This is old news already, but I think it still begs to be given some attention. Our good friends at Cargill, the folks who generously gave us CAFOs and genetically modified corn, had to issue one of the biggest ground meat recalls in history due to salmonella contamination that has already killed one person.
Good work, Cargill.
Normally this news would not be worthy of a post. Sadly, food recalls are issued with as much regularity as movie premieres. And hey, it's just salmonella: apparently the USDA knew about this issue long before the recall but did nothing because salmonella is no big deal as long as you cook your food properly. This one, however, is noteworthy because this particular strand of salmonella is antibiotic resistant. And that, my friends, gets to the heart of why CAFOs are as bad for us as they are for the animals that spend their lives cooped up in them.
Let's review: Turkeys (or cows, or chickens, or whatever animal you want) are forced to live in close quarters, therefore sharing diseases. They are fed a diet of foods they are not biologically equipped to digest, also causing illness. The way to deal with these illnesses when you're working with thousands of animals at a time? Antibiotics! After a while, the strands of salmonella can only adapt and mutate to survive against those antibiotics. And us humans are left to defend ourselves against the resulting onslaught.
Not to say we still shouldn't be cooking our meals properly, or that animals that are 100% pasture-centered will never get sick or carry diseases like salmonella. Truthfully, in my eyes the USDA is more the bad guy than Cargill in this case, as the USDA will say it's unsafe for a small-scale farmer to slaughter or process his own animals on the farm yet they can't keep up with sanitation issues at the supposedly "safe" mass meat-processing facilities.
Totally natural meat (and not the "natural" branded meat that my local Dominicks is now touting, which is a play on the uneducated masses to eat mass produced meat without knowing really what it is still going through) is more expensive, so I've found myself eating less of it lately. And I loves me some meat! But in the end I'd rather eat less, enjoy what I'm eating more, vote with my dollars by supporting my local farmer, and be safe. That's much better than an antibiotic-resistant alternative.
The worst part is, they usually strategically issue the recall to happen when most of the product they're recalling would have already been consumed. Only way to get non-scary ground meat is to get it from a butcher you can watch grind it.
ReplyDeleteDani read: "What To Eat"...it's a great read. I believe it was in this book that we learned the FDA allows meat packing plants to send out their product before test sample results are in. It takes around 2 weeks for results, so the meat has already been distributed and eaten by the time they realize they have a contamination issue.....and that is legal!
ReplyDeleteAmanda