It’s ethicswashing or humanewashing.

To be clear, extensive animal farming isn’t humane. People just DECLARE that it is. As someone from a “less developed”, I’ve seen up close the remnants of traditional extensive animal farming and it’s as brutal as the industrial version, often worse by “welfare” standards.

It’s all marketing, bucolic pastoralist aesthetics feeding nostalgia and protofascism.

And this “factory farming bad” shtick is even more perverse. Like the Carnivore movement, they hide the simple fact that it’s this conspicuous consumption is a status symbol. It doesn’t stop at “welfare”, it’s a race, they keep going… regenerative, grass fed, unvaxxed, hormone free, raw milk, hand milked etc. It will never stop.

More perverse still is that making this most resource intensive meat and milk into the most sought after food product is going to increase food insecurity, it’s going to cause famine and conflict. The more resources are used to please the rich consumers’ idea of a “pure and superior diet” and their fantasies of being God’s chosen rulers of the food chains, the less food there is to go around. Which is how I see conflicts like the invasion of the Amazon forest or the war in Sudan where the rich meat eaters of United Arab Emirates are demanding grass fed meat and empowering the RSF (pastoralist) militias to “cleanse” the black agriculturalist population from the land.

Thanks for sharing, worth the read! As a non-native speaker the title was a bit confusing to me. This is what the author argues for:

Everyone, it seems, can rally together and agree that we must stop “factory farming.” But this rallying cry has created an unforeseen consequence, one that animal exploiters are taking full advantage of. Producers who sell the flesh and fluids of animals can simply state that their product is not factory farmed; it’s organic . . . local . . . humane . . . cage-free . . . (insert any number of misleading labels here). Likewise, when consumers hear these offensive two words, they are now thinking, “Oh, but my meat (or dairy or eggs) isn’t factory farmed, I buy it at Whole Foods” (or “it’s organic,” or “it’s free-range,” etc.).