You were never shown this.
How your food is actually produced. Sourced, dated, and plain.
Start here
Eggs come from hens. What happens to the males?
They don’t lay. They don’t grow fast enough to sell as meat. So on the day they hatch, they’re killed — by grinder or gas.
About 300 million a year in the US. Legal, standard, and how nearly every egg gets made.
The full picture →A meat chicken reaches full size in six weeks.
Its muscle outgrows its own skeleton and heart.
Not hormones — those are banned. Seventy years of breeding for speed.
The numbers →
A breeding sow can’t turn around.
Fourteen square feet. Pregnant about eight months a year.
Ten or eleven states restrict it. Most US pork is still made this way.
Where the law stands →DairyNot yet published BeefNot yet published
Not sourced yet. We’d rather leave them blank.
What the buildings look like
How we work
Sourced and dated
Practices change. An undated claim is worth nothing.
Standard ≠ one video
“Legal and common” and “filmed somewhere” are different claims.
No shock imagery
Hard material sits behind a labeled page. You choose.
Think we got something wrong?
Especially if you work in this industry. We correct fast and publicly.
info@behindthemeat.com →Eggs
Laying hens and meat chickens are different birds. A laying hen is bred to produce eggs and puts on almost no weight. Half the chicks hatched are male.
Males of laying breeds don’t lay and don’t grow fast enough to raise for meat. They’re sorted within hours of hatching and killed — most often by maceration, a high-speed grinder, or by carbon dioxide.
This is changing
In-ovo sexing identifies an embryo’s sex inside the egg, before hatching. France and Germany banned culling effective January 2022. Italy passed similar law with implementation expected by end of 2026.
US adoption began in 2025. NestFresh started selling in-ovo-sexed eggs in July 2025, and by mid-2026 the technology was reported running in a small number of US hatcheries. A bill introduced in the House in October 2025 has not become law.
“Cage-free” doesn’t mean what you think
About half of US laying hens are now cage-free, driven by retailer commitments rather than federal law. It means no cages. It doesn’t mean outdoor access, and a cage-free barn can hold tens of thousands of birds indoors.
It has no bearing on male chicks. The sorting happens at the hatchery either way.
Chicken raised for meat
More chickens are raised for meat in the US than all other land animals combined. The defining fact isn’t cruelty in the dramatic sense. It’s speed.
That speed is genetics, not hormones — hormones are prohibited in US poultry. Peer-reviewed research consistently links fast-growing strains to higher rates of leg and gait problems, reduced activity, and cardiovascular strain. Muscle develops faster than skeleton and heart.
Space
Density is measured as weight per unit of floor area, because the birds grow all cycle. What matters is the end, just before the house is emptied.
The National Chicken Council sets a recommended maximum that varies with target weight. The EU caps lower. USDA organic lower still, plus outdoor access. In practice: tens of thousands of birds, enclosed, artificially lit, limited room to move.
Pigs
A gestation crate is a metal stall sized so a pregnant sow can stand and lie down but not turn around. About fourteen square feet.
A pig pregnancy runs just under four months and a sow can be bred roughly twice a year. In a conventional system she spends most of her adult life in it.
The industry’s rationale is that individual housing prevents aggression between sows and allows individual feeding. Those are real concerns, and group systems that address them are used widely in Europe and by a growing number of US producers.
Where it stands
There is no federal law on sow housing. Roughly ten to eleven states restrict crates. Florida was first, by ballot measure in 2002; Ohio among the most recent, in early 2026. Prop 12 matters most because it governs what can be sold in California, not just produced there.
Crates remain in use across much of US pork production, and Congress has repeatedly considered measures limiting states’ ability to set these standards.
What to do
We’re not asking you to go vegan tonight. Almost every improvement available to you is a reduction, not an elimination.
Start with chicken and eggs, not beef
Most people assume beef is where the harm concentrates, because a cow is big. By number of animals it’s the reverse, by a wide margin. One cow yields hundreds of pounds; a chicken yields a few. If you change one thing, change this one.
Know the labels
- Cage-free — no cages. Nothing about outdoor access or flock size.
- Free-range — some outdoor access; amount and quality vary.
- Pasture-raised — not USDA-defined alone. Meaningful with a third-party certification.
- Natural — refers to processing, not how the animal was raised. Irrelevant here.
- Certified Humane, Animal Welfare Approved, Global Animal Partnership — real standards, published, readable. They differ from each other.
Reduce in a way you’ll sustain
One meatless day a week that lasts five years beats a strict diet that lasts five weeks. Nobody is grading this.
About
Behind the Meat is a nonprofit working to reduce demand for factory-farmed animal products by making accurate information easy to find and better choices easy to act on.
How we handle claims
- Every factual claim is attributed, with the year.
- We separate standard legal practice from what was filmed at one facility.
- We flag what’s changing. In-ovo sexing and sow-housing law both move fast.
- If we can’t source it, we don’t publish it. That’s why dairy and beef are empty.
- We correct errors publicly and quickly.
Tone
Our audience is people who eat meat and haven’t thought much about it. That’s most people. Material designed to shock them mostly makes them defensive, and a defensive reader changes nothing.
Status
Behind the Meat, Inc. is a Florida nonprofit corporation. We intend to apply for recognition as a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3). We are not soliciting donations.
info@behindthemeat.com →← Back