Good Food is Everybody's Business
Our food system is definitely bottoms up! Animal agriculture consumes 80% of all antibiotics used in the US and yet our meat is covered with infectious bacteria. Multiple studies across the US and Canada show that our meat is contaminated with a variety of infections bacteria, some of which is resistant to multiple antibiotic types.
Globalization has fundamentally changed agriculture across Europe. The idyllic image of small farms with sustainable agriculture has been replaced with agricultural cogs producing food-ingredient inputs for international industrial agri-businesses. In every link of the new global food chain, agriculture has become more intensive, larger in scale, and more environmentally and socially unsustainable.
Small farmers in the West who are raising meat and poultry need affordable – and legal – slaughterhouses. Nearly all the meat and poultry consumed in the US today comes from just four companies that operate their own USDA-inspected processing plants. Most of the remaining meat processors – beef, pork, lamb – do not process poultry.
Whole Foods Market, four animal advocacy groups (including the Humane Society of the United States), and industry partners such as CROPP Cooperative (Organic Valley and Organic Prairie brands), have come together to support the Global Animal Partnership to encourage better animal welfare practices.
Nearly 40% of US consumers buy products that are – or contain – certified organic ingredients, a number that has held steady for the last three years. Where those consumers are shopping for those products has changed toward conventional and mass market outlets and away from natural food stores.
Dan Flynn of Food Safety News pulled together a quick – and scary – list of meat and poultry recalls by the USDA in 2010. Here are the highlights. Let’s be careful out there!
Somehow the words “Humane Society” always seem to bring images of puppies and kittens to my mind. But the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) will NOT stop at dogs and cats; ALL animals are to be protected, including the turkeys and chickens that are part of our everyday diets. Like the comic book hero Hellboy – who was tough on evil doers but had a soft heart for cats – HSUS is out to stamp out the bad guys.
