April 12th, 2012

The FDA’s call to the livestock industry to voluntarily limit its routine use of antibiotics is tantamount to taking no action, say critics of the FDA’s plan, announced Wednesday.
The agency “is pretending to act while barely acting at all,” said Avinash Kar, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was among several public health advocates who scoffed at the idea that pharmaceutical and livestock companies would change their ways in response to government advice that carries no penalties.

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June 2nd, 2011

Many large-scale livestock producers around the world feed small amounts of antibiotics to healthy animals to help them grow better. But public health experts say constant exposure is encouraging bacteria to develop resistance to the drugs, undermining their effectiveness in treating human disease.

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October 20th, 2010

CAFO pulls back the curtain on industrial agriculture.

CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Earth Aware, 2010) takes no shortcuts as it squires us on an uncomfortable walk through the ways of modern meat production. It’s a grimy, grisly world and while much is immediately apparent, it’s important to stay for the entire tour so you can appreciate all the connections, redundancies and stupidity in the system.

This isn’t easy. There are pictures — and text — that are pure horror show; glimpses of the slaughterhouse where you can almost smell the stench. But stay on the walk, so you’ll understand. That’s important, because in the end, this is not about a more efficient system that’s brutal but necessary to feed the world, but about a super-controlled corporate game that’s out of control.

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September 2nd, 2010

Fedele Bauccio

Like many of you, I am shocked by the recent recall of over half a billion eggs. However, what is so stunning to me is not the sheer magnitude of the recall. Rather, I’m shocked that this is the first offense perpetrated by the egg industry large enough to trigger America’s outrage regarding food safety. Our egg industry is an emblem of industrialized animal agribusiness — a system that jeopardizes the health of American consumers each and every day, institutionally abuses animals, and pollutes our seas and waterways.

The Food and Drug Administration estimates that each year, 142,000 Americans are sickened by egg-borne Salmonella. Tragically, Salmonella is the top cause of food-poisoning related deaths in the United States. The conditions that created this widespread contamination are hardly an aberration — they are typical of an industry in dire need of reform. The facilities where the eggs originated are both factories (I won’t call them farms) that confine millions of hens in cages smaller than a sheet of paper. Every one of the recalled eggs comes from a caged hen. Nearly 280 million hens are confined in cages across the country.

I have seen industrialized egg factories firsthand as part of my work with the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. These operations are literally nauseating: Airborne fecal dust chokes the air, facilitating the spread of Salmonella among birds packed beak-to-beak. Massive stacks of tiny cages line the dim walls, and thousands of thin white birds shudder in the darkness. They strain to turn around and spread unused wings in impossibly small cages, scratching haplessly at the thin wires under their feet.

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July 7th, 2010

‘Tis the season of farmers’ markets. Last week I moseyed on down to the Southampton (NY) farmers market and picked up some tasty, locally produced cheese that melted in my mouth with a delicious tang. But that local dairy farmer and others like him could become an endangered species if we continue on our current carbon-spewing energy path. Cows don’t produce much in very hot weather and scientists say that “heat stress and other factors could cause a decline in milk production of up to 20 percent or higher” in the Northeast under a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario. That’s a big deal: dairy is the largest agricultural sector in the region, producing some $3.6 billion dollars annually.

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March 11th, 2010

(The piece posted here is the Introduction to Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby. The new book (March 2010)  examines the environmental contamination and heath impacts of industrial livestock production.)

David Kirby, author of Animal Factory

Many Americans have no idea where their food comes from, and many have no desire to find out.

That is unfortunate.

Every bite we take has had some impact on the natural environment, somewhere in the world. As the planet grows more crowded, and more farmers turn to industrialized methods to feed millions of new mouths, that impact will only worsen.

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July 14th, 2009

From Green Right Now Reports:

Chipotle, the burrito and taco restaurant chain that has cut against the fast food grain with its adherence to serving natural, sustainbly raised meat, got its day in the Washington limelight yesterday.

The chain’s founder, chairman and Co-CEO Steve Ells told a U.S. House committee that while it hasn’t been easy to keep consumer prices reasonable while serving pricier sustainable meats, he felt it preserved the restaurant chain’s integrity.

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May 11th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Our Mother’s Day feast was a deliberately local meal. Now that Texas farms are rolling out produce, we were able to pick up some spring green beans and Hot House tomatoes at the farmer’s market, along with some locally made pasta.

Our youngest noted that our meal was doubly green — green spinach pasta and local veggies. Oy, they get so smart in public school, no? (Yes, that’s a joke.) At least her green awareness is growing.

But about that local food. This brings me back, sort of, to a topic I wanted to revisit: CAFOs. Buying locally supports smaller farmers, and reduces the “food miles” borne by the meal, and thereby cuts greenhouse gas emissions. Which is all good.

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January 19th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

There are lots of reasons to cut your meat consumption. Producing beef is the more resource intensive and energy costly than almost any other type of food production (save maybe extracting gourmet delicacies like caviar) and has a big carbon imprint, contributing to greenhouse gases at many stages.

There are also health reasons to trim the volume of animal products from your diet because meats contribute to high cholesterol, hardening of the arteries and so on.

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