(CNN) -- Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science, that something terribly wrong is happening. We know that it cannot possibly be healthy to raise such grotesque animals in such grossly unnatural conditions. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory -- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat, we live on tortured flesh. Increasingly, those sick animals are making us sick.

Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the recently released book “Eating Animals.”

Sort & Cull Comments: Excuse me for the indelicate title. I don’t mean to conjure a distasteful image of the Donner Party celebrating Thanksgiving. On the other hand, it’s not my intention per se to make light of Mr. Foer’s serious indictment of commercial meat production.

Inflammatory rhetoric seldom facilitates the reasoning process and rarely encourages the fair weighing of evidence. Yet when the first opinionated disc-jockey cranks up the volume, the responder has little choice to answer with his own boom box.

In other words, he started it.

Since I certain don’t mean to unfairly skewer words out of context, please follow the following link to Foer’s full article (http://www.cnn.com/…). While I appreciate a few questions he raises, most of the analysis is darkly colored by the moral superiority that too often attends veganism.

Sweeping condemnations don’t get much broader. In less than 1,700 words, Foer managed to blame factory meat production for the swine flu, global warming, human resistance to antibiotics, food poisoning (e.g., E.coli) and animal cruelty. I was left with the impression that only a prudent editor at CNN and the finite space of the Internet worked to limit his charges against livestock producers.

His effort to link factory farming with the origins of the swine flu is conjecture at best and a complete misrepresentation of the current state of the scientific question at worse. The fact remains that we simply don’t know where H1N1 came from. It’s a tough question that needs to be pursued.

Indeed, the ultimate smoking gun may be found smack-dab in the middle of the biggest finishing floor in the country. But to rush to such a conclusion is to disrespect both the authority of hard data and the plausibility of alternate theories.

Some scientists actually believe that since H1N1 is a combination of flu strains from man, pigs and birds, the dangerous brew was probably mixed in an environment where all three species commingle on a regular basis -- say, the small backyard production units all across China.

Foer soon moves on to the shame of factory farming vis-à-vis global warming. Predictably, he wastes no time in citing the controversial UN study published in 2006 (i.e., “Livestock’s Long Shadow”) that finds beef production more responsible for green house gases than the entire automobile industry.

The dubious methodology used by this study has been criticized by noted environmental scientists around the world, specifically its assumption that beef production and deforestation go together hand and glove. Many of these scholars conclude that the UN overestimated beef’s GGH contribution by two to three times.

I wish Foer would consider the new study by researchers at the University of California-Davis entitled “Clearing the Air: Livestock's Contribution to Climate Change." If he is uncomfortable with the fact that the NCBA helped sponsor this study (I could understand such skepticism), there are many other independent critiques to look at. Even the tough-minded EPA believes the UN study simply got it wrong.

When Foer turns to the matter of the therapeutic use of antibiotics and problems of resistance, I honestly share some of his concerns. Clearly, the increasing resistance of pathogens within humans to conventional antibiotics is a well-documented and scary situation. But while I would agree that the resistance problem must continue to be monitored and studied, it seems premature to lay all the blame at the factory farm doorstep.

In a recent report issued by the American Academy of Microbiology, scientists insisted that the question of resistance was extremely complicated: “There are no scapegoats. Responsibility is partly due to medical practice, including patient demand; veterinary practice; industrial practices; politics; and antibiotics themselves. Ultimately, resistance development is founded in the inevitability of microbial evolution."

But we part company again when Foer turns to the question of food poisoning and pathogens somehow uniquely linked to the meat factory model. He seems to imply the E.coli and the like are signature curses of large-scale livestock production. Furthermore, he provides no historical context for food safety, allowing the uncritical reader to infer that once upon a time, before these huge factories eliminated natural standards of safety and animal welfare, all in the name of profit, there was a risk-free golden age of meat production.

The undeniable truth is that today’s meat is safer than it’s ever been, historically. Do we need to do more to preempt and minimize food-borne pathogens? Of course we do. Food safety is an ongoing battle that must never to be surrendered. But to suggest that carefully inspected meat production at the “factory” is somehow a step backwards from the unmonitored farm slaughter of yesteryear strikes me as plain silly, if not a little dangerous.

Finally, Foer and myself couldn’t be further apart when it comes to farm animal welfare. He characterizes the livestock business as “the No. 1 cause of animal suffering.” Not only do the animals in the factory system suffer, they are also sick. Really? Even if you assume that livestock producers are cold-hearted miscreants, would it make any kind of business sense to design a system that significantly compromises animal welfare and performance?

Needless to say, we would disagree as to what constitutes animal suffering. If he considers eating meat from a slaughtered animal as cruelty per se, maybe we don’t have much to talk about.

For more Harrington comments check out www.feelofthemarket.com

(KM)

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