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Meat Industry Vilified by Andrew Marr and Guests

I don't know whether you heard Andrew Marr's "Start the Week" on Monday 9.00am on Radio 4, but many thousands will have. It's normally the high point of my listening week, as I judge Marr to be balanced and fair-minded. This week's issue demolished the livestock industry with all those on the programme being horrified at the methods employed by factory farming which, we were reliably informed, provided 93% of the meat we consume in Britain.

This week's facts came from the author Jonathan Safran Foer. He was joined by Anthony Julius who believes anti-semitism pervades English culture; a Prof Graciela Chichilnisky, who is concerned with the perception of risk by people, governments and international bodies, and the author of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith.
Foer has turned vegetarian and is the latest author to write about the iniquities of farming and food. The programme blurb says his book Eating Animals reports his investigation into the livestock industry "and makes for uncomfortable reading on the truth about factory farmed meat"and the claims he makes were clearly shocking to the panel who had apparently read the book. 
The discussion was one sided - even Andrew Marr admitted as much - when each participant confessed to either not eating meat or, as Julius told us, eating a small portion of chicken on a Friday night and another small portion for lunch on Saturday. No rib eye steak eaters here. And unfortunately Marr failed to play devils advocate, or indeed question any of the damaging  allegations made against the farming industry.
So the participants nodded in agreement when Foer stated that 96% of American meat came from factory farms, and that we were hardly better, with a figure of 93%. Not one of these intelligent academics and thinkers felt the need to ask for a definition. One imagines that some of these people travel through the countryside - maybe even Andrew Marr does himself - but not one managed to relate this experience with the fact that 93% of UK meat comes from factory farms. Where are they? What are those smallish herds of cattle doing in fields visible from the M4, M1, M6? What about all the meat which is sold as 'organic'? Does this also come from a factory farm?
There was not a flicker of a question to Foer about this allegation of his. Yet, if this was an exaggeration, might not other claims be as well? We are all aware that not all livestock farming is as it should be, and this concerns small family farms as much as factory units. Animals do get kept in poor condition, and this and other programmes could be justified, and supported, in exposing the problem.
My fury resulted in the following letter to Andrew Marr - but I have yet to receive a reply and rather think I won't.
I also copies it to Joe Watson, the Scottish farm journalist who is wanting to bring mis-reporting of farming affairs to the notice of others. Maybe he will wish to respond and take up the issue of this programme, and Mr Foer's wrongful claims.

My email to Andrew Marr