Anne Frank famously wrote “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.” Of course, she went on to die of typhus in a concentration camp, which may seem to undermine her benign view of mankind.

I bring all this up because, like Anne Frank, I want to believe that people are essentially good. That’s why I’d like to think that encouraging everyone to watch a new video from the Humane Society, “Overlooked: The Lives of Animals Raised For Food“ will make a dent in the rampant animal abuse that’s standard operating procedure in American meat, poultry, dairy and egg production.

Talk about “a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death”””that’s your typical factory farm in a nutshell. They’re also called CAFO’s, or confined animal feeding operations, but really, they’re just a concentration camp for animals. As with poor Anne Frank, any trust these animals may have in human decency is routinely betrayed.

“Overlooked,” narrated by James Cromwell, who played the farmer in “Babe,” draws a simple and poignant contrast between the systemic cruelty of contemporary feedlots and the way these animals were raised fifty years ago, when a farm meant rolling pastures and not hard concrete floors.

In Britain, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver raised a ruckus“”and consumer awareness–with an expose on factory farmed chickens for his tv show “Jamie’s Fowl Dinners.” Since the program aired, along with a show by another well-known British chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who compared an industrial poultry farm with a free-range operation, sales of organic, free-range chickens have shot up dramatically in Britain.

As Dr Julia Wrathall, head of the farm animals department at the RSPCA Science Group, told trade magazine The Grocer: “When it comes to the chickens we eat in Britain I am beginning to think we may be on the verge of a revolution.”

Will we see a similar revolution in the US? So far, none of America’s celebrity chefs has dared to challenge the mighty meat industry on prime time television, although Mark Bittman’s piece in last Sunday’s New York Times was a nice shot across the bow.

But there’s no need to hold out for more celebrity endorsements to encourage ethical eating. You can cut back on eating meat, right now, and support the farmers who are raising their animals more humanely and sustainably. To borrow another phrase from the eternally optimistic Anne Frank, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

To learn more about how you can help reduce the suffering of factory farm animals, visit the Humane Society’s website.