In the decades following World War II, we entered into a time called the Cold War. As a small child during this time, I felt a sense of dread that the world I lived in could be destroyed, and I was powerless to eliminate that threat. Yet, at the very same time, a much more insidious threat was taking hold, and it developed right here on American soil. The practices of industrialism were being applied wholesale to the production of food. Traditional farming, which relied on stewardship of the land, rotation of crops, and raising of animals in pastures, was being unceremoniously eliminated. Driven by technology, commercialism, and greed, agriculture turned into agribusiness. Massive industrial food production factories were built. We were told that this would make our food cheaper and more readily available to a growing human population, but few people considered, or cared about, the built-in downsides. And, as it turns out, the downsides are significant. Farms that had been in existence for generations were shut down; what used to be the calling of thousands of families throughout America was consolidated into the hands of a few large corporations. The intimate relationship between the farmer, the land, and the food was destroyed. The raising of farmed animals has changed more rapidly and radically in the years following WWII, than it had in the previous seven thousand years, both in the ways animals are selectively bred and in the ways they are housed and treated. Most of them are forced to live in a state of intensive confinement, in facilities labeled by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as “concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).”