Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle, talks about why they switched to 100% humanely raised pork:
People are raising pork in a way that is really not sustainable. It's not pleasant for the animals – and not pleasant is a real understatement. It's really brutal. It's like torturing the animals. The stench is terrible. They're crowded in there and going crazy and biting each other's tails and biting the metal bars. They're in their own waste, which is liquefied and put in these holding lagoons outside of these warehouses. And that poses all of these contamination problems – the stench in the air is just terrible and it's not anything anyone would really want to live around.
And then there's this problem of all the antibiotics that have to be used when animals live in that kind of close confinement-to keep them healthy and promote growth. And that has a slew of health ramification for humans in that we're creating super-bugs that are resistant to antibiotics. And on top of all that, the pork doesn't taste very good.
Mark Bittman recently addressed sustainable farming:
"If the cost of food reflected the cost of production," says [farmer Brenna Chase], "that would change everything." And this is undoubtedly true. But though sustainably produced food is too expensive for some, conventional food doesn’t reflect either the subsidies required to grow it or the huge environmental or health care costs it incurs. Once it does, sustainable food would appear far more competitive.
The Dish 