Conscious Choices

Julie Buckner represents Californians for Safe Food, a group that opposes Proposition 2. "Certainly the egg industry in California will be wiped out," she says. "And in all likelihood, eggs will come from outside the U.S.—Mexico, even overseas as far as China."

Julie also says Proposition 2 would create serious space issues. "Look how much space those crates and those cages took up on your stage. Imagine if we had to create that much more space for so many animals to produce the food you said we eat—76 billion eggs a year," she says. "I don't want animals to suffer, but I don't want human beings to suffer either. And I really want to talk about the impact on people that this initiative has as well as the impact on animals."

Allowing chicken, hogs and cattle to have more space, Julie says, is a choice consumers can make already. "We can either buy animal products, if we so choose, and we can buy them at the cheapest, most affordable, safest cost, or we can choose to pay more for cage-free, free-range eggs and pork and cattle. And that's a personal choice," she says. "But there will not be a choice after this Proposition 2."