Food Safety
Living the Animal Life
Published July 14, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT
There's a bill that's been introduced in Congress that would put sharp limits on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and Obama supports it. I'm fairly amazed and impressed, which I was getting worried that I'd gotten to cynical to even be.
It won't pass. Even that's okay I suppose, considering how the discussion is off to such a good start.
The bill is Rep. Louise Slaughter's (D-NY) offering to ban non-medicinal, preemptive use of antibiotics in livestock.
In large part, as the article notes, these are used to promote growth. However, it's the barely mentioned "prevent illnesses" part that's of most concern. Eddie Gehman Kohn talks here about the way this practice is turning antibiotics into worthless candy by spurring the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, but that's still a side effect - though a powerful and frightening one. The main point of these drugs is to prevent animals that are raised in utterly vile conditions from simply keeling over dead before they can be slaughtered.
If you couldn't prevent the conditions of feedlot life itself from killing cattle, they'd have to be raised in lower concentrations, under cleaner conditions, and given a much healthier diet out of sheer necessity.
As it is now, most cattle are raised in lots packed deep with nothing but each other's waste. The health hazards of this are, one would think, obvious.
They're fed a grain diet, now that it's no longer allowed to feed these obligate herbivores ground up bones and scrap from other cattle, which is like feeding a human an all-Twinkie diet. They get permanent acidosis, roughly equivalent to a terrible case of chronic ulcers, and the bacteria from their guts are able to escape to infect the rest of their bodies. This commonly leaves their livers abcessed and scarred, not entirely unlike what would happen in a human with advanced cirrhosis of the liver.
Imagine humans kept wading in sh*t all day, force-fed to the point of severe obesity, suffering all the while from ulcers and cirrhosis. Those people's immune systems would be extremely compromised. They would need constant doses of antibiotics just to stay alive.
I don't make this comparison to say that animals should be treated like humans, but that they should be treated like animals.
They should be let out on real grass, on well-managed pasture where their numbers are just right to stimulate and fertilize the growth of a healthy prairie. They should be able to move around in the open air, where their immune systems will be supported by a proper diet and exercise, be part of an ecosystem that's very close to a naturally evolved grassland, have a quick death-by-predator (if we insist on being their only predators, we should do it right and be merciful) and the remains returned to the ground for the plants to eat.
This is what they're for. If we are to be sensible managers of the Earth's resources, getting this right is crucial to preserving what's going to be left over when the planet's freshwater and topsoil reserves can no longer handle the levels of grain production asked of them now. Getting this right is crucial to having livestock be a source of health instead of disease.
Weekend Compost Roundup
Published July 11, 2009 @ 08:50AM PT
Raiding the internet garden for your intellectual delectation ...
- Nitrates, including those from fertilizers, may be an environmental trigger for Alzheimer’s, Diabetes and Parkinson's Disease. A nutritionist friend of my mom's had been warning our family for years about the dangers of nitrate preservatives in meats, guess she knew something.
- If the nitrate news wasn't bad enough, there is increasing worry about the endocrine disruption potential of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. The endocrine system consists of all your hormone-producing and reproductive glands, so messing with it is understandably serious.
- The meat industry has no desire to have their products further tested for safety, even when E. coli contamination sickens and even kills their customers. The most disturbing line in the article ... "Several weeks later, the recall was initiated."
- Latinos in the US are more likely to be hungry, that is, with nearly 20 percent living in 'food insecure' households, as they're called these days.
- More food policy news, wherein we learn that Whole Foods is going to start testing independently for the presence of GMOs in the brands it carries.
- In 'honor' of the destructive little frat boy punks who smashed a microwave left outside our building for freecycling (a popular custom in West Philly) last night, The Guardian posts this editorial on the resurgence of hand crafting and a culture of waste not, want not values.
- And speaking of screwed up things happening in Philly, there is apparently a club here that tried to enforce a whites-only policy at their pool because black and Latino kids were coming to use it for a summer camp. Seriously!? What f*ing year is this? I mean, sweet jeebus, but that is some embarassing bullsh*t.
Nation's Food Policy Pro-Pus, Pro-E. Coli, Pro-Bribery, Pro-GMOs
Published July 10, 2009 @ 05:19PM PT
Practices that were infuriating to me under Republicans have simply become disheartening under Democrats. I will explain.
Pro-Pus
So Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former lawyer and a fan of adding extra pus to the nation's milk supply by way of giving all our dairy cows chronic mastitis from rBST/rBGH, has indeed been hired to the newly created position of Deputy Commissioner of Food with the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
In theory, Taylor might not be as bad as all that, he shilled for rBST as a young, impressionable executive and he seems to have grown as a person.
Though adding insult to injury, Pennsylvania's Dennis Wolff is a finalist for Undersecretary of Food Safety. A willing and enthusiastic participant in Monsanto's campaign to prevent rBST-free labeling on milk, Wolff tried to sneak a 2008 ban on the labels under the noses of Pennsylvania citizens who were outraged and forced the governor to overturn the policy.
But really, two, TWO people appointed or being considered to head food safety in the Obama administration who opposed the public's right to know when their milk came from cows being treated with a hormone that gives them chronically inflamed and infected udders!?
(BTW, people would have heard about the bovine growth hormone controversy more widely as of the year 2000, perhaps, if Monsanto hadn't instigated the firing of two journalists who tried to expose rBST/rBGH for the carcinogenic, bovine mastitis-causing health disaster that it is. Though also, and this is funny, ha-ha, as part of the resolution of the ensuing litigation, a judge ruled that it wasn't illegal for a news station to lie. F*ers!)
So, I think we can safely say that there are those in our national food safety leadership who don't consider pus a worrying contaminant in the milk supply. Even if they don't hire Wolff, that this didn't immediately disqualify him, that they'd consider adding to the shame of hiring Taylor, is a mark of some serious concern.
Pro-E. coli
As reported, again at ObamaFoodorama, this is another of goals of the Obama administration's food policy:
Food Safety Working Group Accepting Comments
Published July 06, 2009 @ 12:06PM PT
So the White House's Food Safety Working Group is on Twitter, and they said they were open for comments. Here's what I wrote them:
Mike Taylor for Food Safety Coordinator
Published July 02, 2009 @ 09:59PM PT
Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.
Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.
As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.
So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.
This guy is heading up a food safety working group.
I'm just swimming in the changeiness.
Total(ish) Recall
Published June 28, 2009 @ 11:55PM PT
ObamaFoodorama discusses the ineffectual food safety measure known as a voluntary recall. LaVidaLocavore has more on the food inspection details
The FDA can't even make food processing plants show them their customer complaint records, their pest control records, or their contamination control plans. Let's contrast that toothlessnes towards large corporations with the micromanagement the federal government is trying to impose on individual ranchers in the form of the National Animal ID System.
... Mr. [Jay Platt, the third-generation proprietor of Platt Ranch,] called the extra $2 cost of the electronic tags an onerous burden for a teetering industry and said he often moved horses and some of his 1,000 head of cattle among three ranches here and in Arizona. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person, who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities, Mr. Platt said. And there is no Internet connection on the ranch for filing to a regional database.
... “My main beef is that these proposed rules were developed by people sitting in their offices with no real knowledge of animal husbandry and small farms,” said Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms in Snow Hill, N.C., which rotates sheep, cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens among three properties and sells directly to consumers and co-ops.
“I feel these regulations are draconian,” Ms. Pridgen said, “and that lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture.” ...
Why would the FDA have virtually no power to compel the food production and distribution industries to prevent people from dying of E. coli contamination, all while it's on the verge of having draconian authority over every aspect of animal movement on small farms and ranches?
Consider it a map of public power - Nestlé has it, Platt and Pridgen don't. It's obvious whose side the government is on.
Supper Roundup: Touch of Honey
Published June 25, 2009 @ 06:03PM PT
- Rabbi Mark Hurvitz talks about fasting for Darfur and other meaningful ways to raise awareness.
- "The End of the Line", a documentary about the rapid disappearance of the world's fish due to overconsumption is good, says Twilight Greenaway, but never really calls on us to take the obvious step of eating less seafood.
- I really enjoyed this informative tribute to feminist and organic gardener, Eleanor Perenyi, by regina.
- Jill Richardson alerts us to the fact that 41,000 lbs of ground beef has been recalled. The beef was produced in late April, which, as you may realize, was about two months ago.
- Ali S continues following the very bad situation of US dairy producers.
