The Year in Meat

31109steak1.jpgErik Marcus, author of The Ultimate Vegan Guide and Meat Market: Animals, Ethics & Money, and writer of the daily Vegan.com blog, has written a captivating article, which highlights 2009’s most significant events affecting the meat, egg and dairy industries, as well as the vegan and animal advocacy movements.

Marcus chronicles 2009 as the meat industry’s “most horrific year on record,” with factory farms and feedlots “hemorrhaging cash,” quitting the business or unsuccessfully attempting to sell their facilities. He also humorously describes the industry’s bumbling efforts to redeem itself in the eyes of consumers.

“The Year in Meat” details the “unprecedented barrage of scornful media coverage” suffered by animal agribusiness in 2009, including the high-profile release of Mercy For Animals’ investigations into the world’s largest hatchery for egg-laying breed hens and a Pennsylvania pig breeding facility. Time magazine also published a detailed attack on factory farming and vegan book publishing reached an all-time high, with three different vegan-friendly books simultaneously ranked in Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, Tal Ronnen’s The Conscious Cook and Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Diet.

Marcus highlights progress made on the farmed animal protection and vegan fronts, such as bans on veal and gestation crates in Maine, bans on crates and battery cages in Michigan, a ban on tail docking of cows in California and recent anti-cruelty measures taken by the European Union. 2009 also brought the successful “Meat-Free Mondays” initiative promoted by Paul McCartney and other big-name celebrities, as well as vegan-friendly corporate policy changes, such as BOCA’s switch to a completely egg-free product line.

Click here to read about these and other momentous events in 2009.