ABSTRACT
The bleak lives imposed on industrially farmed animals are justified by the assertion that this gives us cheap food. And indeed, industrially produced meat and milk are cheap at the supermarket checkout. But the low price of these products is achieved only by an economic sleight of hand. We have devised a distorting economics which takes account of some costs such as housing and feeding animals but ignores others including the detrimental impact of industrial agriculture on human health, natural resources and wildlife. This chapter quantifies many of the costs arising from these detrimental impacts and examines how they can be internalised in the price of food. If this were done, nutritious, humane, sustainable food may well be cheaper than unhealthy, inhumane food that damages the environment and the animals who produce it.
