Backbone > Life in the Balance

Let the Cows Come Home!
By Susan Piperato . Photo courtesy PETA

Just before this past Thanksgiving, my 10-year-old son, a longtime, self-proclaimed vegetarian, surprised me by announcing that he was considering eating poultry and beef. “But I’ll only eat it if it wasn’t a cannibal and it ran free and happy until it, you know, died,” he added. The fact that my son understands the difference between factory farming and sustainable agriculture surprised me almost as much as his sudden openness to becoming a carnivore.

Instilling in children the importance of knowing where their food comes from and what it cost the Earth to put it on their plate is laudable, especially considering that when I was a child, “clean your plate” was the response to virtually any question I asked or comment I made about what I was eating. Knowing whether your hamburger began its life on cleared rainforest or in a factory farm is no longer simply about political consciousness—it could save your life.

The confirmation of bovine spongiform encephalitis (bse) or mad cow disease in the us last December—which, incidentally, caused my son and me to reconsider his plans to change his diet—has set just about everyone on edge, and makes knowing the source of your food ever more vital. Thanks to the confirmed appearance of BSE at home—and not simply Europe (where more than 200,000 cows have been slaughtered, according to Orion magazine, due to confirmed or suspected incidents of bse) or Canada—people are reconsidering what they eat.

“Shoppers should always ask: Who raised this meat, how was it fed, and under what conditions was it processed?” reads a January 6 action alert issued by the Weston A. Price Foundation for Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts. The foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1999 to disseminate the findings of the late dentist and nutrition pioneer Dr. Weston Price, whose 1970s photographic and scientific study of native people’s teeth and diet, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, is still considered the bible of nutritionists. The action alert points out that factory farming is to blame: “bse is not found in herds where the operators focus on balancing the nutrients in the soil and do not use synthetic pesticides.”

Environmentalists, health experts, and family farmers, among others, have been warning the public for the past 20 years about the dangers of eating factory-farmed and plant-packed meat and poultry. In the early 1970s there were less than 800 beef factory farms in the us, with the top four beef packers controlling 29 percent of cattle. By 2001, 18 beef plants had taken over 80 percent of the beef processing market. But even extreme increases in the incidence of food-borne diseases associated with meat-packing plants, like E. coli (now at an annual national rate of 20,000 cases with 500 deaths) and salmonella (now reaching two million cases and approximately 2,000 deaths per year), weren’t enough to cause the greater public to take a closer look at their diet. (Or the usda to tighten its enforcement of the meatpacking industry, which operates as a basically self-regulating entity.)

Neither was the fact that the use of rbgh (bovine growth hormone) in factory farming is suspected as a major cause for both breast cancer and girls’ beginning to menstruate sooner, even as early as age eight. Or that two-thirds of the antibiotics made in this country are now used in animal feeds, creating breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant microbes that Americans, in turn, consume. And most meat-eaters don’t want to know that the disposal of the vastly increased amounts of manure produced by the commercial beef industry is such a problem that much of it is thrown into cattle feed—along with slaughterhouse waste, through which mad cow spreads—or dumped in public waterways, polluting aquifers and killing fish.

The recent confirmed cases of bse in this country are a wake-up call for American meat-eaters (and the beef industry—as we went to press, most countries were refusing imports of us beef and the wholesale price of us beef had dropped 25 percent). “Mad cow is a concern because humans can get a related illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, from eating contaminated meat,” reports the us Library of Medicine. vcjd, believed to be caused by eating bse-contaminated beef, attacks the human brain the same way that mad cow attacks the bovine brain. To date, 139 people in Britain have died from “definite or probable” cases of vcjd, 18 of them in 2003, with an additional six still living with the disease.

Factory farming and, indeed, the politics and, yes, the ethics of being carnivorous are no longer “alternative” concerns promoted largely by environmental activists, family farmers, and animal rights activists. In the case of foodstuffs of all kinds, especially meat, knowledge is power, and vigilance is protection.

Reexamine your diet
If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re doing the right thing environmentally and/or morally by eating meat, now is as good a time as ever to consider embracing vegetarianism. Reading Charles Eisenstein’s essay “The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View,” found online at www.westonaprice.org, is informative (the average meat-eater requires three acres a year to provide the grain needed to raise a year’s worth of meat, but one-sixth an acre can feed a vegetarian for the same length of time) as well as insightful (“Let’s start with a very naïve and provocative question: ‘What, exactly, is wrong about killing?’ And for that matter, ‘What is so bad about dying?’”).

Buy local meats
“Independent family producers usually have their meat processed at local independent facilities that have a clean and safe work environment,” reports Minnesota Citizens Organized Acting Together (coact). On January 6, the group publicly reaffirmed support of its 2,000 Minnesota family farmer members and reassured its 12,000 consumer members that “livestock raised in a natural environment and fed their natural diet is safe and wholesome to eat.” For a list of groups and producers who raise meat and other farm products safely and sustainably, visit www.coact.org. For information on purchasing Hudson Valley–grown, grass-fed beef, see Amanda Bader’s article “The Grass is Always Greener” on page 48.

Stand against Big Ag
On December 15, 50 organizations from around the world submitted the People’s Food Sovereignty Statement (pfss) to the World Trade Organization. Based on the claim that the North American Free Trade Agreement has displaced 1.7 million farmers and farm workers since its inception, pfss representatives offered their statement as a viable model for agricultural production and distribution. For more information, contact Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy (www.foodfirst.org) or view the pfss statement at www.viacampesina.org.

Resist all odds
Food crises and agricultural calamities can plant the seed for sustainability. Cuba, unable to import food, animal feed, materials, or equipment from the outside world due to the collapse of trade with the former Soviet Union and the continuing us trade embargo, was forced to look within their own country for solutions. Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba is the story of how Cuba not only recovered from a national food shortage and crisis but embraced the principles of self-reliance.