Eating Animals Part 3:

I read how chickens have changed and became unnatural geneticly modified beings. It when when the USDA and Poltry Industry launched a "Chicken of Tomorrow" contest to create a pefect chicken that could produce more meat with less feed. Sounds crazy right? But they actually figured it out. They made a hybrid corn called Cornish blood that gave chickens broad breasts. Also they gave the birds sulfa drugs and antibiotics, which stimulated growth and held down the diseases induced by confinement. The chickens' feed and environment were so manipulated that they were genetically altered. "The average weight of broilers increased by 65%, while their time-to-market dropped 60% and their feed requirements dropped 57%. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be 300 pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flinstone vitamins." (Foer 107) Factory farms have taken the natural process of farming and made it unnatural like what you'd see in a Frankenstein movie. These chickens grow so fast that their bones and organs cannot keep up with the growth. This results in the chickens being crippled or in immense pain.
All this overcrowding within a stressful and filthy environment leads to a weakened immune system. As a result, virtually all chickens are infected with E. coli. Take this into account and then remember how Foer described "fresh." As a result, "between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected." (Foer 131) I don't know about you, but that scares me. E. coli is a disease responsible for thousands of deaths, and yet chickens we purchase at our trusted stores are infected with it. I think we should have more restrictions on what factory farms can and can't sell. Perhaps a restriction such as; if a factory is producing food that is infected, then it can't sell it or the factory should eventually be shut down. So lets take a look at who is in charge of providing nutritional information to the people of America and able to create and provide these restrictions. "The USDA was charged with providing nutritional information to the nation and ultimately with creating guidelines that would serve public health. At the same time, though, the USDA was charged with promoting industry." (Foer 146) Does that sound strange to anyone else? The people who tell us what is ok to eat are also promoting the food industry. The USDA has a complete monopoly of the food industry and basically sets the guidelines for what we should and shouldn't eat. I think we need to change this so that we are eating the safest food possible and are given proper nutritional guidelines. If this continues, more people will die as a result of unchecked food that was put into our stores.

Food Safety

The U.S. claims to have excellent quality food from factory farms, but statistics don't support this. According to David Hosansky, An estimated 5,000 people die yearly and some 76 million are sickened because of food-borne pathogens like E. coli, listeria and Vibrio vulnificus. Much of our food comming from factory farms is still contaminated and getting people sick. This is due to the fact that there are few restrictions on factory farms when it comes to clean meat. “There are a lot of gaps in the food safety system, and there are also redundancies,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of the food safety program at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an advocacy group in Washington. “The system is very inefficient, and we pay the price in terms of more illness and deaths.” Factory farms try to produce mass amounts of meat at once to increase profit, however their carlessness of handling meat leads to the death of thousands every year. I think we should increase the restrictions on meat factory farms so that we have less contaminated food going to our market. Factory farms only care about their own profit, not the health of others. Their products may be cheaper, but in the long run they cost us more in our health. "Poisoning costs the nation an estimated $7 billion a year in medical expenses, lost productivity and other related costs. It causes symptoms ranging from stomach cramps and diarrhea to kidney failure and death." A person can get sick through such innocuous acts as eating a medium-rare hamburger or unwashed lettuce from a salad bar. Our meat should be more closley regulated so that we don't have to be paranoid when eating a salad or cooking hamburgers on the grill. We, as consumers, have made the food industry too powerful so that they can prevent themselves from being sued due to these sicknesses they cause. Also they can prevent laws that restrict them from sending meat out to the market without being thouroughly checked. This is why we need to give less power to the food industry and keep them more in check.
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