I'll go against BlueJ's advice about the meetyourmeat video...
I do suggest watching it. It's pretty sickening. I'm not going to change my diet because of the video and I still think most of the petards are certifiable whackos, but I must admit I found it more disturbing than most snuff videos. Like bluej said, there is a price to be paid for our lifestyle, however I'm a "full disclosure" kind of person so I figure people ought to see the vid even if it does make them sick. The video was produced with some psychological tricks... Try to pick them out
They mess with the soundtrack and brightness to try to enhance your agitation while watching it. It really is a quality piece of propaganda.
The pesticides and other health issues that come with eating mass produced food have gotten me leaning a bit towards "organic" stuff, and even though a lot of the abuse in the video is already illegal, it's one more justification to pay a bit more for high quality meat instead of going for the bargain bin. Consumer Reports just did a lengthy article (admittedly biased as is usual with CR, but still very good info you won't find anywhere else) on the fact that when you have critters in the food chain eating fodder made from critters on the same level in that food chain, toxins tend to become concentrated. It doesn't help that some of those toxins are added into the cycle in "harmless" and completely legal amounts, but then the unusable parts of those critters are reused as protein supplements to the next generation, which increases the concentration of the toxins in ways that are mostly untraceable. I think the worst part are the antibiotics.
Just like the human abuses that went on during the early decades of the industrial revolution, we'll see an eventual turnaround in how our food is produced. Sooner or later we'll realize that we can in fact afford to do things better, and we will. It probably won't be out of any real bleeding heart consideration for the welfare of the animals, rather that the evidence shows that we're going to cause ourselves some rather serious national heath problems if we don't tighten up our standards on livestock production. Unions forced companies to tighten workplace safety standards and although the price of goods went up as a result, we could afford to make the change in the interest of public welfare. Meat production and distribution is going to have to make the same kind of transformation, trading cost for public safety. The fact that sick animals won't be abused as much and then still end up on the supermarket shelves will simply be a side effect.
The best part about the video - all those petards and vegans have probably seen it and they probably still get nightmares
