5 Excellent New Reasons to Cut down on Meat

Factory farming, the crowding together of livestock in factory-like conditions to cut down on production costs, is widely deplored for its harm to animals, workers, the environment and food consumers.

September 25, 2014 | Source: Alternet | by Martha Rosenberg

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Factory farming, the crowding together of livestock in factory-like conditions to cut down on production costs, is widely deplored for its harm to animals, workers, the environment and food consumers. It is hard to find a farm that crowds animals together in pens and cages that doesn’t also rely on antibiotics and growth chemicals, mistreat workers, spew manure into the environment and generate periodic safety questions about its products.

Meat giant Tyson dumps more than 18 million pounds of toxic chemicals into America’s waterways each year, according to a  recent report, even as it finalizes a  merger with meat giant Hillshire. Tyson was  served with a federal indictment in 2001 charging it with smuggling workers across the Rio Grande and supplying them with phony social security cards. “They cheat these workers out of pay and benefits, and then try to keep them quiet by threatening to send them back to Mexico,”  declared Rev. Jim Lewis, an Episcopal minister in Arkansas.

Meat mergers and the globalization of meat production have the potential for eroding U.S. food safety standards, say food experts. Few missed this summer’s scandal in which Starbucks, Burger King, McDonald’s and KFC were accused of using expired meat products in their China operations. But not as many people have noted the recent sale of Smithfield foods to Shuanghui International, China’s  biggest takeover of a U.S. company to date. In 2008, dairy products tainted with the industrial chemical melamine in China sickened thousands and killed six infants. Last fall, the Obama administration  approved the sale in the U.S. of chickens “processed” in China if they are raised and slaughtered in the U.S. or Canada. In 2007, an estimated  1,950 cats and 2,200 dogs in the U.S. died from melamine-tainted food from China.

And let’s not forget that forty percent of the world’s land surface is now used for food, the vast majority to feed chickens, pigs and cattle, not people. Increasingly governments and environmental groups say such inefficient land use and extreme meat consumption is not sustainable. US factory farms largely elude pollution regulations yet  hydrogen sulfide from manure lagoons is linked to respiratory problems, seizures and worse and nitrates, found in drinking water near hog factories, are linked to blue baby syndrome and spontaneous abortions.