Factory Farming – You’re Eating What They’re Eating!

I remember when we were ready to add solid food to my first born son’s 4 – 6 month old tummy.  As his mommy, I obviously wanted to feed him the best possible food available.   Upon asking his pediatrician advice on where to get such food, she said, “Plant a garden!  It’s the only guarantee you will eat what you think you are eating”.    It didn’t take long for me to learn that it wasn’t only produce that needed special attention, but it was everything else that goes into our daily diet, particularly all meat and animal products: eggs, cheese, dairy, etc.

I have been reading The Great Physician’s Rx for Health and Wellness by Jordan Rubin. I loved what he had to say about consuming meat, all other animal products as well as any other plant based food,

You’ve heard it said that you are what you eat. Well, I’ll take that a step further to say you are what they eat or ate—they meaning the plant or animal sources in your diet.

This concept of us eating what they eat (or ate) was vividly described in an article called Down On The Factory Farm by Tracy Sorensen; published in Alive Australia, a health and wellness magazine.  Below is a partial re-post of the original article.  If you are not from Australia, don’t get fooled that your meat or animal product is any better.  I am originally from the US, and I know their standards are the same, if not worse.  Unfortunately, the standards listed in this article are running rampart all over the western world.

DOWN ON THE FACTORY FARM

Depending on your mood, a trip to the shopping center may or may not be the moment you reflect on the sum total of suffering on the planet. Most of us traipse the aisles on autopilot as we load up on essentials for the week ahead.  We may not give it much thought, but every item has a story: where it came from, how it got there.  In the case of meat and eggs, the stories can be uncomfortable indeed.  Factory farming has made high quality protein cheap and widely available – but it has a come at a cost.

A TALE OF SUFFERING

Pigs

Take pork, for example.  There lie the pork chops on an absorbent pad under a film of plastic.  The journey to that spot under fluorescent lights most likely began in a sow stall.  The nations estimated 300,000 breeding sows are typically kept in rows of metal stalls 2 meters (6.5 feet) long and just 60 cm (1.5 feet) wide.

There is no room to turn around in theses stalls and no opportunity for exercise.  Leg muscles begin to atrophy, so the animal has trouble standing up, but it is also difficult or uncomfortable to lie down.

Once a pregnant sow gives birth, her piglets are kept in the stall next door.  They can reach through the metal bars to suckle, but no other interaction with their mother is possible.  The mother’s nesting and nursing instincts are frustrated.

According to Lyn White, Animals Australia’s Communication Director, “If you kept a dog like this, you’d be prosecuted for cruelty”.

Chickens

Moving along the aisle to the frozen chickens, it’s a similar story.  Before the 1960′s, chicken meat was relatively expensive, a little bit special.  My father tells of how each child in the family was given a chicken once a year.  The chooks lived in the backyard, dodging the kids at play, until it was their turn for the kitchen table.  Until that moment of truth, they lived happy chicken lives, scratching, foraging, running, socializing.

In Australia today over 400 million meat chickens are typically raised in large sheds in which there is barely room to move.  They stand in dim light to discourage activity, fattening up to slaughter in as little as 35 days.  They large breast muscles – they are specially bred this way – can cause their legs to buckle under them from the weight.  Their droppings are allowed to accumulate on the floor, creating air that stinks of ammonia.

The chickens are caught and transported in a process that maximizes economic efficiency but leaves birds with broken bones or dead of dehydration, exhaustion or extremes of temperature by the time they arrive at the processing factory.

Slaughter is a mechanized process in which the birds’ heads are passed through an electric water bath to stun them before their throats are cut.  If they lift their heads, they miss the stunning process and face the mechanized knife fully conscious.  If they miss both the stunning and the throat cutting, they plunge into boiling water while still alive.

Eggs

Its time to move on to the egg section of the supermarket.  Here, the story of suffering continues.  The nation’s 10.5 million batter hens are kept in wire cages, stationary as plants, laying their 193 million eggs into chutes below them.  (Unwanted male chicks are tossed into great piles, ready to be gassed or ground up while still alive).  There are no perches in these cages, and the confinement leads to skeletal and muscular weakness.

Milk

Need Milk?  Dairy cows are kept in a state of almost continuous pregnancy.  Within a day of giving birth, cows are separated from their calves which are then slaughtered as a “byproduct”.   One million dairy calves, less than a week old, are slaughtered each year as byproducts of the dairy industry (this is in addition to those slaughtered for veal).

THE RISK TO HUMAN HEALTH

The animals aren’t the only victims of factory farming.  Crowding animals together indoors without access to fresh air and sunlight, often exposed to urine and feces, is a recipe for disease transmission.

Antibiotics

To cope with this, factory farming relies heavily on the routine use of antibiotics, often administered in feed or drinking water.  While many have been banned, there are still 12 antibiotics that can be used as growth promoters in Australia.

The widespread (albeit regulated) use of antibiotics in meat production has lead to concern about the development of disease-resistant strains of bacteria.  While Food Standards Austral New Zealand (FSANZ) describes this risk as “highly unlikely”, the European Union (EU) has a different view.  In 2006 it banned the routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock.

Hormones

The use of growth hormones is another issue of concern.  When animals’ bodies are production units, enhancing rates of growth means maximizing profits.  While Australian chickens have not been treated with growth hormones since the 1960′s, their use is widespread in both feedlot and paddock-raised cattle.  Female hormones such as oestradiol and progesterone, and male hormones including testosterone and trenbolone acetate, or a combination, are administered to cattle through implants under the skin.

In Australia the use of growth-promoting hormones is approved and regulated by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, which has found no scientific evidence for health concerns.  Still consumers are showing a preference for hormone-free meat.  Coles, a major supermarket has banned hormone-fed beef and will not sell it, however, they have not banned the use of antibiotics in beef production.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of eating meat that lived in its own waste or drinking milk that was from a cow that was full of antibiotics and hormones does not sound good.  I remember while breast feeding my children that whatever I ate pretty much came through my milk into them.  So if it can happen to us humans, it can happen to cows, right?!

So what are we to do?  How can we find meat, dairy and eggs that are not going to cause us such health concerns?

1. Be your own advocate and educate yourself.  Read articles and books, talk to many people in the health and wellness industry, Google searches, etc.
2. Use our voice!  Let your supermarket know what you want to see on their shelves.  If it worked in Australia at a major supermarket, then it can work anywhere
3. Shop at your local Farmer’s Markets where you can come face to face with farmers and ask them the hard questions about their livestock and produce.  Do they spray?  What do they feed their livestock?  What conditions to they live in? etc.
4. Go to your local farm.  Talk to the farmer, get a tour of their livestock and see where they live and in what conditions they live in and find out what they eat.

Jordan Rubin in The Great Physician’s Rx for Health and Wellness says it clearly,

” If we’re talking about food from animals, this means raising the animals the way they’re supposed to be treated because the health of the animal is intricately related to the health of the meat, eggs or milk it provides, which in turn, is related to our health.”