These days, you have to think twice about eating pork, and indeed most types of meat, from large-scale, factory farming. 'Swine flu' is a new strain of influenza that contains genes closely related to the real hog flu, which affects pigs and, usually, not humans. However, so named, the outbreak made us think about pigs and their plight. Living in a city, it is all too easy to forget that the pork we buy at the supermarket or wet market came from an animal that once lived. Few of us know how that animal was bred and raised. Pig breeding has become a highly controlled process for large agri-businesses around the world. Every stage of the hog's life, from artificial insemination to breeding certain genetic characteristics, is controlled. The business demands that sows have many litters - maybe three or four a year - and that piglets put on weight quickly. The breeds of pigs that get to multiply for food production are ones that have these characteristics. Not unlike athletes taking growth hormones to bulk out, pigs are given a 'bionic' diet to grow abnormally fast. Under these conditions, a pig takes about six months to balloon out and be ready for slaughter. Left to nature, a pig would take a year to mature. So, breeds that do not supply a quick financial return are quickly out of favour. The 'advantage' of this kind of farming is price. By standardising and speeding up the process, the price of pork can be reduced. But this has another consequence. Small family farms with a limited number of animals simply cannot compete. Globalisation in trade means meat can be exported cheaply with the effect of destroying local farming communities. Beyond negative social consequences, there are questions about the wisdom of factory farming. Breeding to produce genetic uniformity not only reduces biodiversity but also creates a greater risk of disease spread. Where a particular breed is susceptible to a disease, many animals will be infected. Keeping them in large numbers within a crowded compound exacerbates the risks of the disease spreading very quickly. There are also enormous environmental challenges. Dealing with manure is one, and culling diseased animals and then disposing of them is another. Let's not forget what we had to do to stop the spread of bird flu - cull millions of birds. Bird flu gave us an insight into how chickens are bred today. Commercial chicken farms are heartbreaking in the way they cram the birds into small spaces with controlled feeding. Happy are the chickens that are not genetically modified and can forage outdoors. But, the 'ideal' chicken is a monster that matures abnormally quickly. According to a US study, if a human baby grew as quickly as a typical five-week factory fryer, he would weigh 349 pounds by the age of two. Do we really want to eat such a chicken? The free-range bird seems to be a much superior bet. Cattle don't do any better. The mad cow disease epidemic in Britain, in the late 1980s, was truly scary. The cause was believed to have been feeding the remains of diseased animals and bone meal to herbivorous cattle. There is a problem even with vegetables in the world of industrialised agriculture. According to the Centre for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, in the US, more than 95 per cent of vegetables that had been grown in the world have disappeared since the arrival of highly commercialised farming practices. This is a huge loss of biodiversity. As with animals, 'factory' vegetables are bred to grow quickly and have long shelf lives. Genetic modification makes them look big and nice. Why should we care? There is no need to keep animals in appalling conditions when the world can be fed better on less meat. If people ate more of the grain and vegetables used to raise livestock, the ecological costs would be lower. There would be fewer food scares. Local growers could earn a living again with community-based farms, and we could connect once more to what we eat. Christine Loh Kung-wai is chief executive of the think-tank Civic Exchange
