Why Cage-Free Won and Why It Matters

Months ago, I decided to participate in a project that would push for 100 percent cage-free eggs in Harvard dining halls. Battery cage facilities are so horrifying that surely, I thought, it would be easy to mobilize Harvard students around this issue. Had that been the case, Harvard’s switch to cage-free eggs would have come much sooner. What animals in factory farms endure, however horrifying, has not yet become a priority for enough students that it could serve as the basis for the mobilization of an entire campus. I needed to horrify people about something else.

Crimson writer Sandra Y. L. Korn recently wrote an article on why a sustainable food system is simultaneously a sustainable job system. She described why we cannot, if we are to successfully advocate for sustainability in our dining halls, separate the twin forces of environmental degradation and degradation of labor standards.

In a similar vein, a battery cage is hellish not only for the hen who spends the entirety of her life crippled and unmoving in its confines. It is also hellish for the laborer who treats her with horrifying brutality not because he is a sadistic human being who wants to, but because he is an instrument in a food system in which he has to. It is hellish for the family of the laborer, which falls victim to the psychological damage and even domestic violence that so often results from time spent in a factory farm. It is hellish for the millions of low-income Americans who live near the masses of chemical and animal waste discarded by factory farms.

In short, our current food system is detrimental to virtually every party involved because it is a system rooted in unchecked destruction and exploitation. There is no party left unharmed by our current food system: not animals, the environment, consumers, or producers. As I refined my understanding of the intersectionality of food justice, the way in which I discussed cage-free eggs changed: Cage-free eggs became just one way in which we could at last begin to reform our food system, one of the many multifarious, transitional solutions to the problem of food justice. It was when I began to discuss this multifariousness that many more people began to listen and lend their support. Finally, in response to a swelling of student advocacy, Harvard University Dining Services announced on Oct. 17 that it would switch to exclusively cage-free eggs.

Many of us tend to compartmentalize food activism by claiming just one perspective of many as our own. This  illustrates the flawed way in which we understand food justice, both in theory and in practice, and I have been just as guilty of this. Until quite recently, the food movement has been not a movement at all but a fragmented collection of interest groups that advocate for the environment, animals, labor or public health. These are all necessary and laudable victories, but ones that when treated as isolated issues evade larger questions of food justice. If we do not speak for more than one victim of our food system at a time we cannot begin to address these larger questions. The cage-free egg initiative, I hope, not only directed Harvard’s purchasing power away from an atrocious practice, but also helped promote dialogue on the intersectionality of seemingly unrelated allegiances in food justice.

A few months ago, I had the privilege of attending the Real Food Challenge’s Northeast Training. RFC is unique in that it empowers students to recognize the multifarious nature of food activism. At RFC, I saw what a true food movement will look like: It will not eschew the importance of any injustice in favor of another. Nor will it be suffocated by internal disagreement or ask members to forgo their own passions and strengths in food justice. On the contrary, it will harness the knowledge and passion of each individual to fuel a movement that is conscious of the reality of food activism: that our food system is too complex and exploitative to be reformed one injustice at a time. As I have learned through activism for cage-free eggs, there is truly no hierarchy of oppressions.

Marina N. Bolotnikova ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Eliot House.