Next time you go grocery shopping and you're at the cash register, do me a favor and look in your cart. Look at your ground hamburger that was on sale for .99/lb., pork chops for 1.99/lb., milk for 2.99/gallon, chicken breast value pack, a dozen eggs for a buck. Think to yourself of what went into raising the animals that ended up in your hand and at the big box store where you're shopping. Where and how did those animals spend their lives? Was it roaming, grazing, eating bugs, digging roots, soaking up the sun? Nope, not even close. It was spending their final months in a feedlot with manure, mud, and urine with sometimes hundreds of animals in half-acre pen, confined to a crate where the pigs are unable to even turn around, and locked in a cage the size of a magazine with around 3 chickens to that size where the birds can't lay down and are forced to stand all day. And for what? To maximize profit, of course.
Agribusiness has taken on the facade of manufacturing....Getting the most profit out of the animal no matter what the cost. These animals are eating stale bubble gum with the wrappers still on, chicken litter, corn, soy, whatever the cheapest input to these animals might be. One of the many frustrating factors about this is that it is forgotten where this meat ends up. Some to dog food, but most on our grocery store shelves. We are what we eat goes for us and livestock as well. Do you think the most nutritious meat we can consume comes from cows that are packed full of cheap carbs and protein? Nope. It comes from animals that are able to roam, graze on nutritious clover, orchard grass, fescue, alfalfa, etc. There have been studies that have shown that the benefits of grass-fed meats include lowering your cholesterol, lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, increase your omega-3's, has been shown to fight breast cancer, and it has staggeringly higher amounts of vitamin E, high-quality protein, iron, zinc, selenium, phosphorous, and the B-complex vitamins. More of the many ways that it is superior to grain-fed beef is that it is lower in fat and calories and higher in omega-3 fatty acids and CLA. Why does red meat get a bad rap, then? Because it's the grain-fed beef industry feeding their 'specimens' (That's what they are to these businesses, they don't look at them as animals with a life, they look at the quick, cheap dollar). Pumping their cattle full of antibiotics, vaccines, growth hormones and lacing their grain (which is something ruminants are not designed to eat) with an additive which will make them eat more to pack on quick, cheap weight and fat.
I could go on about beef all day, but there are a few more things I want to say about poultry, too. Pasture Perfect by Jo Robinson is a book I'm almost through with now talks about her experience in a poultry house (300 foot long metal shed with 15,000 birds). She could not spend 20 minutes in there because the ammonia levels were so high from the manure that it was near toxic. These birds spend their lives, which thanks to modern science is now down to a six week turnaround. So quick in fact that nearly 160 million birds a year don't make it this far because their lungs and bones cannot develop quickly enough to support their increasing weight. How should chickens spend their time, then? How about outside, picking bugs and larvae out of the soil, putting nitrogen back into the soil and helping with the cycle of healthy and fertile soil. Are there antibiotics in chicken feed? You bet, arsenic, too. Livestock producers use nearly 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics, just because. 70% of all antibiotics used in the US goes into the livestock industry: pigs, poultry, and cattle. Back to the hens....The major chicken companies won't tell their producers whats in the feed, all their told is to not handle the feed without gloves. Are you kidding me? We're supposedly thinking that chicken is one of the healthiest meats to consume (which by the way grass-fed beef is lower in fat and calories than a chicken breast), and we are actually consuming meat from an animal that had a diet so toxic that a human hand cannot touch it? Give me a break. Okay enough with the broilers, how about laying hens?
Going back to the cage dimensions. Today's CAFO (Concentrated animal feeding operation) houses 3-5 birds to a cage with 50-60 square inches per bird. For reference, a square foot is 144 square inches. Their beaks of course are removed so they cannot cannibalize each other, which they won't naturally do, but subjecting them to a life of high stress and confinement can bring out the worst in just about anything. The eggs from CAFO hens are so nutrient deficient because they are far exceeding their laying capacity. Eggs from free-foraging hens contain 10 times more omega-3's than from confined birds. Also, pastured hens had 50% more folic acid and 60%more vitamin B12 than eggs from factory-farmed hens. Surprisingly, I would much rather have those naturally-occurring vitamins and minerals than arsenic, and antibiotics. If your not an animal advocate, fine, I'm not trying to push that, at least think about the consumption of pastured broilers and eggs for your own health benefit. The poultry industry is so screwed out of proportion that change will not come easily. the best way to get the message across is to eat healthy. The specifics will then work themselves out. Cheap labor is also another factor. There are chicken catchers that will come to these poultry houses at night (to reduce the stress of the birds to they don't see the sunlight at all in their lives), an average team of 8 will catch 40,000-50,000 chickens from several farms in a night. These men and women are also grossly underpaid for the laborious jobs that they have. Environmental concerns and manure runoff from poultry houses I'm not going to get into, because that could be a completely different topic to sound off on. But just think of where all the manure and runoff that's not being cheaply fed to cattle goes. Into the watershed and leeched into the ground, that's where.
How about dairy? Let's see how about dairy. A typical working girl at a factory dairy farm can produce 20,000-30,000 pounds of milk per year, roughly nine semi-trailer loads per year, or nine million glasses of milk. This of course with the help of hormones injected bi-weekly to keep production up. Is all of this necessary? Obviously most think so. As a quick example, milk from pastured cows offers (surprise, surprise) more omega-3's, CLA's, fewer omega 6 fatty acids, more beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E. I don't think I mentioned it earlier, but omega 3's help with blood flow and keep arteries running smoothly whereas omega 6's promote blood clotting. Both are very important, but in the right balance. Grain-fed beef and dairy are astronomically higher in omega-6 fatty acids. Hmmmmm I wonder what the connection might be to the high rate of cardiovascular disease in the US? Which might explain why South Americans' can successfully consume high rates of beef....because it's healthy and comes from cows that spent their time on grass!! I know there will always be factory farming and will unfortunately always be a place for it, I just hope that the option to consume naturally occurring foods increases as it is so vital to our health and well-being. Molly and I have a cow-share because it's illegal to sell raw milk. I still don't understand why it's illegal to sell something that naturally occurs and is so beneficial for us and for the cows. I enjoy going to the creamery, seeing the jersey girls grazing and knowing that my milk came directly from her. I can talk to the farmer, shoot the breeze with her, talk about the weather (always a common interest), and go home. Much more enjoyable to me that spending my afternoon under the fluorescent lighting of a big box store. Is it more expensive? Absolutely, but I am very comfortable knowing that my hard-earned money is going back into the community and staying in the pockets of the farmers before big business dips their fingers into it.
Before you go shopping again, look at this site http://www.eatwild.com/. It's a great website that has much much more information on all of this as well as a directory on where to purchase grass-fed grass-finished meats that are locally produced humanely, with care and love. Being at my new job, I've learned just how important the farmer to consumer connection is. Don't you want to know just what is going into your food? More people are concerned about what type of oil they are going to put in their cars rather than what went into the production of the beef they are consuming for dinner. Do you want to feed arsenic, a plethora of antibiotics, and contribute to an overall dirty, overrun industry? I certainly do not and will not support it.
I didn't even touch on pork and I don't think I will. All of this has the same reoccurring theme, if you haven't noticed yet. If you screw with the natural flow of things, there are consequences. For pigs instead of spending time in their wallows, with their piglets, and getting into trouble, they are crammed into gestation crates on concrete floors where they either stand up or lay down. Either A or B no turning around, no digging up roots and tossing mud. Forced to be a machine. Factory farming is an unfortunate consequence of our time. Whether it be greed, well actually it is greed, that caused us to play God and determine that the way things have gone for hundreds of years just wasn't productive and proficient enough, I will never understand.
A couple of books for your perusal:
Pasture Perfect by Jo Robinson
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
There is so much more out there to inform yourself and please make an educated decision on what you eat to benefit yourself, your community, and for preserving our farmland.
A few pictures that Molly took where I work at Mount Vernon Farm on how animals should be spending their time and unfortunately only a small number do get to spend their days in the sun on the grass....
And the reality.....
I'm not trying to intimidate, just educate.
