics of factory farming gathered together, I found that the excerpts chosen consistently represent their most important work. In short, no other book provides such a thorough introduction to factory farming--and how you can play a role in toppling this system.

I've read a fair number of books, essays and blog posts about industrial farming. About meat eating. About the virtues of one diet over another. I've seen the topic politicized and 'soapboxed' every which way. Finally, in the CAFO Reader I've found a book that takes a reasoned, articulate and compelling view.

I'll send this book to my liberal and conservative family members, to my carnivorous and vegan friends. Where it excels is in avoiding the hyperbole and old saws, replacing them with the staggering power of factual analysis of an incredibly problematic (I'm being nice) industry.

If you eat food, and give a damn about yourself and your future, this is essential reading.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in where food comes from and why we must change our ways. It's not WHAT'S for dinner but WHO'S for dinner and we must come to terms with the choices we make. We can all do more to make this a kinder and more compassionate world for all beings. This book would be great for discussion classes and reading groups.

Let's face it, if we are going to preserve working family farms, so important to our sense of community, we have to level the playing field. The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories is a new book I'm reviewing after receiving a complimentary review copy.

First let me say that this book is amazing! I suggest you go out and read it right now if you are concerned about land use, water pollution, safe food production, preserving working family farms, buying local, communities and the humane treatment of animals.

I've just started reading the book and have lots of good things to say about it. For now I'll post the press release for the book below.

For more information visit [...].

Press Release
The CAFO Reader is a collection of essays by over 30 of today's leading thinkers on one of the most important environmental and ethical issues of our time: the rise of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, where increasing amounts of the world's meat, dairy, eggs, fish, and seafood are produced.

Contributors include Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Fred Kirschenmann, Anna Lappé, Matthew Scully, Eric Schlosser, Andrew Kimbrell, and Wenonah Hauter. These essays analyze and vividly depict the devastating impacts and current conditions in and around factory farms.

The collection also provides a compelling vision of "putting the CAFO out to pasture," in which food systems become more healthy, humane, and sustainable. The CAFO Reader will quickly become an invaluable educational resource in the battle to reform the tragic state of industrial livestock production.

It will also inform and influence the growing public movement of activists, farmers, policy makers, and consumers who are aiming to make our food healthier for ourselves and the planet.

The essays in this volume have been selected from the larger photographic volume CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations): The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories.

Daniel Imhoff is the editor of The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories and the photo-format companion volume, CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation): The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. He is a writer and independent publisher whose many books include Food Fight, Farming with the Wild, Paper or Plastic, Building with Vision, and Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature. He lives in Northern California.

Published by Watershed Media
480 pages, paperback, $21.95

I'm an academic, and I picked this up based on some now-forgotten recommendation to consider for a class on food issues that I'll be teaching during Spring 2012. I was especially attracted by a number of prominent names listed in the table of contents: Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Anna Lappé. These are great writers on our contemporary food system, and it would be great to able to assign one anthology to my class with selections from all of them. Also, I've been vegetarian for nearly 13 years, so I was quite sympathetic to the overall aims of the book. However, there are enough problems with this book that I will not be using it for my class, though I may assign some particular chapters; and in any case I would hesitate before recommending it to anyone.

First, let me note that this book does a few things well: It includes both vegetarians and locavores in its discussion, instead of focusing on just one and alienating (or demonizing) the other. It includes several chapters on fish and the status of workers in our industrialized food system; too often we focus on the suffering of non-human mammals. Other chapters consider CAFOs from more scientific or technical points of view: the economics of food; biodiversity and natural selection. Again, these are issues that are often overlooked. And the pieces by the prominent names are well-done, though they're mostly reprinted.

On the other hand, roughly half of the chapters in this book are simply horrible, with overwrought emotional writing, little to no evidence, and tissue-thin arguments. If I gave this to a class of bright college students, they'd tear it to shreds -- and no doubt lose respect for me for assigning it. Several times, I nearly put the book down for good after grudgingly finishing an especially bad chapter. In the case of the piece by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I almost threw the book across the room in disgust. Eventually I learned to just skip over those chapters that promised, in their first few pages, to be more polemic than analysis. This large part of the book is the sort of thing that encourage the stereotype of vegetarians and environmentalists as irrational, science-hating fanatics. If we want to convince people of the justice of our cause, we need to do so by offering them intellectually powerful reasons and incontrovertible evidence for our beliefs, not by tossing around `corporate' as though it were a four-letter word.

To be sure, some of the chapters are quite good; let me stress that only about half of this book has the problem I identified in the last paragraph. But how do you rate a book that's one-half horrible, one-third decent, and one-sixth great? I rate it three stars.

I became an advocate for animals when I clicked on the humane society's undercover work on an industrial pig farm. Although I "knew" factory farming was bad I was both afraid of seeing the images and unaware of how terrible it really is. My eyes have now been opened and I will never turn back from adding my voice and donations to stop this terrible evil of our times. I have read many books on factory farming and other animal issues. This is the best book I have read to date on this subject. It is a compilation of essays by a whole range of concerned people in many fields. It is incredibly interesting and hard to put down, does not over-do the emotionalism which is inherent in such a subject, while laying out all the facts in a very well researched and complete way. Just read this book - it will give you the whole picture.

In addition to the cruelty aspect this book lays out the incredible environmental cost of industrial agriculture, and gives extremely viable alternatives. We have all been fed a huge lie just to keep increasing the profits of big agra business at the expense of the planet. This is a completely unsustainable model kept going by corporate greed and government turning a blind eye to the excesses and downright criminality of their corporate buddies. The bio-diversity and climate of our planet is being affected. I feel much more educated on the subject now that I know the facts and figures of where factory farming is taking us.

I thank everyone who contributed to this wonderful book.