Category: Reinvention

Tales From The Factory Farm

That’s the new Category I am creating for this blog, because (and this is good) I am seeing an increasing number of debates and analyses of the way in which we have industrialized food production, both to the detriment of the animals and our health. Here are two good examples:

1) Pink Slime: we’ve all been hearing about it, and you are probably disgusted by it (here’s an explanation of what it is). But Mark Bittman lately has been riffing alot on it, and has done a very nice job of pointing out that as odious as the idea of Pink Slime might be, it is a logical consequence of the industrialization of meat production:

But pink slime, as Grist writer Tom Laskaway says, is the tip of the iceberg; it’s a symptom, not a disease. Remember why it was originally created — to eliminate bacteria found in ground meat. The fact that pink slime was a “solution” might lead you to ask: What’s the problem?

The answer lies in the industrial production of livestock on a scale that’s far too large to sustain without significant collateral damage. E. coli, found in the digestive tracts of cattle, is common on factory farms where cattle are fed only grain. (Their stomachs are meant to digest grass.) The incomprehensible quantity of manure produced by these cattle — also often containing E. coli — is deposited on the land, sometimes seeping into the water supply; that’s how you wind up with E. coli in vegetables. To make matters worse, “healthy” farm animals are routinely fed so many antibiotics that E. coli, salmonella and other pathogens are developing resistance to commonly prescribed drugs.

Exactly. Defenders of Pink Slime have been saying that if it is eliminated something like 1.5 million more cows a year will have to be slaughtered to make up for the loss of Pink Slime content in ground beef. So the choice they pose is: eat Pink Slime or kill a million more cows. That’s not a very appealing choice. So here’s the solution: go vegetarian, or stop eating factory-farmed beef. Simple. Yes, humanely-treated, grass-fed beef will cost you more per pound. But if you eat a lot less beef you will be healthier, and the planet will be healthier.

Here’s more from Bittman, in video form.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And, even more, here. Consider yourself fully slimed.

2) Eggs. Eggs are delicious (sorry vegans) and healthy, and it should be perfectly possible to raise and keep hens that are happy to produce them. Except consumers apparently care more about saving a few cents than treating hens humanely. Perhaps that is because they simply have no idea of the depraved and inhumane way in which hens are treated by the factory farmers. Nick Kristof, who grew up on a farm, is trying to rectify that, recently writing about the obscene conditions of one of America’s largest egg producers. As usual, read the whole thing, but here is a key portion:

Mice sometimes ran down egg conveyer belts, barns were thick with flies and manure in three barns tested positive for salmonella, he said. (Actually, salmonella isn’t as rare as you might think, turning up in 3 percent of egg factory farms tested by the Food and Drug Administration last year.)

In some cases, 11 hens were jammed into a cage about 2 feet by 2 feet. The Humane Society says that that is even more cramped than the egg industry’s own voluntary standards — which have been widely criticized as inadequate.

An automatic feeding cart that runs between the cages sometimes decapitates hens as they’re eating, the investigator said. Corpses are pulled out if they’re easy to see, but sometimes remain for weeks in the cages, piling up until they have rotted into the wiring, he added.

Other hens have their heads stuck in the wire and are usually left to die, the investigator said.

Is that how you’d like your breakfast egg to be produced? I didn’t think so. What can you do? Again, simple. By eggs that are certified humane.

Yes, they will cost a bit more. But there are two unavoidable questions central to feeding yourself and your family: 1) Are you willing to pay anything at all to insure humane treatment of the animals feeding you?; and 2) Whether you are or not (hopefully you are), are you willing to pay anything all for a food production system that causes less sickness and environmental damage?

The answers seem pretty obvious to me.

Sh$t Lobbyists Say

This nails it. Pretty darn funny, except it’s really not.

Are The Rich Different Than You And Me?

Well, this graphic says they are, and not in a good way.

Now, if someone would just analyze how much more likely wealthy drivers are to target bicyclists, I’ll know all I need to know.

Rich People Are Unethical
Created by: AccountingDegreeOnline.net

Restricting Medical Research On Chimps

I have no doubt that the next great evolution in humanity’s relationship with animals is a steady expansion of animal rights that will start to elevate the most social and intelligent animals to an approximation of “personhood.”. I don’t know how fast it will happen,  but I do believe that it will happen and that, say 100 years from now, people looking back on the way in which animals are treated today–in food production, in entertainment, and in medical research–will view us as certainly unenlightened and perhaps even barbaric.

There is a lot of momentum in the movement to bestow person-like rights on cetaceans. And the arguments are both fascinating and compelling:

There is similar energy in the effort to elevate the rights of primates and chimpanzees (also intelligent and social), and with regard to chimpanzees this is especially poignant as, unlike cetaceans, they are used for medical research.

Happily, the Institute Of Medicine, which recently completed a detailed study of chimpanzees in medical research at the behest of the National Institutes Of Health, has proposed new guidelines which hopefully will severely curtail (and eventually eliminate) the use of chimps by medical researchers.

It is a very complex issue because chimps arguably do have unique research value when it comes to finding cures for some human diseases (I don’t hold out much hope that humanity will stop entirely subordinating animal welfare to human welfare anytime soon–though I support the ethical argument to do just that). But the guidelines would at least be a significant improvement and set a much higher bar for chimp research. They are:

  • That the knowledge gained must be necessary to advance the public’s health;
  • There must be no other research model by which the knowledge could be obtained, and the research cannot be ethically performed on human subjects; and
  • The animals used in the proposed research must be maintained either in ethologically appropriate physical and social environments (i.e., as would occur in their natural environment) or in natural habitats.

These sorts of debates, and human consensus, move painfully slowly. But over years the accumulation of these incremental steps will add up to real change (I hope). I just wish that the process could be fast-forwarded from its current glacial pace.

UPDATE: Have to add this, since this 14-year old girl is a powerful example of how the future could look very different. You can imagine how an impassioned young person like this might help pick up the pace of change.

Factory Farms Are Killing You (Reason #463)

"Mmm, there's nothing better than tetracycline in the morning."

One of the most short-sighted and objectionable practices of factory farms (sadly, there are so many to choose from) is the massive use of antibiotics on healthy animals in an effort to stave off illness that might prevent getting them to the slaughter. And when I say massive, I mean massive. US factory farms pour some 30 million pounds of antibiotics into their animals every year (in contrast, humans consume just a few million pounds).

That’s a lot of antibiotics, and it is a practice that helps boost the profit margins of both Big Agriculture and Big Pharma. There’s a problem, though. A big one. Using such outsize quantities of antibiotics helps breed antibiotic resistant bacteria. And those hardy little bacteria kill lots of people every year.

The smart policy response is obvious: stop feeding healthy animals so many antibiotics. Europe, which so many American politicians like to scorn, has banned use of antibiotics in this manner since 1998. And what has the FDA, which has understood this problem since 1976, done? Nothing. Well, actually more than nothing. It just made a lot of farm and pharma lobbyists happy, and reneged on a commitment to ban the practice of feeding healthy animals antibiotics:

The FDA has been aware of the resistance problem for many years. In 1977, it decided to act on scientific evidence and order farmers to stop using penicillin and tetracycline in farm animals. The law required the agency to act immediately. But under pressure from Big Ag and Big Pharma (80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are fed to healthy animals), the agency dragged its feet and did nothing, even though public health and environmental organizations, including the American Medical Association(PDF), urged it to act.

With scientific appeals falling on deaf ears for decades, the Natural Resource Defense Council, joined by other plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit last spring seeking to make the FDA follow its own rules. In a calculated attempt to undermine the legal basis for the NRDC suit, the FDA’s recent reversal simply nullified the original 1977 order, in effect wiping out 35 years of history and scientific research.

So there you have it: your (totally corrupted) government at work.

Your smart policy response? Stop eating factory-farmed meat. Even better, stop eating all meat.

Where’s The Beef?

You may not know it, but the single most powerful act you as a human being can take to fight global warming, fight the abuse of animals, and fight the outbreak of global superbugs like avian flu is to become a vegetarian (if you want to know why, read this book). How’s that for a three-fer?

So against that context, we have a good news/bad news situation to report.

The good news: Americans are eating less meat.

The bad news: Americans are still meat gluttons (we consume one-sixth of the total meat consumed annually by the planet, but represent only one-twentieth of the population).

(Source: Daily Livestock Report)

The NYT’s Mark Bittman digs into the data, and the possible reasons Americans are slightly reducing their meat consumption. At least part of the reduction seems to be that Americans are increasingly concerned about the moral and environmental implications of eating meat.

That’s a big deal, I think, because it suggests that awareness and knowledge (and not just cost) can change people’s attitudes about meat, and the frequency with which they eat it. And I hope to do a lot more writing about this because the consumption of meat has such a huge impact on so many critical issues.

A Heartfelt Plea For The Earth

And a moving memorial to those who died trying to protect it.

Everything changes at the 2:16 mark. Pretty stunning….

(Thanks to JV for sharing).

Witness To Murder

With the dolphin slaughter in Taiji resuming after the holiday break, and ushering in a bloody 2012, I thought I would share this incredibly moving video lament.

It must be so hard to watch and bear witness to what happens in that Cove, and it is thanks only to the courage and persistence of Save Japan Dolphins and the other witnesses who spend day after day at the Cove that the rest of the world is not allowed to simply turn away and go back to playing XBox.

Here, for example, is SJD’s Heather Hill on what she saw today:

The boats slowly drove the dolphins towards the Cove, and divers lined the rocks, ready to intervene if and when the panic-prone dolphins entangled themselves in the nets or threw their bodies against the rocks in an attempt to flee.  Because the pod was so large, the fishermen were unable to push them all into the killing Cove (out of the range of our eyes and cameras) at once, and for a while there were dolphins cordoned off in three different sections of the Cove.  One lone dolphin swam between the outer nets while its family members were being slaughtered; watching, listening, and waiting.  After those dolphins already under the tarps were either killed or otherwise restrained, the fishermen opened the inside nets so they could drive the remaining individuals to their death.

One ironic note: Check out the ad on the right that Google’s algorithm selected for me as I watched dolphins being stabbed and killed. I think the algorithm needs some tweaking

Dolphin Discovery is all over the Caribbean and uses wild-caught dolphins to stock their pools. When anyone buys a ticket to a dolphin show they are helping create the demand that sustains the slaughter in Taiji. Please think about that next time your child or a friend suggests going to a dolphin show.

And then do the one thing that can help end this barbarism: say “No.”

Cycling Can Save The World (Part 3,267)

Denmark: This is how we roll.

Yo! Any countries having trouble imagining how to reduce greenhouse emissions (which I guess is just about all of you), listen up!

Inspire your lazy-ass public to ride bikes like the Danes and you will take a big chunk out of climate change, or so says this study:

If all Europeans bicycled as much as the people of Denmark, the European Union could achieve up to one-quarter of its target for carbon emissions reductionsin the transportation sector by 2050, a new report says. According to the European Cyclists’ Federation, the average Dane cycles about 2.6 kilometers a day. If that rate were achieved across the EU, it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 55 million to 120 million tons annually, or 5 to 11 percent of the EU’s overall emissions target, by 2020.

Wondering why that sort of logic has trouble in the land of the Big Mac (apart from the fact that our “leaders” scorn Europe)? The explanation is here.

Two Must-Read Climate Change Posts

Maybe you don’t want to know how bad the outlook is, or how massive the scale of change required to change that outlook. But if you want to face up to the facts, you should read these two posts (one and two) by David Roberts over at Grist.

Post One analyzes a new peer-reviewed paper by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows. According to Roberts, it paints a grim picture:

  • The commonly accepted threshold of climate “safety,” 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] temperature rise over pre-industrial levels, is now properly considered extremely dangerous;
  • even 2 degrees C is drifting out of reach, absent efforts of a scale and speed beyond anything currently proposed;
  • our current trajectory is leading us toward 4 or 6 (or 8 or 10) degrees C, which we now know to be a potentially civilization-threatening disaster.

Post Two looks at the reality of the changes that would be required to our economies and energy use to avoid disaster, and makes clear that:

a) humanity is utterly failing to meet the challenge because no one is willing to trade economic growth to address climate change, and rich countries (known as “Annex 1” in climate-treaty speak) are not willing to take responsibility for the disproportionate contribution they have made to warming (which is what helped them get rich), and shoulder a disproportionate burden in reducing emissions to allow poorer countries (“Annex 2”) more leeway to burn carbon and raise people out of poverty;

and b) the consequences will be pretty horrific.

Roberts’ posts drive home the critical point: the way we analyze, debate and react to climate change right now is, like, a few orders of magnitude short of the urgency and scale required to keep it within even barely acceptable bounds. And the current trajectory we are on won’t allow for “adaptation.” Yet the steps required to actually address the problem are laughably improbable.

Here’s Roberts:

Soooo … where does that leave us? What would it mean for the U.S. and other developed countries to peak their emissions in 2015 and decline them by something on the order of 10 percent a year thereafter?

It’s safe to say that no carbon tax is going to do that. It’s tough to imagine any “market mechanism” that could ratchet things so quickly, at least on its own. We won’t get there through innovation or new technology, even if we spend a trillion a year for the next few years. We won’t get there by tweaking our current system. The only conceivable way to produce that level of reductions is a full-scale, all-hands-on-deck mobilization, what William James called “the moral equivalent of war.”

The vast bulk of the reductions available in the near-term are on the demand side. Of course this means driving efficiency as fast as possible while taking measures (like raising prices and setting standards) to avoid the rebound effect. But it also means (gasp!) conservation. Actually, “conservation” is too polite a word for it. It means shared sacrifice. Climate campaigners have sworn until they’re blue in the face that reducing emissions is compatible with robust economic growth. And it’s true! But reducing emissions enough? Maybe not, at least not for the next little while.

This is the stark conclusion drawn by Anderson and Bows: “The logic of such studies suggests (extremely) dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged, at least temporarily, for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 nations and a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations.”

I know what you’re thinking. It’ll never happen. It’s political suicide to bring it up. Conservatives will use it against us. Very Serious People will take to fainting couches across the land. I’ll address those questions in my next post.

But for now, it’s enough to say: It is what it is. As Anderson says, we’re currently mitigating for 4 degrees C and planning for 2 degrees C. That is ass backwards. It is, almost clinically, insane. We need to be doing the opposite — mitigating for 2, planning for 4 — as soon as possible.

I have zero hope that the human culture of consumption, and humanity’s relentless willingness to subordinate the natural world and its species to humanity’s desires, can change fast enough. But the ironic joke here is that human culture is in the process of subordinating humanity itself as well. Not sure what to do with that utterly depressing reality, but I’m trying to figure it out.