We’ve seen it everywhere: Fast food restaurants, “gourmet” frozen foods, comedy sketches, you name it, bacon has infested our day to day culture. And yet it is killing us and our environment. A recent article touches on various important points that need to be read by the masses. Here are a few:
- The system of industrialized hog (and beef and poultry) farming that has developed over the last 40 years turns out to be ideal for breeding novel strains of deadly pathogens, such as the current pandemic of swine flu. If a new killer virus appears, like the Spanish flu that killed tens of millions after World War I, factory farms will have played a central role in its genesis.
- The food industry uses science and marketing to try to make its products addictive. By manipulating what he calls the “three points of the compass” — fat, sugar and salt — the food industry creates highly processed foods that can hook us like drugs.
- In the 1950s, there were 2.1 million hog farmers, with an average of 31 hogs each. As of 2007, there were 79,000 hog farmers left, averaging over 1,000 hogs each. A single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah holds a half-million hogs and produces more shit every day than all the residents of Manhattan.
- Rolling Stone’s stunning report describes the lakes of shit that surround pig factories as the color of Pepto Bismol because of the “interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs.”
- Vegetarians who think they are unaffected by this toxic fecal frappe should think again: The sludge is often used to “fertilize” crops that end up on your table.
- The environmental devastation is epic. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd walloped North Carolina, home to massive Smithfield hog operations. Rolling Stone described how the hurricane “washed 120 million gallons of unsheltered hog waste” — more than 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill a decade earlier — “into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers.” After scouring the rivers of aquatic life, the toxic sludge oozed to the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, one of the most important fish nurseries in the eastern Atlantic.
Are you disgusted yet? These are just a few of the reasons why we need to change how we operate our meat industries.
I recommend reading the entire article.
