The acronym CAFO stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, the euphemism favoured by the meat industry for what is known to the rest of us as factory farming. The business model is well defined by one of the interviewees in Jonathan Safran Foer’s wrathful and righteous vegetarian polemic: ‘How quickly can they (the animals) be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying.’ 

There are only two possible responses that a reasonably intelligent and enlightened person can have to factory farming. One is indifference – I eat meat and I do not care how it is produced or what the animals that provide my meat endure. The other is revulsion.