Swine flu had one up side. It made a lot of people aware of the cruel and unsanitary conditions of factory farms for pigs.

Factory farms for chickens are not any better. Eating eggs from free-range chickens is one thing. But most of the eggs in the supermarket come from battery cages like the ones below. It’s cruel and it’s unnecessary. The mythology of growth spawned by mega corporations and governments is a mythology of numbers, in which high numbers means growth. Here’s the ground zero of these production numbers. You can see it replicated at every level. We’ve destroyed a voluntary, organic ecology – the free-market – and substituted for it a mechanical monstrosity hinged together by statutory laws with no connection to real demand or supply, but driven by subsidies, speculation, and bureaucratic aggrandizement.