The grotesque abuse of factory farming

15 October 2026, The Tablet

Much Christian discussion about vegetarianism asks the question in the abstract: should I eat meat? The resulting conversation is often short-circuited by the answer, “Well, Jesus ate meat”.

In all my long years of devotedly reading – and writing for – The Tablet, I have never been moved to write a personal letter until seeing Virginia Bell’s letter on the suffering of chickens in the poultry industry (3 October). Many things about our civilisation will seem hard to understand when humans of the future look back. One of them will be our utterly casual consumption of the flesh of animals produced in a brutal industrial food system.

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