The following is an excerpt from The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving The Planet, edited by Emily Hunter (Conari Press, 2011).

Eco-Terrorism 101

If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it. —Billy Bragg

It started with a knock on the door. Someone had pounded three times. I turned the knob without looking through the peephole. It must be the landlord, I thought. He had gotten into the habit of arriving unannounced with prospective tenants to show our apartment, one of the freshly renovated studios in a 70-something-year-old building in Chicago. Before I had opened the door, though, I knew it was not Steve the Landlord. Our dogs were barking. Wildly. The dogs, Mindy and Peter, were snarling, and they never snarled, they never growled. I opened the door anyway.

The guys behind it—gruff-looking early-30s guys with manicured goatees, navy suits, ties with outdated geometric patterns, scuffed black shoes, broad shoulders, hardjaw lines, wholesome haircuts, and eyes looking for fights—were just naturally FBI agents. I didn’t even need to see the badges.

I just said I was in a hurry, that I had to get ready for work, and then I started to close the door. The good cop—well, I will call him the good cop, only because he looked less eager to kick my ass—put his left palm on the gray steel door, firmly enough to put pressure but not firmly enough to make any noise. I could either come downstairs, he said, or they could make a visit to my place of work, the Chicago Tribune.

Dogs barked. Panic. I was not afraid of them, but I was afraid of a spectacle in the newsroom. I relented and then closed the door to get ready.

“What’s going on?” my girlfriend, Kamber, asked from the futon, half asleep.

“It’s the FBI,” I said matter-of-factly, as if it had been Steve the Landlord.

A few minutes later, we crammed into the freight elevator, good cop, bad cop, and me. The elevator ground to a halt, the latticework steel door creaked open, and we walked through the dark hallway to the alley. It was a gloriously sunny Chicago summer day, but the sunlight could not overcome the condominium towers of steel and glass, could not swim through the cracks in the walls, and so I stepped into an alley shrouded in gray.

In college, I had learned about government operations like the counter intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the FBI’s history of harassing and intimidating political activists. False names, phone taps, bugs, and infiltration were used in attempts to disrupt groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian movement, and Students for a Democratic Society. I had learned from books, professors, and Law & Order episodes that if approached by the FBI, for any reason, you should never talk. Nothing good can come of it.

Both good cop and bad cop had heard that line before. The shorter, “nicer” cop started talking anyway.

“Look, we just want to talk to you,” he said. “We want you to help us out. We can make all this go away.”

—————

Working long hours on the metro desk at the Chicago Tribune, covering shooting after shooting, murder after murder, had turned me into the type of reporter I never wanted to become. I felt detached, apathetic, and cynical. Just before the visit from the FBI, I wrote in my journal, “I’m tired of writing meaningless stories, I’m tired of going to sleep at night feeling like I left the world the same way I saw it in the morning.”

After only a few months at the Tribune, I had already built a spectacular wall of emotional detachment. It felt as if it were made of broken bottles and concrete chunks, sharp and gray. I thought I would never survive this beat, unless i found some way to keep a toehold on my humanity. So I decided to go leafleting.

When I worked at the Texas Observer, I wrote a story about an animal rights activist who was prohibited from protesting fur stores as a condition of her sentence for nonviolent civil disobedience. In my research of other draconian legal attacks on activists, I also learned about Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, an international campaign that had formed for the sole purpose of closing the notorious animal-testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Five undercover investigations had exposed animal welfare violations in the lab. I remember sitting in the Texas observer office, downloading a clip of undercover video filmed inside of Huntingdon. It showed animal experimenters with beagle puppies. The puppies’ veins were too small, and one of the experimenters could not insert a needle. He grew frustrated. He shook the dog and then suddenly punched the puppy in the face, hard enough to knock a grown man down. I will never forget that dog’s punctuating wails.

When if decided I wanted to do something positive to balance out the futility I felt at the Tribune, I decided to leaflet about Huntingdon. one month prior to FBI agents knocking on my door, Kamber and I met six local activists at the a-zone (or autonomous zone) in Chicago, which was part independent bookstore and part rabblerouser gathering place. it offered titles on topics including the Zapatistas, herbal medicine, and bicycle repair, and it smelled like punk rock.

From there, we caravaned to a suburb north of Chicago and the home of a corporate executive with Marsh, Inc., an insurance company for Huntingdon. Once out of the van, I hung leaflets on front doors, urging their Marsh neighbor to cease doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences. The fliers made no suggestions of violence or property destruction, they made no threats. Instead, they spelled out what went on in the lab, how Marsh is connected, and why readers should ask their neighbor to use his power wisely.

After about twenty minutes of leafleting, police arrived. They radioed back and forth with their headquarters, trying to decide what to do. Then they handcuffed us.

——————

After the FBI agents followed me out of the apartment building and into the alley, bad cop started needling. He asked if I knew the type of people involved in the campaign to close Huntingdon. He said they were “extremists.”

“I can tell you’re a good guy,” he said. “You have a lot going for you.” he said he could tell by the way I dressed, where I lived. “You don’t want this to mess up your life, kid. We need your help.”

He told me I could help them by providing more information about the other defendants and other animal rights groups. I had two days to decide. He gave me a scrap of paper with his phone number, written on it underneath his name, Chris.

“If we don’t hear from you by the first trial date,” he said, “I’ll put you on the domestic terrorist list.”

Wait, what? I felt as if I was staring blankly ahead, but my eyes must have shown fear.

“Now I have your attention, huh?” he said.

Put me on a terrorist list for leafleting?

“Look,” Chris said, “after 9/11, we have a lot more authority now to get things done and get down to business. We can make your life very difficult for you. You work at a newspaper? I can make it so you never work at a newspaper again.”

I replied that people who write letters, who leaflet, are not the same people who break the law. As I walked away, I crumpled his phone number and tossed it in a nearby dumpster, and just before I left the shadows and could reach the sunlight, Chris said, “have a good day at work at the metro desk.

Say hello to your editor, Susan Keaton. And tell Kamber we’ll come see her later.”

I wish I could say the visit did not affect me. But the history nerd in me could not help but think about all the times when the government had targeted political activists. I could not help but think about the deportation of Emma Goldman and the relentless spying and harassment of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I thought of the White Rose, a group of students my age who covertly printed and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and, when caught, when interrogated and tortured, refused to show fear. They were beheaded. I had always hoped, as we all do after reading stories like this, that if I were ever put in a similar position, I would not flinch.

But I was afraid. Even though I never considered, even for a moment, becoming an informant, I could not stop thinking about how I was on a domestic terrorist list. I was convinced my journalism career was over. Even worse, I was convinced these FBI agents would somehow pass the word to my parents, who would be so disappointed in me, and to my little sister, who would stop looking up to me. These thoughts burrowed somewhere deep behind my eyes and, no matter how irrational they sound, I began to see them as truth.

I did not know it then, but this experience would mark the beginning of both a personal and political journey. After the initial fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out why I would be targeted as a terrorist for nothing more than leafleting. The focus of my life would shift to investigating how animal rights and environmental activists had become, according to the FBI, the “number one domestic terrorism threat.”

——————–

In hindsight the path from that FBI visit to my current life seems completely straight and natural. In reality, I spent years straddling fences, cautiously poised between “unbiased” reporting and advocacy journalism, between my career and the passions I have labeled side projects.

I made some small efforts to climb down. I left an “unbiased” newspaper job covering politics in Washington, DC, to use my writing for very biased purposes at the American Civil Liberties union, ghostwriting op-eds and speeches on the Patriot Act and government surveillance. At night, I continued researching and writing about activists being labeled terrorists. Through my work at the ACLU, and my freelance reporting, the true scope of the attacks on political activists came into focus.

The environmental movement, like all social movements, has a wide range of elements. There are people who leaflet and write letters. And there are underground groups like the Earth Liberation Front, which have vandalized SUVs, burned ski resorts, and destroyed genetically engineered crops. Even at their most extreme, none of these tactics have injured a single human being. Not one.

Meanwhile, the department of homeland Security does not list right wing terrorists on a list of national security threats, and the FBI omits right wing attacks in its annual terrorism reports. Those groups have been responsible for the Oklahoma city bombing, the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, violence against doctors, and admittedly creating weapons of mass destruction.

Through my reporting, I learned that environmental and animal rights activists are being labeled terrorists not because of violence, but because of their beliefs. Corporations and the politicians who represent them have waged a coordinated campaign to push their political agenda.

They have sent out press releases accusing mainstream organizations like the Sierra club, PETA, and Greenpeace of supporting “eco-terrorism.” the children’s movie Hoot has been dubbed “soft-core eco-terrorism for kids.” American Idol star Carrie Underwood was smeared as supporting terrorists when she encouraged her fans to support the Humane Society.

Examples like this would be funny if they had not worked their way into the top levels of government. In 2006, politicians proposed “eco-terrorism” legislation similar to bills that had been introduced at the state level for years. Because of my reporting, colleagues at the ACLU recommended that I testify at a hearing by the house Judiciary committee. Leading democrats on that committee agreed. Suddenly, the fears that I thought I had overcome began to crawl back into my head.

If I challenged this legislation, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, would I be smeared as an “animal rights terrorist”? Would FBI agents fulfill their promises from years ago and tell members of congress that I am on a domestic terrorist list? Would the representative from Wisconsin turn to me and ask, “Mr. Potter, are you now, or have you ever been, a vegetarian?”

The historian Howard Zinn always advised his students, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” the committee staff explicitly told me that democratic leadership supported this bill; I was to speak about my reporting but not challenge the legislation. Meanwhile, corporations and industry groups wanted nothing more than for their bill to proceed unchallenged. The train was moving, I thought, whether anyone liked it or not.

I decided I would not be a token gesture of dissent in their spectacle of democracy. Rather than propose modest tweaks to the bill, I testified that lawmakers must reject it in its entirety. I said that scarce terrorism resources should not be exploited to protect corporate interests. In my testimony, I compared the “eco-terrorist” legislation and scare mongering to one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, the communist witch hunts of the Red Scare.

As I awaited questions from members of congress and braced myself for the reaction from the democrats who invited me, I looked down at my notes and at my hands. It struck me that they were perfectly still. It was an empowering feeling, to have my words and my actions completely in line with my beliefs. Never in my life had I felt so calm.

Immediately after the hearing, I began calling activist groups and urged them to notify their members about the legislation. I began to write regularly for a Web site I created, GreenIsTheNewRed.com. And I began speaking at law schools, conferences, churches, potlucks, punk rock shows—anywhere I could to raise awareness about the law and help stop it.

Months later, the law was rushed through the House of Representatives with only six members of congress in the room. Most lawmakers were breaking ground for a new memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr. when legislation was being passed that labeled King’s tactics—including nonviolent civil disobedience—as terrorism.

It was a major defeat, and for the corporations who supported the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, it was only the beginning. Since then, similar legislation has been introduced in many other states.

In Utah, a lawmaker said legislation is needed to target people like Tim Dechristopher, the University of Utah student who disrupted an oil and gas auction by bidding on parcels of land. In Tennessee, Rep. Frank Niceley argued before the general assembly for eco-terrorism legislation, saying, “Eco-terrorists are left-wing eco-greenies. It’s a different type of terrorism. They don’t have Osama Bin Laden leadin’ them.”

So how have these “eco-terrorism” laws been used? In California, four activists were arrested under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act for protesting animal experimentation outside of the experimenter’s home. Their indictment lists that they chanted, protested, made fliers, and wrote slogans on the ground in children’s sidewalk chalk. As I write this, they are awaiting trial.

For those who have been convicted as “terrorists,” the label follows them from the courtroom into prison. for example, Daniel McGowan was arrested in 2005 for his role in two arsons by the Earth Liberation Front. He targeted genetic engineering and a timber company that logged old-growth forests. In a court hearing, the lead prosecutor called the Earth Liberation Front a terrorist organization and compared the property destruction of McGowan and his codefendants to the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

McGowan pleaded guilty to his charges and was sentenced to prison as a terrorist. He is now incarcerated in a secretive prison facility on U.S. soil, called a communications management unit (CMU). He was transferred there without notice and without opportunity for appeal.

The CMUs radically restrict prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that rival, or exceed, the most restrictive facilities in the country, including the Supermax ADX-Florence. Inmates and guards at the CMUs call them “Little Guantanamo.” they have also been described as prisons for “second-tier” terrorists.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, these inmates “do not rise to the same degree of potential risk to national security” as other terrorism inmates. Most prisoners are Muslim, and the secretive prisons have also housed Andrew Stepanian, an animal rights activist convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” charges.

Through interviews with attorneys, family members, and a current prisoner, it is clear that these units have been created not for violent and dangerous “terrorists,” but for political cases the government would like to keep secret.

——————-

My experiences with the FBI pales in comparison to what many activists have endured, both during this “Green Scare” and in other eras of government repression. I have not been threatened with prison time, terrorism enhancement penalties, or anything like that. However, my experience has prompted the stark realization that the overly broad use of the word terrorism affects many more people than those who set foot in a courtroom.

Few activists will be visited by the FBI, even fewer will be arrested. The real purpose of all this—the FBI visits, the public relations campaigns, the legislation—is to instill fear and make everyday people afraid of speaking up for their beliefs. The scare-mongering has had what attorneys call a chilling effect: it has made everyday people feel as if they must choose between their activism and being labeled a terrorist, and that is not a choice anyone should have to make.

It can be unsettling and frightening to learn how far the government has gone to attack political activists, and sometimes I wonder if spreading this information simply makes more people afraid. But time and again, in dozens of venues, from the New York City Bar Association to anarchist bookstores, I have seen an incredible thing happen when people learn about these issues and then turn to their neighbors. Their conversations are never about how they are afraid; they are about how they are angry and want to take action.

The best way to handle the fear these scare tactics create, I learned, is to confront it head on. “Never turn your back on fear,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote. “It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.”

——————–

The leafleting case in Chicago was eventually dismissed, and we decided to move back to Texas. Kamber and I packed our few belongings and prepared for the journey home. I dreaded moving day. Not because of any attachment to the city, but because I did not want to walk downstairs, through the marble lobby with its Corinthian columns and Victorian couches, and enter Steve the Landlord’s office to turn in our keys. He knew, I thought. He must.

The building was old, but secure. The FBI agents did not kick down any doors when they visited our apartment. They flashed badges and were escorted inside. They probably told Steve that Kamber and I were suspected terrorists, and that this was a national security matter that needed urgent attention. Perhaps they showed him my photo, film noir style. Would he even buzz me into his office? I wondered. Would he ask me to slide the keys under the door, to keep me at a safe distance? Would he refuse to return my security deposit, because there was a “no terrorist” clause in the fine print of the lease?

I opened his door and walked up to his desk as he spoke with a couple of prospective tenants. I tried to silently slip the keys across the desk, but they jangled like jailer’s keys, and the sound of metal on wood echoed up into the vaulted ceiling. I turned, exhaled, and walked away. He called after me when I was almost to the doorway. Here it comes, I thought. Steve the Landlord is going to say how disappointed he is in both of us. How he is going to take custody of the dogs because they should not live with such terrorist scum.

“Hey, will,” he said. I turned to face him. “Give ’em hell.”

Support AlterNet by purchasing your copy of The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving The Planet through our partner, Powell’s, an independent bookstore.

Will Potter is an award-winning independent journalist based in Washington, DC. He has just released his first book, Green Is The New Red, from City Lights Books.

Countercurrents.org

The single greatest challenge facing our modern economic food chain is the insanely unnatural low cost of food to the consumer, making the simple and necessary act of eating dependent on food that is almost free. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil. We are gorging ourselves at the $1.99 all-you-can-eat oil buffet. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Eat, or Die Trying

For the most part of human history, the cost of eating was a brutal, hard day of death defying exertion. You found food or you died, and you probably died trying. As civilization advanced, the cost of food fell. Social organization added efficiencies to food gathering, freeing time to reinvest in technology, develop specialists, get drunk, or fight. Commerce grew, trade developed, and the production of food ceased to be simple individual effort, becoming pooled resources that traded food for other commodities in ever increasingly complex exchanges. This primitive separation of end user from producer in no way relieved the individual from contributing to the general pool of wealth – idle laggards still starved to death with nothing to trade in the markets for food. Whether you bartered in kind, or used some form of money, you still had to expend a hard life’s toil to eat. Again, many died trying.

This is what has essentially driven the pace of history; ever-creative ways to produce more food per unit of person labour. It worked well enough. People ate better, mortality rates improved, populations grew, and technology and specialized work gained from the surplus of labour that could be directed their way. In the western world, and in particular England, receding amounts of arable land were required to feed more and more people. By the end of the 13th century, land became fenced and enclosed in a crude form of assembly line privatization; surplus people were forced into small subsidiary “cottage” industries, or streamed by the thousands into the safety of larger communities and cities. The factory, and unemployment, was born. Starvation was no longer reserved for lazy n’er-do-wells and became the providence of the economically displaced. Human exertion and effort became unlinked from the land.

Of course, as private property displaced whole communities, the new landed parvenu aristocracies gained control of the lands complete suite of resources. These new “capitalists” drafted up the economically useless as modern workers, returned to the land now as wage slaves who toiled for meagre subsistence, exchanging the better part of their labour for wretched scraps at the edges of the growing marketplace. The landowner took the rest as personal wealth, which we call profit now. Technology advanced at greater rates and civilization picked up steam…literally.

In 1712, at the Conygree Coalworks in England, the local capitalist – Lord Dudley – was having a devil of a time improving his bottom line. Half-starved and wretched labourers slogged below the earth’s surface in claustrophobic blackness, hacking coal from stubborn seams under his private lands. The mines kept filling with water, drowning his workers and cutting into profits. At this time, a remarkable new device appeared saving the unhappy aristocrat from such frustrating declines in production. Thomas Newcomen had perfected his “atmospheric engine”, a steam propelled device that could pump the water out of the mines with only a handful of dimwitted attendants. Free from the prospect of drowning, workers could now beaver away at an increased rate (we call that productivity now), padding the pockets of the Dudley’s at a pace never before encountered. It was a miracle, and the beginning of the glorious Industrial Revolution. Another separation became enshrined between humans and the earth.

For the first time, human beings were considered as productive chattel and productivity the measure of increasing profits. Commerce exploded and people left the land in droves, crowding into cities of productive convenience where labour became plentiful and the distribution of goods, cheap. Food became one of those goods. The aristocracy of private ownership rejoiced at the gap between sustenance wages and profitable consumer goods. Machines provided economies of scale that allowed a growing middle class to expend only a part of their lives trying to eat, and the aristocrats – none at all.

Law followed. Growing and complex states began to learn how to utilize the expanding power of the marketplace. Trade laws, taxation, and growing defences of private capital grew. Economies of scale visited both the growing hordes of urbanized landless, as well as the increasing foothills of private capital. Conglomerates of vested interests pooled resources, dragging legal scripture behind them. The earliest known “corporation” was founded in the 14th century in Sweden, however the concept of a legally protected business venture with an infinite life of its own quickly spread. By 1602, with the Dutch East India Company established in Amsterdam, the “conglomeration of vested interest” became the principle means by which sophisticated nation states launched the age of exploration and colonization.

Not since the advent of the steel plough – when tilling fields moved from dragging a sturdy stick across hard land – had the productivity of food taken such a monumental leap. Where once an individual could feed only himself and his dependents, now organized teams of agricultural workers employing wondrous new machines could feed dozens, and then hundreds of humans with ever decreasing human effort. For the emergent middle classes, less and less time was required working to feed one’s self. With the falling cost of food, more and more people could spend their time and money on other goods or pursuits. Machine made clothes, machine made furnishings, machine made gewgaws of all manner and description (we call that consumerism today). In a very real sense, western humanity was liberating itself from the tyranny of essential sustenance, and investing the freedom in greater liberty – and pointless, mass produced crap. Snow globes sold like hot cakes. Exactly like hot cakes.

The global food chain became organized thus; grow it, ship it to a central location, distribute it back to regional and then local markets and retailers, sell it to hungry consumers. At each step along the way, “value” was added to calories, where value meant profit. Where little value was realized there was malnutrition and starvation, where lots of value was available, there became increasing participation by corporations. By their nature, corporations squeegeed out the inefficiencies and brought increasing amounts of capital to bear. No profit, no food. Or snow globes. As the Industrial Revolution gripped the earth, colonization and mercantilism gave way to capitalism. Market places expanded and stratified, layers of value added enterprise employed less and less people to produce more and more food. Horses gave way to tractors; local farm markets gave way to dedicated food retail chains. Rail lines and steamships moved food across nations, continents, and the globe. Economies of scale at every step lowered the cost of eating along with everything else.

As the 20th century clicked forward, for the burgeoning masses of wealthy western nations, cheap food became a right, and then just simply assumed. Poverty and squalor remained the providence of the economically marginal, as it always had and in that sense, little had changed. However, for increasing members of affluent western societies, prodigious amounts of capital moved away from food production and into all the things that make powerful capitalist states breathless nations of discretionary consumers. Rich meant less and less time feeding one’s self, and more and more time accumulating stuff.

In 1914, western humanity inexplicably took time out to spend three decades denuding the earth of healthy, well-fed men, women, and children. A blind and irrational invisible hand swatted from the earth about 200 million or so. All these human folk had to be properly fed and supplied prior to their excruciating death, and industry celebrated by rising to the challenge. Machines leapt into the breach in a symbiotic reciprocating engine of feeding and killing on a truly industrial scale. “Total war” entered modern lexicon. Airplanes moved food and bombs in alternating waves. With the entire continent of Europe momentarily out of the food making business, America and good old Yankee know how took up the slack. America was an island fortress, island as in thousands of miles away by sea. Transport logistics was born; convoys of hundreds of specially designed ships moved back and forth across the oceans. The costs were staggering, food went short, and rationing was imposed on the rich and middle classes. For the last time in history, the cost of food rose to life and death again. And then peace broke out.

The next great step forward in food history came at the close of global hostilities in mid century. Having invested the no-cost-too-high capital of military supply and distribution, the ships, trains, trucks, and airplanes manufactured in the thousands were returned to civil use. Private, corporate industry vacuumed up legions of military logistics specialists. Transport and distribution costs collapsed around the world. The “container” ship was born. At the same time, complex munitions processes moved into synthetic, inorganic fertilizer production that dramatically increased crop yields. Incredible plenty drove prices down at the same time transportation costs fell. Abundance rejoiced. Farmers went broke. In their place arose massive agricultural conglomerates that vacuumed up the great diversity of the world’s local farms, replacing them with hectares upon hectares of dedicated crops, mechanically worked, industrially fertilized, and hooked by rail, sea, and air to far-flung markets offering the maximum return on investment.

Welcome to the Machines

Today, entire heartlands of biodiversity, countless expanses of small rural farms and communities, have been purchased by syndicates of corporate finance wizards from the urban bowels of Wall Street. Banks, hedge funds, and trusts receive billions of dollars worldwide from the accounts of thousands of scattered investors – most unwittingly – through pension funds and other retirement and savings vehicles. None of whom would recognize a carrot in the ground if it kicked them in the groin. Their only task is to maximize their clients return on investment. And food is a reliable investment it turns out. Once assembled and sold forward to international agri-businesses, hundreds of hectares are mechanically and scientifically ploughed under and replanted with “monocultures” of single crops. Electronically monitored machines prepare and renew the soil with mountains of synthetic fertilizer, more machines plant the crop, and more machines harvest it.

The crop is delivered to massive central terminals by rail and truck, where it is rerouted towards regional complexes and ports. Sometimes travelling the breadth of a continent, and sometimes travelling the expanse of the sea on huge ships designed for the purpose, the happy crop is delivered to yet more terminals where it is assembled, packaged, and labelled with paper, tin, and other things – all of which arrive in exactly the same way – for sale to food distributors. Large retail grocery outlets contract to have the increasingly angry crop loaded on yet more trucks, rail, or ships, after which it is finally delivered to urban hubs of people in the form of canned creamed corn, lined up on brightly lit shelves and slathered in marketing. Two cans for under a buck and a hat for your kid.

Millions of western homemakers in mini vans will spend twice that on fuel to drive to the store; pouring out of their urban sprawl like microbes, leaving behind their suburban castles, hot tubs, motorbikes, and heated driveways, bitching about the cost of food the entire way. They will spend twice what they can eat and throw out the rest. They will have money left for IPods and plasma TV’s. Absolutely none of them will toil from sun up to sun set for the single purpose of eating. None. A can of creamed corn from the other side of the planet for nothing more than a few moments worth of inconvenience.

The cost of food is almost zilch.

Humanity may have landed a man on the moon, but nothing compares with two cans of creamed corn for under a buck. It’s a freaking miracle. A miracle when one considers all the open palms that creamed corn had to pass through from seed to plate, throwing off profit into every sweaty one. Food is now corporate, and driven by the bottom lines of dozens of invisible enablers, corporate charters all regulated by law and designed for no other reason than the maximization of each shareholders value. Built atop every golden kernel of corn is a golden edifice of economic interconnectivity.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, US households may have spent as much as a third of their disposable income on food at the dawn of the corporate age in the early 20th century. By 1933, that number had shrunk to 25%. Well into the post war era, 20%. When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, 15%. Iraq war – 10%. Economic meltdown…9.7%.

Food, clearly, is too big to fail.

Consider then, that all the efficiencies that are the miracle of cheap food rest entirely on technology and mechanization. Consider further, that each and every technological piece depends on – in its turn – nothing more substantive than gooey black oil. No oil, no food. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil.

But of course, oil is infinite – or so we think. We don’t actually believe that, but we think it just the same. To a certain point, we are correct. When we worry about oil, we worry about it running out, which is in all probability not going to happen. However, while we fret away our time worrying about the earth’s supply of fossil fuels we completely miss the point. We will never run out of oil if only because the cost of slogging it out of the planet will become so exorbitant, we may never get a chance to pump that last, precious barrel. As the price of oil rises, and those costs are passed along the conga line of civilization, the real question becomes the effect those rising costs will have on everything. Everything, including creamed corn and snow globes.

The oil community has a name for this – peak oil. Peak oil is the place on the graphs where the easy, cheap to access oil runs out, and there is nothing but expensive stuff ahead. While all agree that the oil supply bell curve is real (the “Hubbard curve”), and that we are very near to conquering the air thin summit of said Hubbard curve, there is dispute about when the actual downward part of the trip will begin. Pessimists argue that we are there now, while sunny optimists say we won’t reach it for years…say about 2015. 2015 as in five years from now, when we will in all probability be bitching and screaming about spending eight or nine percent of our disposable income on food.

Let Them Eat Really Expensive Cake

The cost of food will rise with the cost of oil and the problem with that problem is that our technology won’t save us. Food in the ground can be made cheaper by simply making more of it. However, the issue is that all that food is way over there, and all of us rich westerners live way over here, tightly packed into teeming centers of urban sprawl. Between our food and us is a complex system of oil dependent logistics. Planes, trains and automobiles; combine harvesters, container ships, and mini vans.

Quick fact: it can take as much as 50 barrels of oil to produce a single calorie of food energy. Healthy people need about 2100 calories a day. If that seems ridiculous, consider that the average American calorie travels over 1500 miles, or that nearly 70% of seafood products are imported. Nearly 10% of beef stocks are also imported, and all those rump roasts require 35 parts of energy to produce a single unit of beef food energy. Grain is grown in one place, cows in another, fertilizer in another, and mountains of manure are collected and shipped to yet another. Think about all the things that have to happen, and all the places and people your Big Mac passes through in order for you to eat for under five bucks. Think about how many of these people, places, and things are powered by oil in some way. All of them – including you, the consumer. You don’t need to be an economist to get it; as the price of oil rises, the cost of food will keep in step. One only need think about it.

Oil prices must rise, and food prices must rise with them. What does that mean? It means that we will have less disposable income because we have to eat. We just have to, and so we will have to pay the price no matter what. We will have less money for other things. Less for cars. Less for plasma TV’s. Less for Target, American Eagle, and Home Depot, all of whom will have their own oil/price issues. Our growing food expense, which is not negotiable, will cannibalize our spending on everything else. If you are thinking at all about it at this point, you will quickly realize that you will be working more for food, and less for gewgaws. America is a gewgaw nation, and so you are also starting to realize that even more jobs will disappear, more companies fail, more banks will go broke. Banks that aren’t in the food business at least.

All that technology, all those machines and synthetics and drive and energy and Yankee know how that are directly responsible for food production are not owned by the humans that depend on them. Every link in the modern food chain is owned and operated by legal bundles of contracts and agreement called corporations. Absolutely every one of which is required by law to increase profits and return on investment. Not one is going to take a “haircut” on food. Not one cares who eats, and who does not. Instead, guaranteed an end user who must purchase by a separate law of nature, all will simply pass along the costs, no matter what they become. Falling purchases of calories will simply be made up by increased margins from smaller and smaller pools of rich folks who have the wherewithal to pay. History will regress and retrace its steps, back to times when great swaths of humanity spent the better portion of their lives simply trying to eat. Or more correctly, paying to eat.

For several generations now we have taken food for granted, its collapsing cost ensuring that it became a small but necessary evil every grocery day. Spending even 10% of our hard work on the necessity of food was too much for us. Our scorecards are measured in the amount of useless crap we can consume, free of the burden of eating. The sudden reversal of that historic trend, and its effects on every other facet of our consumer societies, is indeed the greatest challenge facing us today. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Think about it.

Aetius Romulous, Historian, Economist, Accountant, Writer, and blood sucking CEO. Born at the wrong end of the Baby Boom Generation – too late to enjoy the ride, too early to have missed it, and stuck in the middle with the mess. Aetius writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution. t’s a living.

http://screambucket.com/aetiusromulous@rogers.com

Patrick O. Brown, a Stanford University biochemist, has changed science twice by giving stuff away. In the early 1990s Brown invented the DNA microarray, a tool that measures how cells make use of their DNA; he then showed researchers how to make their own, transforming genetic research. In 2000 he was one of three scientists who launched a free, online scientific journal called the Public Library of Science (PLOS); it has already broken the stranglehold of $200-a-year scientific publications like Science and Nature.

Now he is tackling an even bigger foe. Over the next 18 months Brown, 55, will take a break from his normal scientific work (finding out how a small number of genes are translated into a much larger number of proteins) in order to change the way the world farms and eats. He wants to put an end to animal farming, or at least put a significant dent in our global hunger for cows, pigs and chickens.

Brown, who has been a vegetarian for more than 30 years and a vegan for 5, notes that while livestock accounts for only 9% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, it accounts for 37% of human-caused methane (most of it emanating from the animals’ digestive systems) and 65% of human-caused nitrous oxide, according to the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Both are far better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, meaning that cows, chickens and their ilk have a larger greenhouse effect than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world.

The green cognoscenti are choosing animal husbandry as their new enemy. Jonathan Safran Foer, the bestselling novelist, has published articles declaring that he is raising his kids vegetarian because of the environmental consequences of meat farming and that if people are going to eat meat, they should consider eating dogs. Lord Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics, told the Independent that the West would have to become more vegetarian in order to combat global warming; without change in present trends, meat and milk output will double by 2050.

Brown brings scientific clout to the debate–he’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–and a realization that the arguments for change need to be economic, not just ethical. Growing crops to feed animals requires a lot more land, energy and fertilizer than growing them to feed people, he says: 70% of the land that was once Amazon rain forest is dedicated to grazing. Even if scientists figure out how to make milk with stem cells, it’s unlikely they will be able to create milk with the same efficiency as they can corn or wheat.

“There’s absolutely no possibility that 50 years from now this system will be operating as it does now,” says Brown. “One approach is to just wait, and either we’ll deal with it or we’ll be toast. I want to approach this as a solvable problem.” Solution: “Eliminate animal farming on planet Earth.”

Diets are malleable. Thirty years ago nobody drank high fructose corn syrup. Now it’s a dominant part of the American diet. As Western diets move into China, people there are eating more beef. Brown argues that the key to removing meat from diets is to give foodmakers an incentive to make yummy vegetable-based fare. If vendors push the new foods, palates will follow.

Incentive? Brown thinks if he can convince food manufacturers that the costs of selling meat are too high, and rising, they’ll come around. Seemingly tiny changes in economics could make animal farming a lot less affordable. At the moment farmers around the world are arguing they should be immune from taxes and ceilings on greenhouse gases; if they are not exempt, the cost of meat will go up. Raising the price of water would have the same effect. It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce a liter of milk.

Brown plans to spend the first six months of his project hammering out economic models with colleagues, illustrating ways that animal farming is likely to become onerously expensive. Then he’ll take a year off to work with famous chefs and food researchers on tastier vegetarian dishes, and to develop a strategy to tackle the political, economic, legal, behavioral and food-security issues he’s sure to face.

If Brown can work it so that McDonald’s puts less meat in each Big Mac, that could count as a win. Until now little research has gone into making foods friendly to the environment.

“If you’re a big food producer now, this is absolutely inevitable,” he says. “You’d better start thinking ahead. You’d better seriously start investing and trying to find alternatives in order to stay alive.”

Republished from Forbes.com

Taxes can do a lot of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and the military. But that’s not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have saved many lives – not only the lives of people who are discouraged from smoking as much as they would if cigarettes were cheap, but also the lives of others who spend less time passively inhaling smoke.

No reasonable person would want to abolish the tax on cigarettes. Unless, perhaps, they were proposing banning cigarettes altogether – as New York City is doing with transfats served by restaurants.

A tax on sodas containing sugar has also been under consideration, by Governor Paterson among others. In view of our obesity epidemic, and the extra burden it places on our health care system – not to mention the problems it causes on a crowded New York subway when your neighbor can’t fit into a single seat – it’s a reasonable proposal.

But in all these moves against tobacco, transfats and sodas, we’ve been ignoring the cow in the room.

That’s right, cow. We don’t eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of cigarettes, transfats or sugary drinks. 

First, eating red meat is likely to kill you. Large studies have shown that the daily consumption of red meat increases the risk that you will die prematurely of heart disease or bowel cancer. This is now beyond serious scientific dispute. When the beef industry tries to deny the evidence, it is just repeating what the tobacco industry did 30 years ago.

Second, we have laws that ban cruelty to animals. Unfortunately in the states in which most animals are raised for meat, the agribusiness lobby is so powerful that it has carved out exemptions to the usual laws against cruelty.

The exemptions allow producers to crowd chickens, pigs and calves in stinking sheds, never letting them go outside in fresh air and sunlight, often confining them so closely that they can’t even stretch their limbs or turn around. Debeaking – cutting through the sensitive beak of a young chick with a hot blade – is standard in the egg industry.

Undercover investigations repeatedly turn up new scandals – downed cows being dragged to slaughter, workers hitting pigs with steel pipes or playing football with live chickens. We may not be able to improve the laws in those farming states, but taxes on meat would discourage people from supporting these cruel practices.

Third, industrial meat production wastes food – we feed the animals vast quantities of grains and soybeans, and they burn up most of the nutritional value of these crops just living and breathing and developing bones and other unpalatable body parts. We get back only a fraction of the food value we put into them.

That puts unnecessary pressure on our croplands and causes food prices to rise all over the world. Converting corn to biofuel has been criticized because it raises food prices for the world’s poor, but seven times as much grain gets fed to animals as is made into biofuel.

Fourth, agricultural runoff — much of it from livestock production, or from the fertilizers used to grow the grain fed to the livestock — is the biggest single source of pollution of the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the EPA. A meat tax would be an important step towards cleaner rivers. By reducing the amount of nitrogen that runs off fields in the Midwest into the Mississippi, it would also stop the vast ?dead zone? that forms in the Gulf of Mexico each year.

The clincher is that taxing meat would be a highly effective way of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Here’s just how bad eating meat is for global warming.

Many people think that buying locally produced food is a good way to reduce their carbon footprint. But the average American would do more for the planet by going vegetarian just one day per week than by switching to a totally local diet.

In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization surprised many people when it produced a report showing that livestock are responsible for more emissions than all forms of transportation combined. It’s now clear that that report seriously underestimated the contribution that livestock — especially ruminant animals like cattle and sheep – are making to global warming.

As a more recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown, over the critical next 20 years, the methane these animals produce will be almost three times as potent in warming the planet as the FAO report assumed.

Meat-eaters impose costs on others, and the more meat they eat, the greater the costs.

They push up our health insurance premiums, increase Medicare and Medicaid costs for taxpayers, pollute our rivers, threaten the survival of fishing communities in the Gulf of Mexico, push up food prices for the world’s poor, and accelerate climate change.

Red meat is the worst for global warming, but a tax on red meat alone would merely push meat-eaters to chicken, and British animal welfare expert Professor John Webster has described the intensive chicken industry as “the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.?

So let’s start with a 50% tax on the retail value of all meat, and see what difference that makes to present consumption habits. If it is not enough to bring about the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to go higher.

Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University, the author of “Animal Liberation” and the author, with Jim Masion, of “The Ethics of What We Eat.”

Autumn is a time of abundance – mushrooms, hazelnuts, red and orange carrots, potatoes, beets, parsnips, fennel bulbs, apples, squashes, pears, kale, leeks – and eating fresh, local, seasonal food is easy and appealing. Converting to a diet that is predominantly local may appear daunting, however. Who really wants to eliminate the avocados, citrus fruit and chocolate that come to us from sunny climates?

Yet when we explore the origins of our food, we may learn that our choices involve considerable use of fossil fuels through transportation and we may wish to use our dollars on food that is produced closer to home. The push to “eat local” has far less impact on the environment compared with eating lower on the food chain.

At the same time, some fans of eating within a certain radius have not done their homework regarding the production of specific foods. Others are simply marketing groups that fail to tell us the whole story behind the feeding of animals used for meat or milk production.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh did a comprehensive study of the carbon footprint of food. The study was published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal and won the annual award for “Best Paper on Environmental Policy.” Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews discovered that, by eliminating meat just one day per week per year, you would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the same amount as if you reduced your driving by 1,000 miles. Going vegan is the equivalent of driving 8,000 miles less per year.

A central fact that some advocates of eating locally do not grasp is that eating chicken, beef or other animals involves the use of grains and beans that were transported hundreds and thousands of miles (even when they are partly grass-fed). While the cow may have been raised, and even slaughtered, close to where you live, its fodder was transported great distances, using plenty of fossil fuels or other types of energy. And as we know, it takes many pounds of the protein from grains and beans to produce a pound of beef protein.

So if you think that eating local animals or farmed fish is a vote for the environment, think again. Your better choice is to eat locally baked whole grain bread and a steaming bowl of lentil or pea soup, comprised of several ingredients from the Prairies.

Tofu manufactured on Powell Street in Vancouver or in Sooke, BC, involves far fewer transported soybeans than the equivalent weight of meat from a locally raised cow. Furthermore, beyond the feed, cows from the range near Kamloops, BC, may be trucked to feedlots in Alberta to be fattened and killed, with the carcasses later trucked back to BC supermarkets. And can wild fish that swam hundreds of kilometres be considered local when caught within 100 miles? The story can be complex and uncovering the truth may require expert detective work.

Here are a few possibilities to bring you closer to the origins of your food:

• Explore farmers’ markets.
• Seek out community-supported agriculture (e.g. www.ladybugorganics.com).
• Take a weekend country drive to discover farm gate sales.
• Start a backyard or balcony garden; plant herbs on the windowsill.
• Grow garlic, kale, mustard greens, turnips, cabbage, spinach and Swiss chard outdoors well into winter. A hotbox or greenhouse allows plants to flourish in colder weather.
• Walk around your neighbourhood to find community gardens.
• Choose local produce at supermarkets and request that they buy locally.
• Buy seasonal foods in bulk and preserve or freeze.

Reference

www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2009/winter/wheres-the-beef.shtml

Vesanto Melina is a registered dietitian and author of a number of nutrition classics, including Becoming Vegetarian, Becoming Vegan, Raising Vegetarian Children and the Food Allergy Survival Guide. To book a personal consultation with Vesanto in Langley, call 604-882-6782. www.nutrispeak.com

Reposted from Common Ground.

What could be more American than a glass of milk? Cow’s milk, that is. In light of this common perception, the time is long overdue to add the milk mustache to that ever-growing list of American myths. Human beings are not designed to drink any milk except human milk (only during infancy, of course). As you’ll see below, consuming dairy products — milk, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, etc. — is not green and it’s not healthy.

It’s also a nightmare for the cows themselves. Here’s a little of how the folks at GoVeg describe it: “The 9 million cows living on dairy farms in the United States spend most of their lives in large sheds or on feces-caked mud lots, where disease is rampant. Cows raised for their milk are repeatedly impregnated. Their babies are taken away so that humans can drink the milk intended for the calves. When their exhausted bodies can no longer provide enough milk, they are sent to slaughter and ground up for hamburgers.”

*Living dairy-free has never been easier…so here’s a little motivation to get you on the greener, cruelty-free, not-milk track.

Environmental Reasons to Avoid Milk

1. Dairy cows produce waste.

Lots of waste. In fact, your average dairy cow produces 120 pounds of waste every day — equal to that of more than two dozen people, but without toilets, sewers, or treatment plants.

2. Let me repeat: Dairy cows produce lots and lots of waste (and greenhouse gases).

California produces one-fifth of the country’s total milk supply. According to MilkSucks.com, “in the Central Valley of California, the cows produce as much excrement as a city of 21 million people, and even a smallish farm of 200 cows will produce as much nitrogen as in the sewage from a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people, according to a U.S. Senate report on animal waste.”

3. Milk production ultimately leads to climate change.

The dairy industry is an extension of the beef industry (used-up dairy cows are sent to the slaughterhouse after an average of four years, one-fifth their normal life expectancy) which means it plays a major role in creating climate change. Here’s the equation: The dairy industry uses cows before passing them on to be slaughtered by the beef industry which is now recognized as an environmental nightmare. “According to a UN report,” writes Brian Merchant, “cows are leading contributors to climate change … Accounting for putting out 18% of the world’s carbon dioxide, cows emit more greenhouse gases than cars, planes, and all other forms of transportation combined.” That means the industry of exploiting all cows — including dairy cows — involves destructive practices like deforestation and polluting offshoots like runoff.

4. Milk often contains unwanted ingredients.

Under current industrial methods, cow’s milk is often a toxic bovine brew of man-made ingredients like bio-engineered hormones, antibiotics (55% of U.S. antibiotics are fed to livestock), and pesticides — all of which are bad for us and the environment. For example, unintentional pesticide poisonings kill an estimated 355,000 people globally each year. In addition the drugs pumped into livestock often re-visit us in our water supply.

Which brings us to…

Health Reasons to Avoid Milk

5. Cow’s milk is for cows.

The biochemical make-up of cow’s milk is perfectly suited to turn a 65-pound newborn calf into a 400-pound cow in one year. It contains, for example, three times more protein and seven times more mineral content while human milk has 10 times as much essential fatty acids, three times as much selenium, and half the calcium. Some may like cow’s milk but drinking it is both unnecessary and potentially harmful.

6. Milk is actually a poor source for dietary calcium.

Humans, like cows, get all the calcium they need from a plant-based diet.

7. Contrary to popular belief, milk may increase the likelihood of osteoporosis.

It is still widely accepted that the calcium in dairy products will strengthen our bones and help prevent osteoporosis, but studies show that foods originating from animal sources (like milk) make the blood acidic. When this occurs, the blood leeches calcium from the bones to increase alkalinity. While this works wonders for the pH balance of your blood, it sets your calcium-depleted bones up for osteoporosis. As explained by John Robbins, “The only research that even begins to suggest that the consumption of dairy products might be helpful [in preventing osteoporosis] has been paid for by the National Dairy Council itself.”

8. Milk makes you fat.

In 2005, the Harvard School of Public Health had this to say on the consumption of dairy products: “Three glasses of low-fat milk add more than 300 calories a day. This is a real issue for the millions of Americans who are trying to control their weight. What’s more, millions of Americans are lactose intolerant, and even small amounts of milk or dairy products give them stomach aches, gas, or other problems.”

It’s easy to go dairy-free. Here are 7 easy vegan recipes to set you off on the right path.

Reposted from AlterNet.

Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us – ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair’s landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can’t even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming – our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.

And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous. A series of recalls involving contaminated foods this year – including an outbreak of salmonella from tainted peanuts that killed at least eight people and sickened 600 – has consumers rightly worried about the safety of their meals. A food system – from seed to 7‑Eleven – that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America’s obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. “The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us,” says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). (See pictures of what the world eats.)

Some Americans are heeding such warnings and working to transform the way the country eats – ranchers and farmers who are raising sustainable food in ways that don’t bankrupt the earth. Documentaries like the scathing Food Inc. and the work of investigative journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan are reprising Sinclair’s work, awakening a sleeping public to the uncomfortable realities of how we eat. Change is also coming from the very top. First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House garden has so far yielded more than 225 lb. of organic produce – and tons of powerful symbolism. But hers is still a losing battle. Despite increasing public awareness, sustainable agriculture, while the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, remains a tiny enterprise: according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically. Sustainable food is also pricier than conventional food and harder to find. And while large companies like General Mills have opened organic divisions, purists worry that the very definition of sustainability will be co-opted as a result. (See pictures of urban farming around the world.)

But we don’t have the luxury of philosophizing about food. With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil – which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills – our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy – demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 – but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs – and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants – and as every farmer knows, if you don’t take care of your land, it can’t take care of you.

See 10 things to buy during the recession.

See the top 10 food trends of 2008.

The Downside of Cheap
For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you’ve never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat. According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn. Corn is king on the American farm, with production passing 12 billion bu. annually, up from 4 billion bu. as recently as 1970. When we eat a cheeseburger, a Chicken McNugget, or drink soda, we’re eating the corn that grows on vast, monocrop fields in Midwestern states like Iowa.

But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized – both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop – at least until corn ethanol skewed the market – artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 – a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman. (See the 10 worst fast food meals.)

So what’s wrong with cheap food and cheap meat – especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don’t receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories – some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s – but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it’s no surprise we’re so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.

Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals. No one doubts the power of chemical fertilizer to pull more crop from a field. American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990. But the quantity of that fertilizer is flat-out scary: more than 10 million tons for corn alone – and nearly 23 million for all crops. When runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what’s known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year, and around the world, there are nearly 400 similar dead zones. Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

The food industry’s degradation of animal life, of course, isn’t limited to fish. Though we might still like to imagine our food being raised by Old MacDonald, chances are your burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals – 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs – are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren’t widgets with legs. They’re living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure go?

Pound for pound, a pig produces approximately four times the amount of waste a human does, and what factory farms do with that mess gets comparatively little oversight. Most hog waste is disposed of in open-air lagoons, which can overflow in heavy rain and contaminate nearby streams and rivers. “This creek that we used to wade in, that creek that our parents could drink out of, our kids can’t even play in anymore,” says Jayne Clampitt, a farmer in Independence, Iowa, who lives near a number of hog farms.

To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we’re breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year – a figure that’s almost certainly higher now. “I don’t think CAFOs would be able to function as they do now without the widespread use of antibiotics,” says Robert Martin, who was the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

See more pictures of what the world eats.

See photos from a grocery store auction.

The livestock industry argues that estimates of antibiotics in food production are significantly overblown. Resistance “is the result of human use and not related to veterinary use,” according to Kristina Butts, the manager of legislative affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. But with wonder drugs losing their effectiveness, it makes sense to preserve them for as long as we can, and that means limiting them to human use as much as possible. “These antibiotics are not given to sick animals,” says Representative Louise Slaughter, who is sponsoring a bill to limit antibiotic use on farms. “It’s a preventive measure because they are kept in pretty unspeakable conditions.”

Such a measure would get at a symptom of the problem but not at the source. Just as the burning of fossil fuels that is causing global warming requires more than a tweaking of mileage standards, the manifold problems of our food system require a comprehensive solution. “There should be a recognition that what we are doing is unsustainable,” says Martin. And yet, still we must eat. So what can we do? (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)

Getting It Right
If a factory farm is hell for an animal, then Bill Niman’s seaside ranch in Bolinas, Calif., an hour north of San Francisco, must be heaven. The property’s cliffside view over the Pacific Ocean is worth millions, but the black Angus cattle that Niman and his wife Nicolette Hahn Niman raise keep their eyes on the ground, chewing contentedly on the pasture. Grass – and a trail of hay that Niman spreads from his truck periodically – is all the animals will eat during the nearly three years they’ll spend on the ranch. That all-natural, noncorn diet – along with the intensive, individual care that the Nimans provide their animals – produces beef that many connoisseurs consider to be among the best in the world. But for Niman, there is more at stake than just a good steak. He believes that his way of raising farm animals – in the open air, with no chemicals or drugs and with maximum care – is the only truly sustainable method and could be a model for a better food system. “What we need in this country is a completely different way of raising animals for food,” says Hahn Niman, a former attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice. “This needs to be done in the right way.”

The Nimans like to call what they do “beyond organic,” and there are some signs that consumers are beginning to catch up. This November, California voters approved a ballot proposition that guarantees farm animals enough space to lie down, stand up and turn around. Worldwide, organic food – a sometimes slippery term but on the whole a practice more sustainable than conventional food – is worth more than $46 billion. That’s still a small slice of the overall food pie, but it’s growing, even in a global recession. “There is more pent-up demand for organic than there is production,” says Bill Wolf, a co-founder of the organic-food consultancy Wolf DiMatteo and Associates. (Watch TIME’s video “The New Frugality: The Organic Gardener.”)

So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It’s clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down – a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million – with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

It’s that very efficiency that’s led to the problems and is in turn spurring a backlash, reflected not just in the growth of farmers’ markets or the growing involvement of big corporations in organics but also in the local-food movement, in which restaurants and large catering services buy from suppliers in their areas, thereby improving freshness, supporting small-scale agriculture and reducing the so-called food miles between field and plate. That in turn slashes transportation costs and reduces the industry’s carbon footprint.

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits – and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades – that’s hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren’t the enemy – and they deserve real help. We’ve transformed the essential human profession – growing food – into an industry like any other. “We’re hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm,” says Hahn Niman. “We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it’s enjoyable work.”

See pictures of the global food crisis.

See pictures of the world’s most polluted places.

One model for how the new paradigm could work is Niman Ranch, a larger operation that Bill Niman founded in the 1990s, before he left in 2007. (By his own admission, he’s a better farmer than he is a businessman.) The company has knitted together hundreds of small-scale farmers into a network that sells all-natural pork, beef and lamb to retailers and restaurants. In doing so, it leverages economies of scale while letting the farmers take proper care of their land and animals. “We like to think of ourselves as a force for a local-farming community, not as a large corporation,” says Jeff Swain, Niman Ranch’s CEO.

Other examples include the Mexican-fast-food chain Chipotle, which now sources its pork from Niman Ranch and gets its other meats and much of its beans from natural and organic sources. It’s part of a commitment that Chipotle founder Steve Ells made years ago, not just because sustainable ingredients were better for the planet but because they tasted better too – a philosophy he calls Food with Integrity. It’s not cheap for Chipotle – food makes up more than 32% of its costs, the highest in the fast-food industry. But to Ells, the taste more than compensates, and Chipotle’s higher prices haven’t stopped the company’s rapid growth, from 16 stores in 1998 to over 900 today. “We put a lot of energy into finding farmers who are committed to raising better food,” says Ells. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Bon Appétit Management Company, a caterer based in Palo Alto, Calif., takes that commitment even further. The company sources as much of its produce as possible from within 150 miles of its kitchens and gets its meat from farmers who eschew antibiotics. Bon Appétit also tries to influence its customers’ habits by nudging them toward greener choices. That includes campaigns to reduce food waste, in part by encouraging servers at its kitchens to offer smaller, more manageable portions. (The USDA estimates that Americans throw out 14% of the food we buy, which means that much of our record-breaking harvests ends up in the garbage.) And Bon Appétit supports a low-carbon diet, one that uses less meat and dairy, since both have a greater carbon footprint than fruit, vegetables and grain. The success of the overall operation demonstrates that sustainable food can work at an institutional scale bigger than an élite restaurant, a small market or a gourmet’s kitchen – provided customers support it. “Ultimately it’s going to be consumer demand that will cause change, not Washington,” says Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appétit’s co-founder. (See pictures of two farms in Nebraska.)

How willing are consumers to rethink the way they shop for – and eat – food? For most people, price will remain the biggest obstacle. Organic food continues to cost on average several times more than its conventional counterparts, and no one goes to farmers’ markets for bargains. But not all costs can be measured by a price tag. Once you factor in crop subsidies, ecological damage and what we pay in health-care bills after our fatty, sugary diet makes us sick, conventionally produced food looks a lot pricier.

What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that’s to quit thinking big. We already eat four times as much meat and dairy as the rest of the world, and there’s not a nutritionist on the planet who would argue that 24‑oz. steaks and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes are what any person needs to stay alive. “The idea is that healthy and good-tasting food should be available to everyone,” says Hahn Niman. “The food system should be geared toward that.”

Whether that happens will ultimately come down to all of us, since we have the chance to choose better food three times a day (or more often, if we’re particularly hungry). It’s true that most of us would prefer not to think too much about where our food comes from or what it’s doing to the planet – after all, as Chipotle’s Ells points out, eating is not exactly a “heady intellectual event.” But if there’s one difference between industrial agriculture and the emerging alternative, it’s that very thing: consciousness. Niman takes care with each of his cattle, just as an organic farmer takes care of his produce and smart shoppers take care with what they put in their shopping cart and on the family dinner table. The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty – it’s based on selective forgetting. But what we eat – how it’s raised and how it gets to us – has consequences that can’t be ignored any longer.

- With reporting by Rebecca Kaplan / New York

The original version of this article mistakenly referred to the Bon Appétit Management Company as the Bon Appétit Food Management Company

See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

The Tale of Two Cattle
How did your hamburger get to your plate – and what did it eat along the way? The journey of beef illustrates the great American food chain

ORGANIC (1% of all cattle)
This is the way all beef used to be raised – and how some people still imagine it is. Bill Niman tends a small herd with one of the lightest hands in the business and produces what Bay Area chefs swear is unparalleled beef

Diet: Grass
Niman’s cows eat only grass, along with a smattering of hay. That’s the normal diet for cattle. Their rumen, a digestive organ, can break down grasses we’d find inedible

Supplements: None
Niman gives no supplements whatsoever to his cattle – no drugs, no hormones, no additives. That’s not ironclad for organic beef – some companies might use antimicrobials – but generally the animals are supplement-free

Environmental Impact: Living with the Land
To prevent his ranch from becoming overgrazed, Niman shifts his cattle around the land, ensuring that the grass has time to recover between feedings. The result is a surprisingly low-impact hamburger, since grass doesn’t need chemical fertilizer to grow and its presence helps prevent soil erosion. There’s no need to clean up manure – with Niman’s low cattle density, the waste just fertilizes the land

Human Impact: The Omega Effect
Beef has a bad rep among nutritionists, but that might be partly unfair for grass-fed steaks. According to research from the University of California, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids than conventional beef

CONVENTIONAL (99% of all cattle)
The vast majority of all American cattle start off on open ranges, but that’s where the similarity to their organic cousins ends. They’re shifted after a few months to the tight quarters of an industrial feedlot, to be fattened up as fast as possible

Diet: Grass and corn
Conventional cattle feed off grass pasture for the first several months, but at the feedlot, they’re switched to a heavily corn-based diet, which makes them gain weight faster but also makes them get sick more easily

Supplements: Chemicals
In part to help them survive the crowded conditions of feedlots, where infections can spread fast, conventional cattle are given antibiotics in their feed, and sometimes growth hormones, bloods and fats

Environmental Impact: Waste
A 1,000-head feedlot produces up to 280 tons of manure a week, and the smell can be powerful. All that feed corn requires millions of tons of fertilizer and, ultimately, a lot of petroleum

Human Impact: Fat Attack
Feeding corn to cattle for the last several months of their lives doesn’t just get them fatter faster; it also changes the quality of the beef. Corn helps produce that marbled taste many of us love, but it can result in beef that is higher in fat – helping to fuel the obesity epidemic

Reprinted from TIME.

The Oceans are like the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. As long as it was alive it laid a golden egg each day but then the greedy farmer decided to kill it to get all the gold inside and found nothing and the Goose laid no more golden eggs because it was dead.

For centuries, the oceans have fed humankind. But in the last century, human greed has raped and pillaged oceanic eco-systems remorsefully with an ecological ignorance that is staggeringly insane.

I don’t eat fish because I am an ecologist and I have seen the diminishment of fish in the seas all of my life. I was raised in a fishing village and I was raised on a diet of cod, sardines, mackerel, smelts, clams, lobsters, flounders and trout. I have seen with my own eyes the steady diminishment of fish, lobsters and crustaceans. And what I ate as a child I choose not to eat today for the simple reason that there are to many of us on land eating so few of them that live in the seas.

The fisherman has now become one of the most ecologically destructive occupations on the planet. It’s time to put aside the outdated image of the hardy, independent, salt of the sea, hard working fisherman working courageously to feed society and support his family.

No longer does the average fishermen go to sea in dories with lines and small nets. Today’s industrial fishermen operate multi-million dollar vessels equipped with complex and expensive technological gear designed to hunt down and catch every fish they can find.

One manufacturer of electronic fish locators (Rayethon) even boasts that with their product, “the fish can run but they can’t hide.”

And for the fish, there is no safe place as poachers hunt them down mercilessly even in marine reserves and sanctuaries.

We humans have waged an intensive and ruthless exploitation of practically every species of fish in the sea and they are disappearing, and if we don’t put an end to industrialized fishing vessels and heavy gear very soon, we will kill the oceans and in so doing, we will kill ourselves.

Scientists this week revealed that widespread malnutrition is affecting the fish, bird and animal populations of our oceans. Not only are we depleting their populations, we are starving the survivors.

We are feeding fish to cats, pigs and chickens and we are sucking tens of thousands of small fish from the sea to feed fish raised in cages. House cats are eating more fish than seals, pigs are eating more fish than sharks, and factory farmed chickens are eating more fish than puffins and albatross.

With other factors like increased acidification, global warming, chemical pollution and ozone depletion causing plankton populations to decline, we are waging a global assault on all life in our oceans.

The fish cannot compete with our excessive demands. We have already removed 90% of the large commercial fish from the sea. Chinese demands for shark fins is destroying practically every species of shark in the ocean.

Whereas the fishing industry once targeted and destroyed the large fish, they are now focusing on the smaller fish, the fish that have always fed the larger fish. Of the top ten fisheries in the world today, seven of them now target the small fish. If to small to feed people, they are simply ground up into fish meal to feed domestic animals and farm raised salmon and tuna.

Aquaculture has also now emerged as the most wasteful utilization of fish and is the economic engine driving the intensive exploitation of the small fishes.

And now Japanese and Norwegian fisheries are extracting tens of thousands of tons of plankton from the sea to convert into a protein rich animal feed.

This week a report on the State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture released by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concludes that 80% of all marine fish stocks are currently fully exploited, overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion; including stocks of the 7 largest prey fisheries. Very few marine fish populations remain with the potential to sustain production increases, and more have now reached their limit than ever before

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not taking an animal rights position on this issue when we say that people must stop eating fish and eating meat that fish are fed to. Our position is based solely on the ecological reality that commercial fishing is destroying our oceans.

We all know this. We are all aware of this diminishment. We feel it in our gut. The ecological reality is not only staring us in the face, it is kicking us in the teeth. The problem is that we are in absolute denial and we refuse to acknowledge that by stripping life from the seas, we will be undermining the foundation for our survival on land.

This denial is so entrenched that even Greenpeace serves fish to their crew onboard their ships while undertaking campaigns to oppose over-fishing.

The Kaiyapo people of Brazil call those who destroy the forests – the termite people because they gobble up the trees. In the oceans we have human parasites sucking the life out of the ocean and giving nothing back. We humans have become the parasitic bloodsuckers of the ocean and when we kill our hosts, as we will surely do, the way we are presently going, then we ourselves will die.

For a long time, I wondered why I even have bothered to speak out about these concerns to a society that refuses to acknowledge this reality and simply dismisses any talk of over-exploitation as radical extremism. For decades, I have endured this extremism of apathy and ecological ignorance.

This last week in Paris at the Sustainability Conference I spoke of these things to a room full of journalists and when I called for a closure of all commercial fishing in the Mediterranean, I was pleasantly surprised that not a single journalist disagreed nor questioned me for making such a radical demand. In fact my announcement was greeted with applause.

The public is becoming aware of the gravity of the ecological predicament that threatens life in the sea. And this is very encouraging.

I can’t think of anything more important than the preservation of diversity in our oceans. Perhaps we can adapt to global warming and perhaps we can survive a mass extinction even of species on land. But I know one thing to be an ecological certainty and that is if we kill the oceans – we kill ourselves.

In diversity is the preservation of life.

We must stop eating the oceans. Eating fish is for all intents and purposes – an ecological crime. There are no oceanic sustainable fisheries – not a one.

That little fish consumer sustainability card that some people carry around to pretend to be ecologically correct consumers is simply a fraud, an attempt to make ourselves feel good as we continue to eat the seas.

Now I know that some people are not going to like what I am saying, but then again, I have never written or spoken for the purpose of winning popularity contests. I don’t try to be all things to all people. I aim to be ecologically correct in my thinking and from any perspective that I have viewed it, coupled with my observations of the steady and now escalating diminishment of life in the sea since I was a boy sitting on the end of the dock in Passamaquoddy Bay to now, where I voyage through all the oceans of the world trying to defend life in the sea, I see the writing on the wall in big bold letters and the signs look ominous indeed, dangerously so.

Some may think that a call to ban all commercial fishing is radical. I view it as a very conservative and essential policy that we must implement to save the oceans and ourselves.

Am I concerned about the fishermen and their families? I am not without sympathy for their situation but I am far more concerned for the future survival of humanity and the oceans. We simply need to put an end to an industry and an occupation that is literally undermining the life support systems of this planet. This requires sacrifices but sacrificing a job is preferable by far than sacrificing the future for all of us.

We need to consider the needs of the fishes and we need to give them the space and the time to recover from the terrible slaughter we have inflicted upon all the species that live in the sea.

I am tired of hearing the excuses of fishermen that the seals or the dolphins have diminished the fish numbers. They want to take us for fools to buy into this unscientific scapegoat argument. The fish are gone because they the fishermen took them, and took them and took them without mercy. And now like Wall Street bankers they come begging for subsidies and getting them because politicians for the most part suffer from homopechephobia or a political fear of fishermen, who if they don’t get what they want tend to riot and threaten.

They need to be treated as the Ocean destroying thugs that they are. The fishing industry needs to go extinct before they cause a pattern of irreversible extinctions and loss of diversity in our oceans.

If an ecological collapse occurs because of the removal of a pivotal species or species, we won’t be worrying about jobs. We’ll be worrying that our fellow man will be hunting and eating us. If that occurs the words that Jesus Christ once said will become perversely very true indeed when he said to the fishermen, “I will make you to become fishers of men.” (Mark 1-17) 
To learn more visit http://www.seashepherd.org/.

At first blush, global warming seems to be a great hook for those of us promoting animal-friendly eating, but there are two problems:

1. Offering accurate information. Many people say that meat is the leading cause of global warming. But this is not true; the production of meat is not the leading cause of greenhouse gases — only more than transportation. From:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607612562
Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health

Although the main human source of greenhouse-gas emissions is combustion of fossil fuels for energy generation, non-energy emissions (including from agriculture and land-use changes) contribute more than a third of the total greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide.

And elsewhere:

Greenhouse-gas emissions from the agriculture sector account for about 22% of global total emissions; this contribution is similar to that of industry and greater than that of transport. Livestock production (including transport of livestock and feed) accounts for nearly 80% of the sector’s emissions.

So livestock comes after energy generation and industry. And that is only globally; from the Salon article referenced below:

Here in the U.S., livestock’s impact is not quite so extreme: Six percent of our greenhouse gases come from livestock production, compared with 19 percent from cars, light trucks and airplanes.

See more here (scroll down to the update).

As we’ve said elsewhere, no meat eater is actively seeking to be a vegetarian; rather, people are looking for a reason to dismiss us. When we exaggerate or lie, that is all that is remembered — not the underlying reality. That worldwide meat production contributes more to global warming than all of transportation is accurate and striking; there is no reason to exaggerate.

2. The expected impact in the public mind, and how it thus actually affects animals. When the public hears “livestock” (as in “livestock causes more global warming than transportation”), they think cattle, and the conclusion is that they should eat less beef. Even when people hear “meat … global warming,” they think burping (or flatulent) cows. (Of course, the news is written by, and the media run by, meat eaters. So they will always choose the side that is least challenging to their habits / the status quo.)

For those that look into the science and aren’t already vegan, concern for global warming leads almost inevitably to more chickens being eaten (it takes about 190 chickens to provide the same number of meals as one steer; see “Suffering per Kilogram” and “Farm Animal Welfare, Legislation, and Trade” (pdf).

For example, from:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/22/peta/index.html

“Astonishingly enough,” says study coauthor Gidon Eshel, a Bard College geophysicist, “the poultry diet is actually better than lacto-ovo vegetarian.” In other words, a roast chicken dinner is better for the planet than a cheese pizza.

How about going vegan?

The average American is responsible for about 26 tons annually, so if the entire U.S. population went vegan, we’d reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by only 6 percent.

The vast majority of that 6 percent is from cutting out beef and dairy. (The entire article is worth reading for how “informed” opinion plays this out.)

Similarly:

Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States
Environ. Sci. Technol. In press

Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

The LA Times shows “replace beef with chicken” in action:

“No hamburger patties?” asked an incredulous football player, repeating the words of the grill cook. He glowered at the posted sign: ‘Cows or cars? Worldwide, livestock emits 18% of greenhouse gases, more than the transportation sector! Today we’re offering great-tasting vegetarian choices.’ “Just give me three chicken breasts, please,” he said….

Here is another example. A final data point is that if Al Gore — who believes global warming is an existential risk — won’t change, it would appear that global warming/veg isn’t an incredibly compelling argument for veganism (see here, and comments).
My general impression (and I know there are exceptions to this and all arguments) is that global warming is another argument that makes sense to us, and makes us think, “Here is a great, self-interested hook I can use to convince others of veganism’s superiority!” But it isn’t a question of whether veganism is the best diet for addressing global warming (as far as I can tell, it is). The bottom line has to be the actual impact of the message we choose to present. In other words: we shouldn’t seek out and use arguments that seem to support veganism — veganism isn’t the point. If we take suffering seriously, we must seek to present a message that reduces the most suffering.

As Nobel Laureate Herb Simon discovered, human psychology / decision making is often determined by ‘good enough.’ People don’t hear about a concern (especially a relatively abstract issue like global warming) and take it to the fullest extent — e.g., stop driving at all — but rather, those motivated enough will do something (drive a bit less, drive a more fuel-efficient car) and feel good that they are doing something. (The same has held true for “the health argument“)

In this case, though, doing “something” means eating a lot more chickens. We can say, “But being vegan is even better!” till we’re blue in the face, but experience shows that this is effective only in the rarest of cases; the vast majority of people who will be moved at all about global warming are happy to be ‘taking action’ by eating a lot more chickens. (And it is the cattle industry that is worried about the global warming / diet argument, not the poultry industry — the latter loves anything that badmouths beef.)

Although the global warming / food connection seems clear to us and appears to justify our veganism, the bottom line is how it actually plays out in people’s minds via the actual media. When used on its own, I fear that the diet / global warming angle does significantly more harm (more chickens eaten) than good (people actually going veg who otherwise wouldn’t have if exposed to the realities of modern agribusiness).

For this reason, I think that we should be very careful how we use global warming. It is a hot topic, so it gives us an “in” with the media and environmental groups. But if we present it on its own, given human psychology, the case is almost always going to have the bottom line of eating more chickens. In my opinion, the global warming / diet connection does more harm than good when presented on its own, but can work as a hook to capture attention and allow us to draw attention to the horrors of modern agribusiness, with a special focus on cruelty to chickens.

PS On a related topic, there is growing recognition that increased usage of certain biofuels will exacerbate global hunger (e.g., http://tinyurl.com/5wmh3y). Of course, the same argument of resource usage can be made regarding using crops as animals feed (e.g., http://tinyurl.com/2lvbww) — according to the FAO, only 100m tonnes of cereal crops go to biofuel, while 760m tonnes go to animal feed — and the latter figure isn’t even counting soy. As pointed out here:

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, will feed people…. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals — which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

Keep in mind, however, that beef is much, much less efficient than chicken (and eggs) — see, again, the Salon article:

Welcome, then, the savior of environmentally concerned carnivores everywhere: the chicken. Unlike cattle, chickens don’t burp methane. They also have an amazing ability to turn a relatively small amount of grain into a large amount of protein. A chicken requires 2 pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, compared with about 6 pounds of grain for a feedlot cow and 3 pounds for a pig. Poultry waste produces only about one-tenth of the methane of hog and cattle manure.

Like thousands of activists over the past decades, I’d love to think there is some perfect, logical, self-interested argument that won’t just vindicate my veganism, but will convince large numbers of people to go vegan, while not leading others to eat more chickens. But this is not the case — there just aren’t lots of people out there who secretly want to be vegan but just need that one statistic. For nearly everyone, any change away from the status quo is difficult and resisted. As much as we’d love to argue otherwise, in response to health or environmental arguments, the first, easiest, most convenient, and socially acceptable step is to eat more chickens.

It is worth briefly considering why health and environmental arguments seem to be more easily “accepted” by people, and why most individuals are resistant and defensive when faced with the cruelty argument. Much of this could well be that health choices are personal (and easily overridden by habit, convenience, etc, even in the face of severe health issues), while environmental concerns are abstract and easily assuaged by taking some action (new lightbulbs, recycling) from the laundry list of suggested actions (“No one’s perfect!”).

The obvious cruelty and vicious brutality of factory farms, however, is both real, immediate, undeniable, and clearly an ethical challenge to our view of ourselves. For these reasons, the animals’ suffering can’t be easily dismissed and forgotten; thus it is important for meat eaters to avoid the issue as much as possible (and to make the messenger the issue, whenever possible). For the same reason, it is incumbent on us, as animal advocates, to actually advocate the animals’ case, so that no one can avoid facing the hidden reality.

As I’ve written elsewhere:

I’m not fooling myself – I know that exposing what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses isn’t going to reach everyone. But feel-good arguments that avoid the horrors of meat production are easily dismissed, and thus simply not compelling enough. We don’t want people to nod in agreement and continue on as before. It is far better if 95% of people turn away revolted and 5% open their minds to change, than if everyone smiles politely and continues on to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich.

Let me repeat: Trying to appeal to everyone hasn’t worked, and it won’t work. It is well past time to give up the fantasy that there is some perfect self-centered argument that will magically compel everyone to change.

In deciding what to present to the public, our criteria shouldn’t be, “Does this seem to denigrate (some) meat and/or support veganism?” We shouldn’t be trying to justify our diet — we need to stand up for the animals. We don’t get to determine how people should react; we must consider how our chosen argument will actually play out to the general public and through the media. We must set aside our personal biases and needs, and honestly ask, “Is this the argument that will alleviate as much suffering as possible?” The animals are counting on us.

Reprinted from Vegan Outreach.

With April being a cold month in Toronto so far, it is hard to feel too concerned about global warming. But it is worth noting that the greenhouse effect can cause weather extremes in both directions.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar for best documentary in 2006. The clear message in this ground-breaking movie is that governments, industry and people must cut down on fossil fuel use, and soon.

We can also play a powerful role for positive change by adjusting what we eat. Global climate change is directly related to agriculture through the loss of wilderness to farmland, methane released from animals, and energy-intensive fertilizers, pesticides, food processing and transportation.

By eating low on the food chain, locally-grown and organic, you can make a significant difference.

Why didn’t Gore mention anything about agriculture in the movie? 

Likely Gore wanted to keep the message focused, and targeted to the political situation in the U.S.

The more in-depth book version of An Inconvenient Truth, does suggest buying local and eating less meat. On page 317 it says:

Americans consume almost a quarter of all the beef produced in the world. Aside from health issues associated with eating lots of meat, a high-meat diet translates into a tremendous amount of carbon emissions. It takes far more fossil-fuel energy to produce and transport meat than to deliver equivalent amounts of protein from plant sources.

In addition, much of the world’s deforestation is a result of clearing and burning to create grazing land for livestock. This creates further damage by destroying trees that would otherwise absorb carbon dioxide. Fruits, vegetables, and grains, on the other hand, require 95% less raw materials to produce and, when combined properly, can provide a complete and nutritious diet. If more Americans shifted to a less meat-intensive diet, we could greatly reduce CO2 emissions and also save vast quantities of water and other precious natural resources.”

When the movie was made, the role of diet may not have been as well known as it is now. An important report released in Nov. 2006 by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization shows that livestock production is responsible for an incredible 18 percent of human induced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide – more than all of the world’s motor vehicles.

Agriculture plays a significant role

Agriculture emits carbon dioxide through transportation, fertilizer production and the energy used for factory farming.

Deforestation (partly to clear land for agriculture) is responsible for 13% of climate change through the release of stored carbon dioxide. Methane causes 17.3% of climate change due to livestock digestion, animal manure, rice paddies, dams, fossil fuel extraction, and landfills. Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) accounts for 5.4% mostly due to fertilizers.

Surprisingly, the actual burning of fossil fuels accounts for only 39% of climate change mostly from cars, industry and heating homes. (This accounts for 75% of CO₂ emissions. The rest is due to deforestation.)

Figures are from Story Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Warming, by Guy Dauncey, 2001

Deforestation

At least 13% of climate change is due to cutting down or burning forests. A lot of forest is cleared for agriculture, especially in rainforest regions.

The photo to the right is a satellite image of the Brazilian State of Rondonia. Intact wilderness is dark green. Farms and recently deforested areas are lighter colours.

Satellite data shows that 600 fires were started each day on average during 2004 to clear land for farming. The rate of destruction has doubled in the last decade. Rainforests are home to one third of land species.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7547087 (picture 5)

Burning of fossil fuel

About 39% of climate change is due to using oil, natural gas and other fuels. Some of this energy is used for the processing, packaging, refrigeration, and transportation of food, factory farms, and the production of fertilizers and pesticides.

A 2002 Worldwatch report says that a typical meal made with ingredients from a supermarket takes four to 17 times more petroleum consumption in transport than the same meal made from local ingredients. And a head of lettuce grown in California and shipped nearly 3,000 miles to Washington, D.C., requires about 36 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it provides in food energy when it arrives.

In terms of production, animal foods demand a lot more energy than plant foods. According to one study, meat production requires 10 to 20 times more energy per edible tonne than grain production. Growing feed crops requires extensive energy for ploughing, harvesting, pumping irrigation water, transportation, and producing fertilizer and pesticides. Once grown, the crops are dried and processed using additional energy.

Furthermore, the housing of pigs and chickens in huge windowless sheds requires energy for artificial ventilation, conveyor belts and electric lighting. Slaughterhouses are also energy intensive.

For harvesting fish, extensive energy and resources go into building, maintaining and fueling fleets of trawlers.

Methane

Methane is responsible for 17.3% of climate change. The high percentage is due to the fact that methane is 23 times more potent than CO₂. The good news is that its warming effect only lasts 10 years compared to 100 years for carbon dioxide. Scaling back methane emissions will lead to a quicker reduction in climate change due to the shorter lag time.

Livestock digestion (i.e. burps and farts from cows and sheep) accounts for 18% of total global methane emissions, and factory farm waste lagoons account for a further 7% of emissions. Combined, these two sources equal 4.3% of total climate change. Other sources include dams (accounting for 20% of emissions), fossil fuel extraction (20%) and landfills (10%). Rice paddies account for around 10%, but rice is a staple food for a lot more people (half the world’s population) than cow meat is, and BBC reports that there are varieties of rice being developed that emit much less methane.

Dams are often built to hold water for irrigating crops – especially feed crops such as corn and soy. In Alberta, most large rivers have been dammed for the main purpose of collecting water for irrigation.

Nitrous Oxide

Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) is a powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for 5.4% of climate change. It has one of the longest atmosphere lifetimes of the greenhouse gases, lasting for up to 150 years. Since the Industrial Revolution, the level of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere has increased by 16%.

About 70% of human induced N₂0 emissions is due to the widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilizers. Tilling soil, transportation and industry make up much of the rest.

Farming practices and the loss of CO₂ from soil

In Canada and United States, farming practices amount to 8% of climate change due to the release of methane, CO₂, and N₂O. This figure doesn’t include deforestation when new farms are created. In the rest of the world, where there are fewer cars and industry, farming accounts for a much higher percentage of climate change.

Tilling soil causes carbon dioxide to be released. There are roughly 44 tons of C0₂ in an acre of healthy soil. Tilling a field releases up to 4 tons of CO₂ per acre. The United States has lost a third of the original topsoil since settlement.

Every year, the planet’s soils absorb roughly 50 billion tonnes of carbon from decaying vegetation and release 50 billion tonnes through decomposition. But forest destruction and farming weakens the soil, causing 1.5 billion tonnes to be lost to the atmosphere. It is estimated that about 7% of CO₂ in the atmosphere is from carbon that has been lost from soil.

Photo: Healthy soil is full of life and capable of absorbing carbon dioxide.

What you can do

Eat low on the food chain

Moving toward a vegetarian diet is the most powerful food choice you can make to reduce climate change. A meat-based diet uses far more agricultural land than a vegetarian diet because domesticated animals must also be fed. Taking individual weights into account, food animals outweigh people in North America by a factor of four to one! All these animals need food, water and transportation. Most of our farmland is dedicated to feeding them.

By curtailing our meat consumption we could free up millions of acres of agricultural land that could be returned to forest and wild prairie, absorbing tons of CO₂ in the process.

Using less farmland also means less soil erosion, less irrigation water, less pesticide, less N₂O emissions, and less fossil fuel for farm machinery and fertilizer production.

The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization issued a stunning report on global warming in Nov. 2006. Livestock production is responsible for more climate change gasses than all the motor vehicles in the world. In total, it is responsible for 18 percent of human induced greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a major source of land and water degradation.

A recent study at the University of Chicago, found that a vegan diet is the most efficient, saving a ton and a half of CO₂ or equivalents per year when compared to a standard North American diet. By comparison, the average American car driver emits 1.9 to 4.7 tons of carbon dioxide, depending on the vehicle model and fuel efficiency. The study found that red meat and, surprisingly, fish were responsible for the highest emissions. Most seafood undergoes energy-intensive long-distance travel from ocean to market. Energy used for food production accounts for about 17 percent of all fossil fuel used in the United States. Furthermore, livestock production emits greenhouse gases not associated with fossil-fuel combustion, primarily methane and nitrous oxide.

Also see Meat production’s environmental toll,
and Fish & seafood – the environmental costs

Eat locally grown and organic

Buying locally grown food greatly reduces the energy and resources necessary to transport and store foods. Typically, produce from Mexico or California is shipped in refrigerated trucks. When you buy long-distance food part of the price you pay is for fuel and the truck. Fresh food from other continents is typically flown in by airplanes. Planes require staggering amounts of fuel to lift produce and meat into the air and across oceans.

Buying organic foods supports farmers that are using alternatives to nitrogen-based and petroleum-based fertilizers. Organic farming methods also tend to be more gentle on the soil, helping to reduce soil erosion and CO2 emissions from soil.

See Eating Local and Organic

Reduce food and packaging waste

A 2004 study, from the University of Arizona, found that half of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten. The average family of four throws out $600 worth of good food every year.

There is a huge opportunity to reduce this wastage by adjusting shopping, storage and eating habits. For example, eating leftovers is a great way to reduce the amount of garbage that ends up being trucked to landfill sites. Landfills emit methane, and food wastage requires more agricultural land.

Look for foods that require little or no packaging, such as whole fruits, vegetables, and bulk dry goods. By eating vegetarian meals, you can avoid animal products that tend to require more energy for processing, packaging, and refrigeration than plant-based foods.

See Minimizing wastage for simple ways to reduce waste.

Story Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Warming, by Guy Dauncey, 2001

In July 4, 2006, Guy Dauncey (earthfuture.com) informed us that “all emissions related to food, including CO2, methane from cattle, and nitrous oxides from fertilizing, are included in both Kyoto and national greenhouse gas emissions figures.”

Reprinted from the Toronto Vegetarian Association.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivative Works 2.l5 License.

(NaturalNews) Many health conscious people have made the decision not to eat meat, viewing the consumption of animal flesh as having negative consequences on the body, the spirit, and even the personality. Animal rights activists have been quite vocal in pointing out the deplorable conditions under which animals destined to become part of the traditional food chain are raised. Tough economic times have given rise to a chorus of budget minded columnists reminding people that giving up animal protein will make their food dollars stretch farther. Today, there is one more aspect to consider about the consumption of animal protein: the connection between industrialized animal farming and human disease.

New infectious diseases are linked to the rise of factory animal farming

Factory farms are breeding grounds for virulent disease and disease resistant strains of antibiotics, according to the 2008 report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, in conjunction with the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The commission’s report highlights the risks to the public resulting from the growth of the industrialization of farm animal production. It is the result of two and one half years of investigation centered in four areas: public health, environmental impact, effects on farm communities, and animal health and welfare.

Fifteen commissioners, each with impressive credentials, concluded that while factory animal farming and production is increasing worldwide at an exponential rate, the rates of new forms of infectious diseases have been concurrently on the increase. There is clearly a link between factory farming and human illness.

Although the number of farms producing animals for food has declined dramatically in the past five decades as small independent farmers have been pushed out of the way by the giant food conglomerates, the number of food animals produced has stayed fairly constant. It is this concentration of farm animals in larger and larger numbers in ever closer proximity to one another, along with some of the feed and animal management methods used in the industrial system that has increased the risks of pathogens and created more opportunities for disease transmission to humans. Of particular concern is the increase in antibiotic use, needed to keep animals alive under such deplorable conditions. Excessive use of antibiotics has given rise to antibiotic-resistant microbes that pose a threat to the health of humans as well as animals.

The risks fall into three categories: prolonged worker contact with animals, increased pathogen transmission within a herd or flock, and the increased opportunities for the generation of antimicrobial resistant bacteria as the result of imprudent use of antibiotics, or new strains of viruses.

Communities near industrial farms animal production facilities are seen as particularly at risk, with children, the elderly, and individuals with chronic health conditions in the greatest danger of the health threats posed by such methods of farming.

Government officials ignore threat of antibiotic-resistant infections

These warnings are nothing new. Several organizations have raised questions about the effects of antibiotic use in factory farming on land and water raised animals. The Infectious Disease Society of American has declared antibiotic-resistant infections to be an epidemic sweeping through the U.S. The Food and Agriculture Organization has recommended that agricultural use of antibiotics be restricted. They claim that the health of the world’s population is threatened by the globalization of industrial animal farms and concentrated animal feeding operations.

Zoonotic pathogens are on the increase

Prior to the 20th century, many humans lived short life spans relative to their potential. Many died at young ages as the result of infections. With the implementation of better hygiene and sanitation systems people began to live longer. But it wasn’t until the discovery of penicillin that the life span increased dramatically. During the golden age of America that began in the early 1950s, penicillin and its derivatives kept most Americans in the picture of health. When polio was finally conquered in the 1960s, everyone believed the threat of infectious disease was history.

That golden age was short lived. New diseases began to show up at a pace previously unknown in history of medicine. A new pathogen has sprung up almost every year for the past three decades. Most of these pathogens are zoonotic, meaning they can jump the gap from animals to infection of humans. Of the documented human pathogens, about 64 percent are zoonotic.

People have turned their backs on nature in the interest of greed

According to reporter Laura Sayre in an article for Mother Earth News, the total U.S. hog population numbered 53 million in 1965. This number was spread over more than 1 million pig farms in the United States, many of which were small family operations. Today, 65 million hogs are raised on just over 65,000 farms across the nation. Many of these factory farms are raising 5,000 hogs at any given time.

Sayer notes that broiler chicken production has risen from 366 million in 1945 to 8,400 million in 2001. Most industrialized chicken raising facilities house tens of thousands of birds together. Fifty-five billion chickens are raised each year on a worldwide basis. The global pig industry is close to 1 billion, half of which are raised in confinement. Some countries house as many as 50,000 animals together.

Raising animals in such a fashion violates the principles of animal husbandry accepted as good practice by people for thousands of years and practiced on family farms. Intensive confinement often severely restricts movement and natural behaviors, such as the ability to walk or lie on natural materials, having enough floor space to move with some freedom, and rooting behaviors in pigs. The most intensive confinement systems, such as restrictive veal crates, hog gestation pens, restrictive furrowing crates, and battery cages for poultry all prevent animals from normal range of movement and are particularly inhumane treatments.

The outcome is animals in severe distress. Animals cannot be cared for by tried and true traditional methods when they are crammed together in factory farms in confined conditions. Animals raised under the industrial model experience no quality of life and live in constant stress as the result of overcrowding. This results in weakened immune systems and susceptibility to infection. Lack of sunlight and fresh air guarantees any disease will spread like wildfire.

Good animal husbandry helps protect the safety of the food supply. Scientists have recognized that food safety is linked to the health of animals that produce meat, dairy and egg products. They know that intensive confinement production systems produce increased pathogen shedding in animals.

To prevent and treat the diseases that arise from such conditions, the lords of factory animal farms have relied on antibiotics to the point of injecting chicken eggs with them. Animal feed is laced with antibiotics and so are the tissues and organs of these animals when they appear in the butcher’s case. Producers of ‘natural’ chickens that are claimed to be free of antibiotics can get by with that claim because the chicken embryos are soaked in antibiotics while they are inside the eggs. Today, the majority of antibiotic use is preventative.

Overuse of antibiotics in people is insignificant compared to that in animals

Some members of the medical establishment and many critics outside of the medical profession have been concerned for many years about the excessive prescribing of antibiotics for diseases that offer inconvenience as their major threat. These warnings have generally fallen on deaf ears within both the medical profession and government regulatory agencies. Antibiotics are now often the first choice treatments for diseases that are not even affected by them, like the common cold.

This excessive use of antibiotics pales in comparison with their use in the industrialized raising of animals for food. According to Sayers, “it’s a simple fact that the more antibiotics are used, especially prolonged use at low doses as in factory farms, the more antibiotic-resistant microbes will become. Bacteria and viruses are also notoriously promiscuous, swapping genes across species and even across genera, creating what the Johns Hopkins researchers call reservoirs of resistance. In some pathogens, selection for resistance also results in increased virulence…In other cases, otherwise harmless microbes can transfer resistance genes to pathogenic species.”

Bio-containment procedures are geared toward protecting livestock from disease outbreaks. There appears to be little concern about preventing human pathogens from escaping into the wider environment through the many routes available that include the food itself, water, and air. A worker in such facilities can carry pathogens home on his body or clothing without being aware of it, allowing microbes to be released in towns or cities miles away from the factory farm where he works. Globalization means that pathogens can be spread anywhere.

Waste systems are inadequate to neutralize pathogens

Human health is further threatened by the likelihood of animals to excrete pathogenic microbes. The tremendous quantities of waste that concentrate on the premises of industrial animal producers may exceed the capacity of the landscape to absorb the nutrients and neutralize the pathogens. The annual production of manure produced by animal confinement facilities exceeds that produced by the human population of the country by at least three times. And unlike human sewage, the majority of waste from factory farms is spread upon the ground untreated.

Such large quantities of manure carry excess nutrients and chemicals including antibiotics, hormones and heavy metals into waterways, lakes, groundwater, soils and airways. Land application of untreated animal waste on cropland contributes to excessive nutrient loading, and ultimately to plant growth so dense around water that aquatic animal life is suffocated.

Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock operations account for 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding emissions from the transportation sector. Air quality degradation is also a problem near industrial farm animal production because of the localized release of toxic gases, and particulates and bioaerosols that contain microorganisms including human pathogens. Livestock emission of ammonia from factory farms adds to the acidification of soil and water, while species diversity is threatened by nutrient overload.

Factory animal farms shown to be linked with food borne illness

“When dioxin-contaminated chicken feed led to the removal from the market of all chicken and eggs in Belgium for several weeks in June of 1999, doctors there noted a 40 percent decline in the number of human Campylobacter infections,” according to Sayer. Most chickens sold in the U.S. are contaminated with this bacterium. Eggs from factory farm chickens contaminated with salmonella caused 2,000 hospitalizations and 60 deaths in the year 2000. A host of infections not thought of as food-related may be the result of overuse of antibiotics at factory farms.

The MRSA bacterium, responsible for difficult or impossible to treat infections in humans, seemed to come out of nowhere when it was first seen in hospitals. Now the Veterinary Microbiology study has showed that industrialized North American pig farms and farmers commonly carry MRSA, including a strain that infects humans. Around nine million Canadian raised hogs are imported into the U.S. every year.

Healthy people are developing MRSA infections. Medical, agricultural, and environmental experts have called for Congress to compel the FDA to study whether use of antibiotics in animal agriculture is contributing to the surge in MRSA deaths in the U.S., which now exceed the number of deaths from HIV/AIDS. Since the government is not systematically testing U.S. livestock for MRSA, it is not known whether farms in the U.S. are also sources.

The excessive use of antibiotics in factory farms can select for resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. A European study has documented that industrial pig farms routinely using antibiotics were more likely to have MRSA than farms with limited antibiotic use.

For more information:

http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=38438

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2008/2008-04-29-01.asp

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Natural-Health/Meat-Poultry-Health-Risk.aspx

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=32320

Reprinted from NaturalNews.

by Richard Stacel, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) Most people today are usually aware that fast food is not the healthiest or “best” food to eat. Typically, the majority of people eat it several times a week or more. People generally eat fast food for a few main reasons, mostly because it’s convenient, cheap and usually tastes pretty good.

The cost factor is certainly an understandable reason given the current state of the world economies and everyone’s need to tighten up on their spending. But even this is really no excuse to be pumping the tons of toxic chemicals and “dead” food into you or your families’ bodies.

Nearly all books and documentaries that have come out in recent years showing how bad fast food is mostly focuses on it’s high fat/ high sodium content. Very few of them truly reveal the real dangers of consuming fast food and just why it is totally unfit for human consumption.

Hopefully this article will help you to truly begin to understand why it’s not just a “less healthy” food, but something so terrible, so disgusting, and so horrible that you are far better off eating nothing at all than to consume fast food. If most people truly knew what it is that they’re putting into their bodies when they go up to that drive through window and place their order, surely the vast majority would rarely if ever consume it again.

Certainly anyone who is interested in overcoming illness and disease and attaining higher levels of health and internal purity must vastly limit or completely eliminate their consumption of these so called foods.

So just what is in fast foods today and why is it really so bad for you? Come along as we cover some main reasons for such a strong stance against fast foods and just why they are to be avoided at all cost. Be warned that some of this information may be quite disturbing to some readers.

Fast Food Nation

In 2002, author Eric Shlosser, a correspondent for the Atlantic Herald, came out with a ground breaking book called “Fast Food Nation” which takes us through a sordid maze of deception, cover up, lies, fraud and both animal and human cruelty that has unfortunately become all too common in the meat packing industry today. This was even turned into a 2006 movie release of the same name.

If you only saw the movie, then you missed virtually all of the “meat and potatoes” of this story because the movie was but a pale shadow of the mind blowing information contained in the book.

The movie mostly focused on the plight of the immigrant laborers who work in the meat packing plants. These plants are the main suppliers of the meat, chicken and other foodstuffs sold in the fast food industry.

The book covers every aspect of the fast food industry. From the truly horrible and inhumane conditions of the animals themselves from birth till death, to the often slave like conditions of the plants where the mostly immigrant and poor workers toil in 12 hour shifts or longer each day and more.

Fast Food nation is a thoroughly well researched book that has won worldwide praise for its author Eric Shlosser. Eric was able to gain access to feed lots, slaughter houses and even the J.R. Simplot plant in Aberdeen, Idaho where millions upon millions of French fries are made on a daily basis. The majority of which are mostly destined for area McDonald`s restaurants.

The fast food industry came out in strong protest against his book saying that they don’t agree with his conclusions. At the same time when asked if there were any errors in the book the same industry said “no” that they could not find any errors in his facts or figures at all.

The Processing Line

Twenty years ago the standard number of cattle processed per hour in a typical meat packing plant was 175. The older meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 per hour. Today the workers at many plants are required to kill up to 400 cattle per hour. At the rate worker injuries are all too common as the workers stand close together in one spot for hours a day performing the same task over and over again. Mostly this involves swinging a large sharp knife over and over again to carve up the animal into smaller pieces for processing. Mistakes and injuries to other workers are common as they struggle to keep up with the fast pace of the line in constant fear of falling behind or being fired.

The pace of the line that these workers are forced to work at is a major cause of many serious injuries to workers and has even led to several deaths. How do these workers die exactly…well this is where the story gets downright grizzly. Many times these workers are near the meat grinders when some get limbs caught in them or simply fall into the larger machines completely. By the time the machine can be shut down, there is nothing of the worker left to recover.

That means that along with the meat from the cattle, there is at times, human meat mixed in with the animal meat itself. Fortunately it doesn’t occur all that often, but the author is surely not taking any chances on putting such meat into his body or that of his family and I strongly suggest that you don’t either. There are other things mixed into with the meat as well which we’ll cover shortly.

The speed of the cattle line not only producers a danger to the workers themselves, but it causes them to make a much higher percentage of mistakes in the cutting of the meat itself. What this means is that, because these workers are being forced to do the same motion up to 10,000 times per day, they can and do make mistakes and end up cutting the wrong part of the animals.

Instead of cutting the meat parts that are to be sold, they can end up hitting the bowels which often causes a “mixing” of the animals waste to be mixed in with the meat that is eventually sold to restraints and the public. This is a main source of various E-coli outbreaks that we hear about on the news from time to time. How many more people get sick from such “food” but never report it?

Animal Cruelty

With the terrible and inhumane way in which the animals themselves are treated which causes the meat to lose any of it’s health benefits, coupled with the contamination of the meat itself during processing, you now have a situation where this meat is not only providing very little nutrition or bio-energy, but it can be quite dangerous and deadly.

“Every day in the United States, roughly 200,000 people are sickened by a food borne disease, 900 are hospitalized and fourteen die. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year. Most of these cases are never reported to authorities or properly diagnosed” – Fast Food Nation, page 195

Not only are these animals often killed while they’re in poor health, as a recent investigative film by the human society showed that even animals that are too sick or weak to walk are being picked up by forklifts and led to the slaughter anyway. This is against current animal welfare policies but is rarely enforced due to a loophole in the laws.

Aside from the obvious reasons for animals to be sick and weak such as hormone injections and cramped feedlots which stresses animals out just as it does humans, there are other more stomach churning reasons for their ill health.

The animals are not only unhealthy due to how they’re treated in terms of actual abuse or crowded and stressed conditions, but what they’re being fed is absolutely disgusting a crime against nature itself. These cattle are ruminants, meaning that they’re designed to eat grass and perhaps some grain. They have four stomachs because they’re meant to eats things with high cellulose content.

So what is it that these animals are being fed that further contributes to their being in such ill health and overweight? Until 1997, about 75% of the cattle in the US were being fed livestock wastes, the rendered remains of dead sheep and cattle. They were also fed millions of dead pets from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that this might be responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) also known as “mad cow disease”

However, current FDA regulations do allow dead pigs and horses to be turned into cattle feed, along with dead poultry too. They also allow the poultry to be fed to dead cattle. Other constituents of cattle feed include cattle blood, metal fragments and sawdust.

Is it any wonder then that these poor animals are sick and weak and some are unable to even walk to their own slaughter?

Many such animals go to the slaughter with their bodies wracked with tumors, viruses, infections and some reports indicate that a majority of them have cancer throughout their bodies. Meat packers are taught how to cut around the cancers and tumors to avoid infecting the meat itself. But this means that even the “uninfected” parts are so weakened of nutrients, oxygen, energy and life force that it is still unfit for human consumption.

Because of their low nutrient content, higher levels of diseased tissues, bacteria, weak and impure electromagnetic and life force energies along with little to no exercise and not being allowed to eat the grasses that they are designed to eat and other reasons constitute why these animals are unfit for human consumption and a horrible choice of food to be putting into your body.

The Chicken is No Better

If you think the chickens that are sold at fast food places are treated any better, then please take a look at this 48 minute video recently featured on Mercola.com

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic…

How Science is used to Deceive

The meat and other foods sold at fast food restaurants bears little to no resemblance to actual freshly cut meat. Food scientists employ a number of very deceptive and clever techniques to fool the senses into thinking that such foods are tasty and healthy. Science has discovered many chemicals that can exactly emulate the smells of fresh foods found in nature.

For example; Ethyl-2-methyl butyrate smells just like an apple. Adding methyl-2-peridylketone makes something taste like popcorn. Ethyl-3- hydroxybutanoate makes something taste like marshmallow. On and on these combinations go and it can all be done without effecting the appearance or nutritional value of the processed foods. These ingredients can be listed as “natural flavors” on the labels, even on foods that are listed as “organic”

At the Lamb Weston plant in American falls, Idaho, Eric Shlosser saw how the French fries undergo an amazing amount of scientific testing and chemical tweaking to attain just the right taste, consistently, mouthfeel, cooking time and even after taste. At one point they had him close his eyes and he was asked to identify various foods just from their smell. When the first sample was brought him he said “hmm… apples”. When the next sample was brought to him he said “French fries”, the third smelled just like a hamburger. Upon opening his eyes and expecting to see each of the foods present, all he saw was a scientist in a lab coat holding small white pieces of paper under his nose. These were the samples of the chemicals used to make fast food taste and smell so good.

This process is certainly not limited merely to fast food or French fries. At the IFF (International Flavor and Fragrances) plant in Dayton, NJ, Eric saw how chemicals that make nearly every single food or product sold on the market today taste and smell just as they do. Some of these products include; toothpastes, colognes, pop tarts, frozen and restaurant foods, ice cream, snack cakes, cookies, mouthwashes, antacids, potato chips, corn chips, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, sports drinks, bottled teas, beer, wine coolers, all natural juice drinks, frostings, dishwashing detergents, floor waxes, shampoo, soaps, furniture polish, and the list goes on and on.

Why such a focus on the aroma of food, because up to 90% of the taste of a food is actually linked to its aroma. Of course if the food is healthy and fresh, why do they need to add aroma and taste back into the food? Simple, because the food sold at most if not all fast food restaurants is so degraded, so old and of such poor quality that if you actually were to see it’s color and smell it before all of this chemical processing, you would never put such foods into your stomach. This is especially true of the meats that are sold at fast food restaurants.

This is a major reason why reading those labels and eating as much organic, unpackaged and unprocessed foods as possible is so incredible vital to health and longevity. Too often even foods that are labeled as “natural” or “organic” will contain many of these chemical potions. Eating as much raw real foods such as fruits, vegetables and locally grown meats is about the only way to make sure that you’re not consuming foods with these myriad of chemicals in them.

What Color is the Food?

Aroma is not the only tweaking that goes into fast foods. The color of food also has a lot to do with it’s perception of flavor. This is by design because we know that color often indicates whether a food is ripe or rancid. In the early 1970′s an experiment was done where people were given an “oddly tinted” meal of steak and French fries that appeared normal under the colored lights they were subjected to. Everyone thought that the food tasted fine that is until the lighting was changed. As soon as people saw that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, people were shocked and several even became ill.

If you have bought stand supermarket meats at anytime, you probably noticed that it has that bright red “healthy” looking color in it. Well that meat is not much better than your typical fast food meats. The bright red color is from the same kind of chemical food coloring and chemical wizardry of sight and aroma as the food colorings used in the fast food industry.

The processing of these foods whether it’s the beef, chicken, other meats or French fries has not only destroyed its chemical and nutritional value, but the energetic and phytonutrient or light energy of these foods long before they get to the dinner table.

Understanding how this food is processed, what the animals are eating, how they’re treated and what effect all of this has on the animals that you’re consuming is critical to understanding why fast food is something that you want to avoid at all costs.

The Quick and the Dead

At the very least you want to limit your consumption of this convenient food to no more than once a week, making sure to take digestive enzymes with every meal to ensure proper digestion. Since these foods are enzymes, nutrient and energy dead, that means that you will use up far more of your own digestive enzymes to process this food. This is why fast food equals dead food and the more dead foods we consume, the faster we end up dead ourselves. We truly are what we eat.

Most natural raw foods contain their own natural enzymes which helps the food to digest itself in the stomach and intestines. This takes a big load off of the pancreas which makes most of our digestive enzymes. This is very important since digestion is the number one drain on our store of enzymes. What’s not well known is that enzymes are also a major part of our immune system and are responsible for every process that occurs in the human body, even the beating of your heart.

This is why eating foods high in natural enzymes, which means eating raw, fresh and minimally processed foods as much as possible along with sufficient enzyme supplements, can go a long way to not only aiding in digestion and absorption of nutrients, but can even help boost the immune system and ward off disease.

When enzymes are not busy digesting our last meal, they travel around the body dissolving tumors, killing bacteria, viruses and germs, absorbing dead tissues and rebuilding new ones along with strengthening the entire system. This is the main reason why juicing is so effective at helping people at overcoming and eliminating their serious diseases

We get a plethora of these natural vitamins, nutrients and enzymes when juicing or making natural smoothies with plenty of raw, fresh ingredients. Their natural enzymes are released in the juicer or the blender in the same way that cutting up a fresh salad also releases and activates the nutritional and enzymatic contents in the leaves.

Hopefully you can now see more clearly why it’s vital to avoid fast foods. This truth extends to just about all packaged and processed foods. Food that is packaged and processed is almost totally enzyme, nutrient and energy dead. These foods use up and drain the human body of tremendous amounts of enzymes required to digest and assimilate their nutrient content while giving very little in the way of true life giving energies back.

The longer we keep putting these denatured and energy dead processed foods into our bodies, the faster we’re using up our own limited stores of these life sustaining substances. This can not only hasten the onset of disease, but can accelerate the arrival of our own demise. It for these and other reasons why you should avoid fast food at all costs.

If you want to read more about this, the author highly recommends the book “Fast Food Nation”.

Sources;

“Fast Food Nation”, Eric Schlosser
“The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing” Daniel Reid

About the author

Richard Stacel is a network engineer and practitioner of Chinese martial arts, medicine and chi-gung for over twenty four years. Having learned many Chinese health and healing arts from old world gung-fu and healing masters and practitioners, Rich has helped many people to overcome their health issues and achieve their fitness goals. Through diligent study and experience he has taken this knowledge even further over the years including reading scores of books on Chinese medicine, health, nutrition, supplements, meditation, martial arts, physics, science and many other subjects. Utilizing the web, health and fitness videos, newsletters, articles, teachings and lectures, Rich is passionate about spreading the true knowledge of health, healing, fitness and spiritual truths. I’m proud to be writing articles for NaturalNews.com You can learn more about the Chinese Health and Fitness video by visiting his website at www.chinesehealthandfitness.com

Reprinted from NaturalNews.

Since President Richard Nixon signed the Conquest of Cancer Act in 1971, the “war on cancer” in the United States has become a series of losing battles. Through taxes, donations, and private funding, Americans have spent almost $200 billion on cancer research since 1971. However, more than 500,000 Americans die of cancer every year, a 73 percent increase in the death rate since the “war” began.(1)

Prevention Is Possible

Dr. John R. Seffrin, president of the International Union Against Cancer, said, “Cancer is potentially the most preventable and most curable of the major life-threatening diseases facing humankind.”(2) Both the International Union Against Cancer and the World Health Organization estimate that at least 2 million lives could be saved by 2020-and 6.5 million lives by 2040-if “immediate action” is taken to prevent and treat cancer.(3)

Clinical studies have proved that smoking and consuming food that’s high in fat or animal protein are leading causes of cancer. The number one recommendation in the American Cancer Society’s “Guidelines on Nutrition and Physical Activity for Cancer Prevention” is to eat a diet “with an emphasis on plant sources.”(4) Researchers have found that vegetarians are between 25 and 50 percent less likely to suffer from cancer, even after taking smoking and other factors into account.(5)

Of Mice and Men

Millions of mice (referred to as “preclinical models”) have suffered and lost their lives to futile cancer research. According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology biology professor Robert Weinberg, “[I]t’s been well known for more than a decade, maybe two decades, that many of these preclinical human cancer models have very little predictive power in terms of how actual human beings-actual human tumors inside patients-will respond. . . . [H]undreds of millions of dollars are being wasted every year by drug companies using these models.”(6) The New York Times reported that following preclinical tests on animals, only “one in 20 prospective cancer cures used in human tests reaches the market, the worst record of any medical category.”(7) Dr. Richard Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute (which has an annual budget of more than $6 billion for cancer research), was quoted as saying, “The history of cancer research has been the history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in human beings.”(8,9)

Critical Differences

Those who profit from animal experimentation claim that animals are physiologically similar to humans-similar enough to persuade us to believe that what happens in a rat, mouse, dog, cat, or nonhuman primate will occur in humans.

Although most animal cancers arise in the bone, connective tissue, or muscle (sarcomas), most human cancers arise in living membranes (carcinomas). Furthermore, animals who are confined to small laboratory cages, repeatedly manipulated, and otherwise subjected to pain and stress make very poor “models” of human cancer patients. These animals may be given highly concentrated doses of substances that a human being would never be exposed to or heavily irradiated to form cancerous tumors, or they may have human tumors grafted to their bodies.

Animal experimenters want a disposable “research subject” who can be manipulated as desired and killed when convenient, but their artificially created “animal models” can never fully reflect the human condition.

Technologies and Treatments

Much of the research conducted in the name of curing cancer misses the mark: What kills human cancer victims 90 percent of the time is metastasis-when aggressive cells spread to other areas of the body. According to Fortune magazine’s investigation of the National Cancer Institute’s grants since 1972, only an alarming 0.5 percent of study proposals were dedicated to research on metastasis.(10)

Alternatives to animal testing include replacing animal tests with non-animal methods, such as 3-D in vitro models in which scientists grow actual human tumors surrounded by actual human tissue, allowing for controlled laboratory testing in an exact replica of in vivo human cancer. Comparative studies of human populations allow doctors and scientists to discover the root causes of human diseases and disorders so that preventive action can be taken. Epidemiological studies led to the discoveries of the relationship between smoking and cancer and to the identification of heart disease risk factors.(11) Microdosing is another promising alternative: Human subjects are given a drug dose that is one-hundredth of what would be expected to have an actual effect on the body, but sensitive measuring equipment is able to monitor the metabolism of the drug and allow scientists to predict the dangers or benefits of a full dose.(12)

Of the three basic treatment methods available to people who are diagnosed with cancer today-surgical removal, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy-not one is guaranteed to be effective. If a cancer does go into remission following one of these treatments, there is no assurance that it will not reappear. Because radiation and chemotherapy treatments irradiate or poison normal tissues as well as cancerous ones, both can cause additional cancers and unbearable side effects. Animal testing has not helped these patients; if anything, it has held back progress in treatments.

What You Can Do

Take responsibility for your health and avoid carcinogens. Stay away from animal-based foods (meat, eggs, and dairy products), tobacco, excessive radiation, artificial food additives and colorings, and pesticides in order to lower your risk of getting cancer.

Encourage medical charities and research agencies to develop and use clinical, epidemiological, and other non-animal research methods. If you donate to medical charities, write, “Not to be used for animal studies,” on your check because some organizations–including the March of Dimes, the American Cancer Society, the Canadian Cancer Society, and countless others-use donations to fund experiments on animals. Compassionate, modern charities, such as the National Children’s Cancer Society, Cancer Care, and the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade, know that non-animal methods are the best way to fight cancer. Visit HumaneSeal.org to find out which charities do and which do not fund research on animals.

References
1) Clifton Leaf, “The War on Cancer: Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer-and How to Win It,” Fortune 9 Mar. 2004.
2) International Union Against Cancer, “Concerted Global Action Is the Only Answer to Rising Cancer Deaths,” 3 Jun. 2003.
3) World Health Organization and International Union Against Cancer, Global Action Against Cancer 2005.
4) American Cancer Society, “Cancer Prevention and Early Detection: Facts and Figures, 2004,” 2004.
5) J. Chang-Claude et al., “Mortality Pattern of German Vegetarians After 11 Years of Follow-Up,” Epidemiology 3 (1992): 389-91.
6) Leaf.
7) Gardiner Harris, “New Drug Points Up Problems in Developing Cancer Cures,” The New York Times 21 Dec. 2005.
Andrew C. von Eschenbach, “The Nation’s Investment in Cancer Research: A Plan and Budget Proposal for FY 2006,” National Cancer Institute, Oct. 2004: 54.
9) Jerome Burne, “Danger Mouse,” The Times [U.K.] 30 Jul. 2002.
10) Leaf.
11) Christopher Anderegg et al., “A Critical Look at Animal Experimentation,” Medical Research Modernization Committee, 2002.
12) Kerri Smith, “The Human Guinea Pigs,” The Times [U.K.] 17 Dec. 2005.

These facts are not surprising to anyone who has spent time around these social, playful animals. Pigs, who have a great sense of smell and can live into their teens, are protective of their young and form bonds with other pigs. Pigs are clean animals, but they do not have sweat glands, so they take to the mud to stay cool and ward off flies.(3,4)

Problems With Factory Farms

Only pigs in movies spend their lives running across sprawling pastures and relaxing in the sun. On any given day in the United States, there are nearly 63 million pigs in factory farms, and 104 million are killed for food each year.(5,6) Factory-farming conditions are no better in Canada, which exports more than 8 million live pigs to the U.S. for slaughter each year.(7) In 2003, managers of Canada’s largest pig exporter faced cruelty-to-animals charges after 10,000 dead and dying pigs were found on the company’s farms. Investigators found dead pigs stacked behind barns and dead piglets in manure tanks, and all the live pigs “were in some form of distress.”(8)

Mother pigs (sows)-who account for more than 6 million of the pigs in the U.S.-spend most of their lives in individual “gestation” crates.(9) These crates are about 7 feet long and 2 feet wide-too small for them even to turn around.(10) After giving birth to piglets, sows are moved to “farrowing” crates, which are wide enough for them to lie down and nurse their babies but not big enough for them to turn around or build nests for their young.(11)

Piglets are separated from their mothers when they are as young as 10 days old. Once her piglets are gone, each sow is impregnated again, and the cycle continues for three or four years before she is slaughtered.(12,13) This intensive confinement produces stress- and boredom-related behaviors, such as chewing on cage bars and obsessively pressing against water bottles.(14,15)

After they are taken from their mothers, piglets are confined to pens until they are separated to be raised for breeding or meat.(16) Every year in the United States, 50 million male piglets are castrated (usually without anesthesia) because people who eat pork complain of “boar taint” in meat that comes from intact animals.(17) Perhaps because of the tremendous pain caused by the procedure, castration is thought to have long-term negative effects on piglets. Research conducted by Europe’s food safety agency found that castrated piglets tended to spend less time with their mothers and other piglets; according to one Norwegian researcher, “Sometimes they get depressed.”(18) Norway banned piglet castration without anesthesia in 2002, and the procedure will be prohibited entirely as of 2009.(19)

Because they, too, are extremely crowded and prone to stress-related behaviors (such as cannibalism and tail-biting), farmers chop off piglets’ tails and use pliers to break off the ends of their teeth-without any pinkillers.(20) For identification purposes, farmers also cut out chunks of the young animals’ ears.(21)

Transportation and Slaughter

Farms all over North America ship piglets (called “feeder pigs”) to Corn Belt states such as Illinois and Indiana for “growing” and “finishing.” When they are transported on trucks, piglets weighing up to 100 pounds are given no more than 2.4 square feet of space, and farmers are warned that the piglets “probably will get sick within a few days after arrival.”(22) One study confirmed that vibrations, like those made by a moving truck, are “very aversive” to pigs. When pigs “were trained to press a switch panel to stop for 30 seconds vibration and noise in a transport simulator … the animals worked very hard to get the 30 seconds of rest.”(23)

Once pigs reach “market weight” (about 250 to 270 pounds), the industry refers to them as “hogs” and they are sent to be slaughtered. The animals are shipped from all over the U.S. and Canada to slaughterhouses, most of which are in the Midwest. According to industry reports, more than 1 million pigs die en route to slaughter each year.(24) There are no laws to regulate the duration of transport, frequency of rest, or provisions of food and water for the animals.(25,26) Pigs tend to resist getting into the trailers, which can be made from converted school buses or multidecked trucks with steep ramps, so workers use electric prods to move them along. There are no federal laws to regulate the voltage or use of electric prods on pigs, and a study showed that when electric prods were used, pigs “vocalized, lost their balance and tr[ied] to jump out of the loading area” and that their “[h]eart rate and body temperature was significantly higher … when compared to pigs loaded using a hurdle [movable chute].”(27) A former pig transporter told PETA that pigs are “packed in so tight, their guts actually pop out their butts-a little softball of guts actually comes out.”(28) When a transport truck owned by Smithfield Foods-the largest pork producer in the world-and loaded with 180 pigs flipped over in Virginia, many pigs were killed in the accident, while others lay along the side of the road, injured and dying. PETA officials arrived on the scene and offered to humanely euthanize the injured animals, but Smithfield refused to allow the suffering animals a humane death because it is illegal to sell the flesh of animals who have been euthanized.(29)

A typical slaughterhouse kills about 1,000 hogs per hour.(30) The sheer number of animals killed makes it impossible for pigs’ deaths to be humane and painless. Because of improper stunning, many hogs are alive when they reach the scalding-hot water baths, which are intended to soften their skin and remove their hair.(31) The U.S. Department of Agriculture documented 14 humane-slaughter violations at one processing plant, where inspectors found hogs who “were walking and squealing after being stunned [with a stun gun] as many as four times.”(32) An industry report explains that “continuous pig squealing is a sign of … rough handling and excessive use of electric prods.” The report found that the pigs at one federally inspected slaughter plant squealed 100 percent of the time “because electric prods were used to force pigs to jump on top of each other.”(33) A PETA investigation found that workers at an Oklahoma farm were killing pigs by slamming the animals’ heads against the floor and beating them with a hammer.(34)

Health Problems Caused by Eating Pork

The consumption of pork and other animal products has been linked to cancers of the mouth, throat, colon, and stomach.(35,36,37) A study of more than 90,000 women concluded that “frequent consumption of bacon, hot dogs, and sausage was … associated with an increased risk of diabetes.”(38) However, those pork products are on the daily menu for 25 percent of kids between the ages of 19 months and 2 years.(39) According to another study, the children of pregnant women who consume cured meats on a daily basis run a “substantial risk of [growing a] paediatric brain tumour.”(40)

Every year in the United States, food poisoning sickens up to 76 million people and kills 5,000.(41) Pork products are known carriers of foodborne pathogens: One study found that more than 50 percent of the tested samples of ham were contaminated with staphylococcus, and another study determined that “traditional salting, drying and smoking of raw pork meat was not antimicrobiologically effective” against Salmonella typhimurium.(42)

Because crowding creates an environment conducive to the spread of disease, pigs in factory farms are fed and sprayed with huge amounts of pesticides and antibiotics. The pesticides and antibiotics remain in their bodies and are passed on to people who eat them, creating serious human health hazards. Pigs and other factory-farmed animals are fed 20 million pounds of antibiotics each year, and scientists believe that meat-eaters’ involuntary consumption of these drugs is giving rise to strains of bacteria that are resistant to treatment.(43)

Environmental Hazards

Each factory-farmed pig produces about 9 pounds of manure per day.(44) As a result, many tons of waste end up in giant pits in the ground or on crops, polluting the air and groundwater. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, agricultural runoff is the number one source of pollution in our waterways.(45) A Missouri-based hog farm had to pay a $1 million fine for illegally dumping waste, which caused the contamination of a nearby river and the deaths of more than 50,000 fish.(46) Smithfield Foods was fined $12.6 million for polluting the Pagan River with phosphorous-contaminated wastewater from its slaughter plant.(47)

Pigs and other farmed animals are the primary consumers of water in the U.S.; a single pig may require up to 21 gallons of drinking water per day.(48) Eighty percent of agricultural land in the U.S. is used to grow food to meet the needs of pigs and other factory-farmed animals.(49) In the “finishing” phase alone, during which pigs grow from 100 to 240 pounds, each hog consumes more than 500 pounds of grain, corn, and soybeans; this means that across the U.S., pigs eat tens of millions of tons of feed every year.(50)

What You Can Do

Stop factory-farming abuses by supporting legislation that abolishes intensive-confinement systems. Florida and Arizona voters have banned the use of gestation crates, as have voters in the United Kingdom.(51,52)

Stop giving your money to pig farms and slaughterhouses. Vegetarianism and veganism mean eating for life-for your life and for animals’ lives. Call or visit GoVeg.com to order a free vegetarian starter kit.

References

1) “New Slant on Chump Chops,” Cambridge Daily News 29 Mar. 2002.
2) “The Millennium List,” The Times 9 Jan. 2000.
3) M.K. Holder, “Smart Puzzle #3 Pig,” Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviors, Indiana University, 1999.
4) Meg Meier, “Oink, Moo, Quack,” Star Tribune 27 Aug. 2002.
5) National Agricultural Statistics Service, “USDA Quarterly Pigs and Hogs Report: September 2006,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, 29 Sep. 2006.
6) Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Pigmeat, Slaughtered/Production Animals (Head) 2002,” 1 Dec. 2006.
7) Lisa Anderson, “Canada Livestock and Products Semi-Annual 2006,” USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Gain Report 1 Feb. 2006.
Kelly Pedro, “Pigs Found Dead, Dying. Seven Men Have Been Charged Over the Grim Discovery Involving 10,000 Animals,” The London Free Press 15 Sep. 2003.
9) National Agricultural Statistics Service, “USDA Quarterly Pigs and Hogs Report: September 2006,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, 29 Sep. 2006.
10) Marc Kaufman, “In Pig Farming, Growing Concern,” The Washington Post 18 Jun. 2001.
11) Kaufman, “In Pig Farming, Growing Concern.”
12) A.J. Zanella and O. Duran, “Pig Welfare During Loading and Transportation: A North American Perspective,” I Conferencia Virtual Internacional Sobre Qualidade de Carne Suina, via Internet, 16 Nov. 2000.
13) Kaufman, “In Pig Farming, Growing Concern.”
14) Zanella and Duran.
15) Kaufman, “In Pig Farming, Growing Concern.”
16) Glenn Selk, “Managing the Sow and Litter,” Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, Jul. 2003.
17) Joellen Perry and Mary Jacoby, “These Little Pigs Get Special Care From Norwegians,” The Wall Street Journal 6 Aug. 2007.
18) Perry and Jacoby.
19) Guro Å. Skarstad and Svein O. Borgen, “Norwegian Pig Producers’ View on Animal Welfare,” Norwegian Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Mar. 2007.
20) Selk.
21) L. Michael Neary and Ann Yager, “Methods of Livestock Identification,” Purdue University Department of Animal Sciences, Dec. 2002.
22) John C. Rea and George W. Jesse, “Managing Purchased Feeder Pigs,” Department of Animal Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1 Oct. 1993.
23) Zanella and Duran.
24) “Research Looks at Transport Losses,” Feedstuffs 17 Apr. 2006.
25) Dennis A. Shields and Kenneth H. Mathews Jr., “Interstate Livestock Movements,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Jun. 2003.
26) Zanella and Duran.
27) Zanella and Duran.
28) Carla Bennett, “The Joy and Sorrow of Pigs,” Animal Times Fall 1996.
29) Linda McNatt, “25 Hogs Die in Smithfield Truck Accident,” The Virginian Pilot 30 Mar. 2004.
30) Lance Gay, “Faulty Practices Result in Inhumane Slaughterhouses,” Scripps Howard News Service, Feb. 2001.
31) Joby Warrick, “‘They Die Piece by Piece’; In Overtaxed Plants, Humane Treatment of Cattle Is Often a Battle Lost,” The Washington Post 10 Apr. 2001.
32) Warrick.
33) Temple Grandin, “2001 Restaurant Audits of Stunning and Handling in Federally Inspected Beef and Pork Slaughter Plants,” 2002 Meat Institute Animal Handling and Stunning Conference, Colorado State University: Department of Animal Sciences, 2002.
34) Marc Kaufman, “Ex-Pig Farm Manager Charged With Cruelty,” The Washington Post 9 Sep. 2001.
35) F. Levi et al., “Food Groups and Risk of Oral and Pharyngeal Cancer,” International Journal of Cancer 77 (1998): 705-9.
36) F. Levi et al., “Food Groups and Colorectal Cancer Risk,” British Journal of Cancer 79 (1999): 1283-7.
37) P.A. van den Brandt et al., “Salt Intake, Cured Meat Consumption, Refrigerator Use and Stomach Cancer Incidence: A Prospective Cohort Study (Netherlands),” Cancer Causes and Control 14 (2003): 427-38.
38) M.B. Schulze et al., “Processed Meat Intake and Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes in Younger and Middle-Aged Women,” Diabetologia 24 Oct. 2003.
39) T.A. Badger, “Infants, Toddlers Developing Bad Eating Habits, Study Finds,” Associated Press, 26 Oct. 2003.
40) J.M. Pogoda, “Maternal Cured Meat Consumption During Pregnancy and Risk of Paediatric Brain Tumour in Offspring: Potentially Harmful Levels of Intake,” Public Health Nutrition 2 (2001): 1303-5.
41) Paul S. Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Death in the United States,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 5.5 (1999): 607-25.
42) P.L. Mertens, “An Epidemic of Salmonella Typhimurium Associated With Traditional Salted, Smoked, and Dried Ham,” Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd 143 (1999): 1046-9.
43) Jeff Donn, “Contaminated Meat Spurs Concern. Study Finds 1 in 5 Market Samples Contained Drug-Resistant Bacteria,” Associated Press, 18 Oct. 2001.
44) “Rains Swell Waste Lagoons at Four Hog Farms,” Associated Press, 1 Dec. 2006.
45) Sen. Tom Harkin, “Animal Waste Pollution in America: An Emerging National Problem,” U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, Dec. 1997.
46) “Cargill Fined $1 Million for Dumping Hog Waste in River,” Associated Press, 20 Feb. 2002.
47) Bob Piazza and Rex Springston, “Smithfield Is Fined $12.6 Million,” Richmond Times-Dispatch 9 Aug. 1997.
48) Theo van Kempen, “Whole Farm Water Use,” North Carolina State University Swine Extension, Jul. 2003.
49) Marlow Vesterby and Kenneth S. Krupa, “Major Uses of Land in the United States, 1997,” Statistical Bulletin No. 973. U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1997.
50) John Carlson, “Evaluation of Corn Processing By-Products in Swine Diets,” Western Illinois University, 3 Apr. 1996.
51) “Arizona Says ‘No’ to Gestation Crates,” PigProgress.net, 9 Nov. 2006.
52) John J. McGlone, “Current Status of Housing and Penning Systems for Sows,” Pork Industry Institute, Texas Tech University, May 2002.

This article was reprinted from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA)