Poisonous fruits of factory farming

PS - I make $45,000 a year.

Rod - thank you for taking such a strong stand on this. Of course, the same people who don't care about treatment of animals also lack compassion and empathy for the communities they poison with their pollutants, and the schoolchildren and other "consumers" who will eat their diseased meat. They sell out their humanity for a few extra pennies of profit.

Factory farms are also notorious labor abusers. **Human Rights Watch** actually singled out the U.S. meatpacking and slaughterhouse industry as a violator of human rights. Some cites below.

Of course, the recall of 143 MM pounds of beef means that something like 180K animals lived lives of misery and died in torment - all for nothing.

Hillary

In an article entitled Finger-Lickin’ Bad in the February 21, 2006 issue of the online environmental publication Grist, author Suzi Parker documents the exploitive and antiquated sharecropper-type business model used by poultry agribusinesses to dominate the small farmers who actually raise many of the birds sent to slaughter.

In an article entitled The Chicken Hangers in the February 2, 2004 online publication In the Fray documents not only the horrific working conditions in the poultry industry but management’s hostile (and often unlawful) resistance to unionizing efforts or even basic workers’ rights.

A January 26, 2006, The New York Times article entitled Rights Group Condemns Meatpackers on Job Safety , begins, For the first time, Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that working conditions among the nation’s meatpackers and slaughterhouses are so bad that they violate basic human rights.

Mont D. Law, I understand where you're coming from, but several years ago my family made the decision to quit buying and eating beef, period. There's not really any specific health benefits to eating red meat as opposed to other meats (and in fact for some of us eating red meat is a bad idea), and I can buy a lamb roast occasionally instead of feeding my children ground beef.

At the time we made the decision I did look carefully at it: would I be depriving my children of some needed vitamins if I didn't prepare any beef products? But my research showed that in most of the countries of the world, even the first-world nations, beef is more a once or twice a week "extra" than an every-day protein source, and there's a reason for that: it is, generally speaking, a more expensive protein source than chicken, fish, eggs, dairy products, legumes, and so forth.

The truth of the matter is that the beef-saturated American diet is out of sync with nature. If cows are being raised humanely, it takes time and effort to get them to the point where they're ready to enter the food supply; but our insatiable demand for cheap beef on the dinner table every day ignores the natural cost of raising cattle, and just about mandates dubious factory-farming practices, where the goal is to get as much beef as possible into the food supply in an unnaturally shortened time period. Add to that the fact that few of us are even aware what a normal portion size for a fat-laden meat like beef really is, and you have a demand that quickly outstrips supply--at least, if the suppliers are the least bit concerned about humane farming practices.

So for my family, it was easier and better to stop eating beef altogether than to drive a considerable distance to get "crunchy" beef for those rare occasions when we might actually want to eat it. In most of the world, beef isn't what's for dinner; it's a special treat, to be enjoyed with an appreciation of the costs that went into supplying it. Until Americans can reject the McDonaldization of the dinner menu and rediscover the principles of healthy beef-eating we may all be better off to find something else for dinner, at least five or six nights out of seven.

The HSUS and PETA target the rogue farms and then use the videos to promote their agenda which is the promotion of vegetarianism/veganism.

Were the actions of the farm wrong? you betcha, but the folks taking the video are not really concerned about our health. Notice too that the videos are edited.

How long did the HSUS have the videos in their possession. How long did it take for them to notify the USDA? were they waiting until they got their fundraising materials prepared?

I share Rod's concern about the specific abuses recorded by this video, but I don't think that means we need to condemn so-called "factory farming" on the whole. That's about as logical as saying that last year's e coli outbreaks caused by contaminated spinach mean we need to abandon spinach farming.

Most beef farming in America doesn't engage in the practice of using downed livestock depicted in this video, which is illegal. And it's just a falsehood to claim that meat in America isn't healthy on the whole. Instances of genuine risks to life or health from food poisoning are very rare in this country. Let's not use an isolated case of wrongdoing to tar an entire industry.

It's them ding-dang regulators from the FDA not doing their jobs, by gum. Oops - we're not really that much into regulation anymore. Regulation is such a pre-1980s thing. Never mind.

We don't buy this stuff at all! Instead, we eat locally produced meats from people we know. I have sworn off eating beef when we eat out, but I went against my own rule and I had beef at a restaurant over the holidays. I got food poisining. I spent three days throwing up and shivering with a fever. This is REAL folks. I am actually very lucky that it wasn't bad enough to be hospitalized, but boy was I sick.

"An *abuse* of any system is never an argument against the system."
Well, a system filled with abuses (this is simply one of many) is an argument against that system.

As for "Cheap" food, the only reason factory farming is cheap is that the costs are externalized and the governments subsidizes it. Factory meat is cheap the same way housing in communist Russia was cheap!
Corn fed/industialized beef causes cancer, while grass fed beef is full of CLA's -one of the leading cancer fighters in our food. You think grass fed is expensive try paying for health care.

Dave Chirico
West Liberty Farm

This evening Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation," commented on this outrage to an interview program based in Los Angeles, called "Which Way L.A.?"

http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/ww

He said:

“I think the Clinton administration was making a sincere effort to try and impose some tough rules on the meat-packing industry, and it was the right wing of the Republican party in Congress that was blocking these proposals, again and again. Once President Bush took office, the meat-packing industry was essentially empowered. And it’s very difficult to tell the difference between USDA policy and the policy of the American meat-packing industry. It’s tragic, because this should be a non-partisan issue. All Republicans and Democrats have to eat, but the right wing of the Republican industry has very close ties to the meat-packing industry and has prevented any kind of meaningful reform.”

"But I think Rod's emotions get the better of him, and his "solution" is borderline naive."

Sort of like a bleeding heart liberal. But at least our blog host has a heart.

Threads like this are just so amusing to read. Conservatives tying themselves up in knots to cover their butts as the dark side of free-market policies come back to haunt them. One commonality with Abu Ghraib remains: blame the stiffs caught in tape, but management gets off with just a dusting of a dirty look.

Trust the industrial food system? Not in a million years. The HSUS notes that the abuse occurred even though USDA had a number of inspectors at the slaughter plant. Every time something like this happens it's called an "isolated" incident. This kind of abuse takes place behind closed doors so who knows how much of it is going on.

If we saw dogs and cats being treated this way we'd be screaming bloody murder.

I've learned to cook so many wonderful dishes since becoming vegetarian I don't miss meat at all. I'm not about to subsize this kind of barbaric behavior with my hard earned dollars.

By the way, I understand Tyson is under investigation -- again -- for abuses occurring at a couple of its poultry plants. Same old, same old. They'll pay the fine and its business as usual.

...and if any of you should actually run into the UB,

http://images.wikia.com/marvel_dc/images/d/dd/Beefeater.JPG

buy it a gin-and-tunic on all of us - and, from the looks of things, pitching in for a free tube of mega-SPF sunscreen wouldn't hurt, either...