So how do we make sense of this contradiction?

One place to start is the Worldwatch Institute's own assessment of the problem. After highlighting the truly horrific environmental and human health costs of our collective and ongoing meat fest, the organization's press release proceeds to instruct consumers to eat "organic, pasture raised livestock" and to support "pastoral farming systems." This advice sounds sensible -- support the production of animals raised outdoors! -- and it certainly fits nicely with the foodie creed that there's a viable alternative for every food preference. But it's fatally flawed. In fact, it's advice that only perpetuates the problem we're trying to solve.

In all my thinking and writing about meat production, there's no point I believe more strongly than this one: As long as we eat meat factory farms will be the dominant mode of production. In other words, as long as humans deem it culturally acceptable to consume animal flesh -- that is, as long as eating meat is an act that's not considered taboo -- factory farms will continue to proliferate. The reason for this strikes me as intuitive: An unfettered demand for meat, in conjunction with basic human choice, provides political, technological, and scientific incentives to produce meat as efficiently as possible. Unless you have a plan to displace capitalism, density of production will rule, billions of animals will suffer, and our health will continue to decline.

Naturally, there will always be the outliers. There will always be a small percentage of consumers who choose to pay more for meat raised according to standards they deem more acceptable -- pasture-fed, free-range, cage-free, grass-fed, what have you. But to think that these consumers will, by the sheer power of consumer choice, convince the mainstream to switch its allegiance to small-scale, organic, pasture-based farms is naive at best. These consumers will always be the exception that proves the rule of factory farming's dominance. Until meat as meat is stigmatized, factory farms will thrive as assuredly as a dropped object falls downwards.

A more troubling problem with the Worldwatch Institute's suggestion to eat from alternative systems of meat production is that the advice essentially ignores the issue that concerns Pinker and, evidently, humanity as a whole: violence against animals. The fact that an animal is raised according to a set of welfare guidelines does not negate the violence of its untimely and unwarranted death -- a death that, had the animal a direct spokesperson, it would vehemently ask us to stop inflicting. This is a reality that supporters of alternative animal farming routinely refuse to confront. The result is a denial both comical and tragic. I was recently on a radio program about backyard slaughtering in which the host, who kept and killed his own animals, was so deeply concerned with a pig's welfare that he refused to transport it to a slaughterhouse because he felt the ride over could be too stressful for the beloved animal. When asked by a caller how he killed it, the host explained that he drew an X on its forehead and shot it with a 22. Please, I beg, tell me what I'm missing.