• Cheap food is produced on farms that use humans as merely resources and animals as units of production.
• Industrial agriculture is one of the most exploitative industries and slaughterhouses are among the most hazardous
• modern farming breeds animals that are sick and carriers of disease, hence the need for 25 million lbs of antibiotics per year- 70% of the antibiotics produced.
• For half a century scientists have been concerned with the excessive use of antibiotics; now 'superbugs' are evolving - antibiotic resistant bacteria.
• Hormones are used to promote growth or productivity of the animal. Hormone usage causes heath problems in the consumer, the most prominent being early puberty in girls.
• Dairy cows, who live an average of 30 years, survive 4 or 5 years on a factory farm. They are milked until they collapse then they are dragged to the slaughter house. These cows also require greater dosages of antibiotics and have the highest risk of contractiong mad cow disease.
• Every year the young are taken away form the dairy cows and fed a formula mixed with blood and water. The young are chained so that they cannot move and often cannot even lie down comfortably and then they are sold as veal.
• Egg laying hens are crowded into cages, their beaks and toes are cut off so that they do not mutilate each other out of stress and frustration. They are starved so that when food is reintroduced their systems are shocked into laying eggs; this is called forced molting. They dont live for very long, and the ones wo make it to slaughter are sold for soup.
• The chickens raised today are a crossbreed selected to grow in 6-8 weeks as opposed to 6 months or so. some are genetically selected to have grossly enlarged breast meat to meet the demand for white meat. They are then fed a diet that causes them to increase weight by 50% daily; this causes them to suffer from heart attacks, since their hearts cannot pump enough blood to their abnormally growing bodies, and skeletal damage, from too much body weight for their bones.
• Broiler chickens (for meat) are packed into barns where they don't get sunlight or fresh air; cows are packed into feedlots where they have no access to movement. In these stressful, crowded and highly unsanitary conditions misery and disease are rampant.
• sick and tumorous animals are allowed to be sold as food. Tumors are cut out and meat is irradiated at meat packing plants to kill the numerous pathogens.

These and many other reasons are why Muslims should stop patronizing the industry of 'cheap food' (a global industry that is owned and run by 4 or 5 multi-national corporations).

we should instead look to the local farmers for wholesome food. And just as we need them for our sustenance, they need our support; without local support, sustainable farming cannot compete with factory farming; we have already lost nearly 5 million small farms since the 1930's.

Sustainable farming includes but is more than organic; where organic specifies what not to do, such as not using chemial imputs, sustainability address the broader ecological, social and ethical issues. Sustainable farming aims at cultivationg the earth and the animals as God most High commands, so that the ecology and economy thrive.