Underlying the ongoing search for protein sources that look and taste like meat but are in fact made from, say, yellow peas is the assumption that the industrial food system is broken—that eating animals, the title of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2009 book, is deeply destructive to the planet’s water supply, its air, and its land, which could be put to better and gentler use. And it’s destructive to our ethics and personal code of honor: We hurt ourselves when we eat animals killed for our satisfaction.

Is it time to reexamine my own conscience?

I eat meat. However relatively evolved meatless meat may be—and I recently spent a few months researching and sampling the latest iterations—nothing matches the primeval pleasure of gnawing at ribs. Besides, I’m a restaurant critic in two cities, Boston and Atlanta, and eating meat is a professional obligation. Is it time to reexamine my own conscience, as Foer’s book, so airlessly sure of itself, failed to make me do? Several new books made me think so, particularly books that detail the toll that factory farming—of pigs, particularly—takes on the environment and on animals, and on workers and health.

When Barry Estabrook announced the subject of his latest book to his partner, she sighed and asked, “Does this mean I’ll have to give up eating bacon?” His answer was no. Early in Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat, Estabrook’s spare, engagingly narrated book, he introduces a preternaturally intuitive pig so empathetic it could be a low-cost therapist. (Last year I accompanied New Yorker contributor Patricia Marx to tea at The Four Seasons in Boston with a pig she claimed was an emotional support animal, to see how much she could get away with. The answer was a lot. People love pigs, dead and alive.) Few would rush it to the barbecue.

ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLY WALES

Estabrook covers worker injury and water and air pollution. But his heart is with the animals. Pig Tales is animated by Estabrook’s affection for pigs, and the book makes you eager to find the farmer who can give such a noble animal a better—an outright happy—life. Estabrook is naturally optimistic, finding heartening evidence in the insistence on animal welfare behind the purchasing decisions of Steve Ells, founder and co-CEO of Chipotle, and in consumer demand for more ethically raised animals. He sees a pastoral solution in small-scale artisans—a solution that will let his partner, and the reader, continue to eat bacon.

But can we? Ted Genoways’s investigative report​ing is angry, and he wants you to be angry, too. The inescapable theme of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food is the appalling stories of workers in a Hormel pig-slaughtering plant in Austin, Minnesota, who are permanently incapacitated, maimed, harassed, and hoodwinked. As Genoways (who writes in this issue of the New Republic about Chinese espionage on American corn seed research) sees it, everyone in the chain is trapped. The meat-factory town sees immigrants take once-protected jobs for lower wages. Unions see companies reconfigure themselves in corporate sleights of hand that enable faceless owners to run half a plant as a non-union shop, denying benefits and insurance to workers all but certain to get injured. Workers dread the day HR will discover they have been working under false papers and deny them workmen’s comp for on-the-job injuries—injuries the book describes in wrenching detail. Farmers are trapped by the increasingly stringent requirements of Hormel for the size and fat distribution of the pigs they buy, unable to pay off the grow-or-die loans.