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governments prove their worth by providing it.
The producers must oblige, or go to the wall, and so they cut costs. At the end of the line are the animals, their brains, feelings, social norms, even their physiology and native genes, absolutely disregarded and overridden.
But the animals are not quite at the end of the line. At the end of all food chains, the parasites are waiting - bacteria.
They are the most constant force in nature, primed and ready to invade any creature, that is accessible and drops the guard of immunity.
Animals crammed together in permanent stress, are the easiest of targets. They are the
'pathogens' paradise.
Farmers fend off microbes with antibiotics, which sometimes work for a time, but bacteria, in their billion-year history, have faced far worse hazards than that.
Within a few years, they throw up strains that can resist the antibiotics; given long enough exposure, there is none they cannot overcome.
There is cross-resistance: bacteria that evolve resistance s to one drug may also prove resistant to others that they have not previously confronted.
They are also promiscuous: a resistant bacterium may pass its resistance genes on to others. Bacteria that cause no diseases in human beings may thus pass their antibiotic resistance on to other bacteria that do cause human disease.
Consequently, the Soil Association was surely right to suggest recently  that  the antibiotic resistant bacteria that farmers are unwittingly raising on their farms are a far bigger hazard than BSE.
The human population stands at six billion and we live in our millions, cheek-by-jowl. We, too, are a bacterial paradise. We have kept some of them precariously at bay for the past 50 years with antibiotics, and we are putting that protection at risk.
Quite simply, this is lunacy; and it's all for the sake of cheap meat.
But is there an alternative? If food is dearer won't the poor suffer? There are several obvious answers. Only meat needs to be expensive - so we should eat less of it.
Nutritionists now advocate this in any case, on quite different grounds, and the greatest cooking, worldwide, uses meat only as a garnish.
And if the poor can't afford good food, we should ask -why, in a country as rich as Britain, do we continue to tolerate poverty?
In the end, it's only greed that creates the hazard - that and stupidity - and the fact that, in the end, for all our piety, we don't give a damn.