[Ed. Note: For more, read articles in Food Hazards in Animal Flesh and By-products and The Meat and Dairy Industries.]
So it's one thing to blame the cattle factory farms for all this, but the truth is that it is the consumers who create the demand that these factory animal farms are merely trying to meet. If food shoppers really cared what they were eating and changed their shopping habits accordingly, the factory animal farms would collapse virtually overnight.
Remember all the hubbub about the S.510 "Food Safety Bill" and how it
would make your food safe to eat? Well, it turns out those expanded FDA
powers do absolutely nothing to even address the safety of fresh meat
products, and yet new research reveals that nearly half of all fresh meat
and poultry products are contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria,
including
multiple drug-resistant superbugs.
This research was conducted by the Translational Genomics Research Institute
(TGen) and published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. It was
based on 136 samples of fresh meat representing 80 different brands sold in
26 grocery stores from California to Florida.
The research reveals that factory animal farms are breeding grounds for
drug-resistant bacteria which are then passed on to humans through the food
supply. This happens because factory farm animals are routinely dosed with
both antibiotics and vaccines, causing serious imbalances in their own
intestinal flora and immune function. This makes these factory farm animals
the perfect hosts for breeding drug-resistant superbugs such as S. aureus, a
particularly nasty strain that can be fatal if ingested.
It's yet another reason to buy free-range beef, chicken or pork if you eat
those meats, by the way. Only free-range animals that are not injected with
antibiotics are safe from the kind of chemical abuse routinely used in
factory farm operations.
The S.510 Food Safety Bill is a complete joke
What this situation reveals is just how ridiculous all the debate was over
the S.510 Food Safety Bill which recently became law in the United States.
Remember all those Senators who stood before the American people and
insisted S.510 would "make the food supply safe" for everyone?
What they didn't tell you is that S.510 did absolutely nothing to address
the safety of meat products. It only attacked vegetables and thinks like raw
milk and raw cheese, complete ignoring the safety of meat products
altogether.
And now we know why: The meat products sold in America today are so widely
contaminated with dangerous, deadly bacteria that if the American people
really knew how much bacteria was in their meat, they wouldn't buy it!
So the government, as usual, swept the problem under the rug and pretended
that e.coli was a "vegetable farming" problem. Well, I have news for the
federal regulators and geniuses in the U.S. Senate who passed S.510: E.coli
grows in animals, not plants. So the only way it can even get onto the
plants is if the factory animal farms are releasing e.coli downstream where
it contaminates the vegetable farms.
The e.coli problem, in other words, is an animal farm problem, not a
vegetable farm problem.
If you can't eat fresh meat, what about packaged meat?
So you might think that if so much of the fresh beef and poultry is so
widely contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria, maybe the packaged
"processed" meat is safer for you, right?
You might want to reconsider that: Packaged meat is almost always preserved
with a dangerous, cancer-causing ingredient called sodium nitrite. It's
listed right on the label of packages of bacon, sausage, sandwich meat, beef
jerky, pepperoni, ham and many other packaged meat products.
Sodium nitrite causes
cancer, and it's added to meat products primarily to turn them bright
red (as a chemical food coloring agent). It also kills botulism, by the way,
because it's yet another chemical antibiotic agent.
So if you eat fresh meat, you're likely to be encountering superbugs. If you
eat packaged meat, you're probably eating cancer-causing chemicals.
So what to do?
Solutions for meat eaters
You could always go vegetarian, of course. A largely plant-based diet is not
only safer for you; it's also safer for the environment. (Go check out the
runoff from the factory cattle farms near Greeley, Colorado, and you'll see
what I mean...)
For those who choose to eat meat, here are three things you can do to avoid
these dangers:
1) Buy local, grass-fed or free-range meat products from farmers and
ranchers you know. Check out the local food co-ops or Saturday farmers'
markets.
2) Cook the snot out of your meat products just to be sure you kill
absolutely everything that might be living on them.
3) Look for nitrite-free meats at your grocery store or health food store.
They're always in the frozen meat section (in the freezers) because without
the sodium nitrite chemicals, they have to be kept frozen to avoid spoilage.
And finally, don't believe anything the federal government tells you about
so-called "food safety." The federal food safety laws are such a complete
joke that they utterly ignore the single largest source of potentially
deadly bacteria in the entire food supply: the factory animal farms that
have now become superbug breeding grounds.
It's yet another side effect of the widespread abuse of antibiotics. Did you
know that in North America, far more antibiotics are given to animals than
to people? The flooding of antibiotics into the food supply is a type of
chemical assault on our bodies and our environment. These antibiotics are
being found in frogs and fish, rivers and streams. They are an environmental
pollutant that threaten ocean ecosystems and wildlife.
And yet, the only reason these antibiotics are even needed in the factory
animal farm operations is because animal farms are so filthy and unsanitary
in the first place. Have you watched The Meatrix animations yet? If not,
visit www.TheMeatrix.com to learn more.
Mindless consumers created the factory animal farms, in a sense
Now, here's another thing to consider: Why do factory animal farm operations
even exist? Because mindless consumers buy meat based on the lowest price
and nothing else!
If more consumers demanded grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, the
factory animal farms would be out of business! It is the mindless shopping
habits of consumers who frankly don't even care where their meat comes from
that has given rise to these "lowest price" cattle feed lots and factory
farms.
If you don't care where your beef comes from, and you only shop price at the
big box stores, guess what you're buying? Antibiotic-injected,
superbug-infested factory-farmed beef!
Factory farm cattle companies, of course, are only giving consumers what
they demand: the absolutely lowest price on beef, regardless of where it
comes from or how the cows were treated, fed or medicated. Amazingly,
probably 4 out of 5 beef consumers couldn't care less about what they're
eating or where it really comes from. They would eat piles of doggy doo if
it looked like hamburger and was on sale for 99 cents a pound.
So it's one thing to blame the cattle factory farms for all this, but the
truth is that it is the consumers who create the demand that these factory
animal farms are merely trying to meet. If food shoppers really cared what
they were eating and changed their shopping habits accordingly, the factory
animal farms would collapse virtually overnight.
And that's a point of empowerment for YOU to remember: When you refuse to
buy the lowest-price beef (corn fed, factory farmed beef), you deny revenues
to that entire model of cow abuse and antibiotics abuse. When you buy local,
grass-fed, free-range beef, you support the local cattle ranchers who refuse
to participate in the whole system of factory beef operations.
So the choice is up to you, and every dollar you spend makes a difference.
If you eat beef or chicken, simply changing your own purchasing habits can
have a powerful influence over the entire system. And when enough consumers
refuse to buy factory-farmed beef, the beef factories will finally shut down
and become yet another sad chapter in the history of food.
Personally, I don't eat beef, but I do buy beef for my dog. And I go to a
local farmer's market where I can buy beef bones from locally grown
grass-fed, free-ranged cattle.
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