It was especially enraging to hear about Monsanto's patenting of organisms, which is repulsive enough, and to know their suing small farmers for patent infringement when their GMO seeds escape into a neighboring non-GMO field. Part of this situation is created by the way food giants operate in secrecy and also peoples complacent trust in government officials to oversee the food supply. Of course, the second one is a lie as the corporations are the ones in control.
I particularly liked what Salatin said about us being "a society of technicians." People have such a love affair with technology they end up blinded to the enormous downsides of technology. Sure, mega factory farms can "feed" billions of people, but it also destroys the environment and human health with vast amounts of toxic chemical and manure pollution. In the end, people will have to eat the huge pools of dirty manure produced by thousands of cattle shoved into confined spaces. Hows that supposed to work out? Oh, then I guess Big Pharma can come up with more drugs to treat the symptoms of eating factory food. Though I would think the antibiotic resistance of recent decades would also show people that technology is not always the savior and is sometimes the killer. Afterall, along with dirty conditions of these farms they have to use huge amounts of antibiotics to keep the cattle and chickens alive.
And theres another reason I'm revolted by the industrial food system: they treat life like a commodity. Throwing baby chicks onto a scale to be weighed as if their nothing more than a piece of meat. And too often the farmers themselves also view animals and crops this way leading to a factory-like management of farming that denies any ecological founding. Agribusiness tries to call industrial farming "scientific" though in reality a more correct term would be corporate profit-mongering that seeks to prove the hypothesis before the methods are even fully known. GMOs, pesticides, concentrated feedlots are all examples of a system existing for profit.