October 7th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

We make cows sick. Then we eat them. And they make us sick.

That’s the very short version of the industrialized beef program we’re living with right now. Has a certain terrible symmetry doesn’t it? And by abridging the story, I don’t mean to make light of the situation, only to highlight the obvious stupidity of it.

By now, if you’ve seen the movie Food, Inc., or read or viewed any of a dozen reports (here’s just one) on the problems of mass-produced beef, you know what I’m talking about. We’ve taken a grass-eating animal and, in the interest of quickly fattening it for slaughter, turned it into a grain-fed animal that is packed it into feedlots. And in so doing, we have produced beef that’s fatter than ever, full of antibiotics, pesticides and growth hormones — and created an E. coli factory.

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