Imagine a bakery that sells every cake, pie, or loaf of bread for a dollar less than it costs to make. It’s a challenging business model, to say the least. But instead of going out of business, say the shop flourishes and expands, adding more ovens and increasing output for years. Impossible, right?

For a bakery, maybe. But not for America’s big producers of meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. The animal food industry actually uses this contrarian business model with surprising success. Take hog farmers, who routinely spend an average of eight dollars more rais­ing each pig than the animal yields when sold. The farmers, at least the big corporate operators, are in hog heaven. That’s because government subsidies actually make this business model profitable for those at the top. For the same reason, corporate beef producers routinely spend from $20 to $90 more than each animal’s value to raise cattle.

Each year, American taxpayers dish out $38 billion to subsidize meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. To put this corporate welfare package in perspective, it’s nearly half the total unemployment benefits paid by all fifty US states to unemployed workers in 2012. However, as we’ll see, unlike unemployment payments, subsidies don’t actually […]