I was already well-disposed to the themes prominent in Beyond Factory Farming when I picked it up for the first time. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 50 years, and I increasingly tend to a vegan diet.
I changed my diet in solidarity with my students in Kathmandu in 1973, wanting to become more like the people among whom I was serving. It was a small step, a personal one that did not address systemic issues, but it was against the grain of much of American life half a century ago, and it certainly changed me. Over the years, I came to appreciate the healthiness of a vegetarian diet and, more importantly, I learned to respect animals as living beings kindred to ourselves.
James Robinson, the author of Beyond Factory Farming, is the director of the Kathleen Deignan, C.N.D., Institute for Earth and Spirit at Iona University in New York. The institute is inspired and energized by environmental insights and reverence for life proposed by such leading prophetic figures as Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton and Thomas Berry, and the ongoing work of John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker at Yale University.
Robinson is very much at home in a network of communities—like the Agape Community in Massachusetts, the Benincasa Community in Connecticut and the Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York—that expose the core violence in the food habits of our American society. Such communities see the larger picture and work slowly, compassionately and nonviolently toward a worldview that respects life at every level.
This book, Robinson’s first, is a powerful, integral contribution to the current conversation on food justice, grounded in dialogue with the growing literature on the topic, books ranging from Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation Now (2023) to the Jesuit author Christopher Steck’s A Heaven for Animals (2025).
In reading Robinson’s book, I was grateful that I had to deal with the hard theme at the center of it: the enormous cruelty essential to the meat market in our modern industrial societies. Consumers pay a cost for the meat they consume, but animals pay a much higher one. It is ever imperative to remind readers of the horrors behind the mass production of the meat that shows up in sanitized packaging in our supermarkets and on our restaurant menus—the mechanization of birth and death, an abuse of animals that entirely disrespects the fact that they are alive, sentient and often very intelligent.
Robinson gives well-known, horrifying statistics about factory farming and descriptive details too: the fate of animals trapped their whole lives in tiny cages that forbid even minimal movement; animals that are maybe—or maybe not—unconscious as they are hung upside down and shuttled toward the sharp knives of their doom; calves taken from their mothers at birth and fed a diet intended to make them anemic and pale but fattened to an enormous weight before their early deaths—all for the sake of a nice wiener schnitzel or veal marsala?
And on and on. Such mundane horrors need to be pointed out, lest we blithely forget the real cost of the meat we take for granted.
Robinson is well positioned to face up to the title’s problem, but also to run with the ideals of the subtitle: toward a contemplative-prophetic reconsideration of how we live, how we eat, how we relate to the earth and all living beings. He is mindful particularly of the people who do the daily, dirty, dehumanizing work in slaughterhouses, suffering the cries and breathing in the stench of death. Care for animals, he argues, is inseparable from other challenges to systemic justice, including racism and the oppression of marginalized workers.
Robinson’s vision, inspired by Merton, Berry and others, stands solidly in the “Laudato Si’” tradition. As Pope Francis put it in that encyclical (No. 92):
[O]ur indifference or cruelty towards fellow creatures of this world sooner or later affects the treatment we mete out to other human beings. We have only one heart, and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationships with other people. Every act of cruelty towards any creature is “contrary to human dignity.”
Robinson does not follow the traditional path that starts with biblical texts, nor does he search for premodern Christian sources, theological, monastic or otherwise, to show that his views are not new. Since he is not arguing for universal vegetarianism, or what he calls “ontological veganism” (as imperative for everyone, everywhere, all the time), he does not need to claim that Jesus was a vegetarian, nor explain why he was not.
Yet many people still find the Bible warrants the killing and eating of animals—and if that warrant requires factory farming, so be it. After all, God tells Noah after the flood, “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered” (Gn 9:2). That “fear and dread” seem to have darkened life even in the beginning. Perhaps more needs to be said for the sake of informing religious people—let’s say, many Jews, Christians and Muslims—who cannot see the problems Robinson so clearly addresses.
Robinson’s argument is very much a Catholic one. He appeals only occasionally to the lived wisdom of religious traditions of the East, which have long reimagined the relation of humans and other life forms. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh is evoked a few times, as is Rachana Rao Umashankar, a professor at Iona and a specialist in Sufi Islam in South Asia. Late in the book, the “engaged Buddhism” proponent Sulak Sivaraksa is introduced, in conversation with Rosemary Radford Ruether on the stultifying force of global capitalism. These are powerful testimonies.
Broadening our view of nonviolence would have strengthened Robinson’s overall argument. He might, for instance, have looked into the Hindu ideal of nonviolence, promoted in ancient yoga texts and embraced as a way of life by Mahatma Gandhi for personal and political reasons. Jain tradition, too, is famed for its fundamental promotion of nonviolence. Animals do not adhere to specific religious traditions; care for them invites shared compassion and action among good people everywhere on earth.
The final part of the book highlights the educative process, in which individuals and our societies change over time what we eat, how we live, what we care for. In a fine practical move, Robinson points to the menus in Catholic school cafeterias. Start with the children, and make sure they have lunch options not reliant on the slaughterhouses of factory farming. This offers a constructive ending to a powerful book: If we educate our children and grandchildren to eat differently in a more compassionate world, surely their witness will affect us as well.
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