Oh, and it tastes worse. Excerpt via great interview in Good.

Click image for full interview.

…I was looking for different pork—pork that actually tasted great—and I wasn’t finding that with my suppliers. It wasn’t great pork because of the way it was raised. And so I read this article in Ed Bahr’s Art of Eating where he talked about the Niman ranch. And so I hooked up with Bill and went up to Iowa and visited some of these new farms. But I didn’t have anything to compare it to, so I said: “Well, isn’t this the way all pigs are raised?” And they said, “No, most of the pigs in the United States—better than 95 percent of them—are raised in confinement. You should probably just see it for yourself.” And I did. I visited many different confinement operations. And what I saw really, really horrified me. It was a really bad experience. But I’m really glad I had this experience. It’s really important to understand what goes on inside those buildings.

People are raising pork in a way that is really not sustainable. It’s not pleasant for the animals—and not pleasant is a real understatement. It’s really brutal. It’s like torturing the animals. The stench is terrible. They’re crowded in there and going crazy and biting each other’s tails and biting the metal bars. They’re in their own waste, which is liquefied and put in these holding lagoons outside of these warehouses. And that poses all of these contamination problems—the stench in the air is just terrible and it’s not anything anyone would really want to live around. And then there’s this problem of all the antibiotics that have to be used when animals live in that kind of close confinement—to keep them healthy and promote growth. And that has a slew of health ramification for humans in that we’re creating super-bugs that are resistant to antibiotics. And on top of all that, the pork doesn’t taste very good…click over to Good for the rest.