You hit on the central structural contradiction that large non-profit balance sheets are desperate to evade. Cheap animal protein is a thermodynamic and economic fiction. Cycling edible crops through animals that feel pain and fear bleeds off nine out of every ten calories simply maintaining basic metabolic heat. The only reason a supermarket pork chop appears "cheap" is that agribusiness cartels externalize their true costs onto the public commons: subsidized grain, diverted river water, air pollution choking rural fence-line communities, and minimum-wage slaughterhouse labor.
When reform campaigns rebrand themselves as "anti-factory-farming" while tiptoeing around animal consumption, they end up negotiating the dimensions of the cage rather than challenging the property relations that treat living creatures as industrial inventory. If you remove the extreme confinement that makes industrial slaughter mathematically profitable without replacing the underlying caloric supply, animal products naturally become luxury goods for the affluent, leaving working families with higher grocery bills and leaving the slaughterhouse machinery fundamentally intact.
The missing piece is not a clever PR campaign that tricks people into austerity. It is confronting the material supply directly. We have to break the patent monopolies of corporate agribusiness, redirect the billions currently propping up feedlot monocultures into decentralized fermentation-made proteins and whole-plant agriculture, and treat basic nutrition as a public utility rather than a speculative market.
Farmed animals will never be liberated by polite regulatory tweaks that make their exploitation slightly more palatable to polite society. Ending factory farming means ending the commodity status of sentient life, and that requires being honest with the public about what replaces it on the plate and who controls the tools to feed us.
