Upton Sinclair’s seminal work, The Jungle, exposed the corruption and exploitation prevalent in the meatpacking industry, and transformed Americans’ attitudes toward food safety practically overnight. Today, we face a new issue in American agriculture; that of unsustainable farming, but most people are unaware of it. Hopefully this article will elicit the same sort of revolutionary response as The Jungle did 100 years ago.

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He’s fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he’ll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That’s the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food – TIME (via Boing Boing)