Chipotle’s History of Factory Farming

An extraordinarily effective video. Don Draper would be proud.

Chipotle’s video perfectly demonstrates that food politics alliances are both vital and disagreeable. As vegans, we should be delighted anytime anyone slams factory farming for any reason. And here we’ve got Chipotle creating an expensive, engaging ad that captures the disturbing essence of factory farming. The trouble is that the video then suggests that the meats you can order at Chipotle’s resolve everything that’s indefensible about factory farming.

So, as vegans, we get a big win by having Chipotle invest its money and talents into bashing factory farming. But we also get a miseducated consumer as part of the deal.

It’s a deal I’ll happily take. Our first priority needs to be to end factory farming, because an end to factory farming would doubtless shrink animal agribusiness by 70 percent. Yeah, at some point, once the menace of factory farming has receded, we’ll have to refocus our energies to deal with misinformation surrounding non-factory farmed meat. But that’s a problem we should be desperate to have. We’ll be much closer to a vegan world at that point, and that will be thanks in large part to efforts by allies like Chipotle. (Via Bittman and US Food Policy.) Link.

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