Food Inc, both the book and the movie, cover some of these issues. Over 15 years ago, Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" covered why there is literally "shit in our meat" and why our ground beef is now treated with ammonia.

The meat industry is a lot like the Mormon church. Asking the FDA and USDA to police the industry is like asking the the GAs to come clean about TSCC.

My EX once told me about when he worked in a pea packing plant. Some of the workers would secretly urinate into the huge vats.

Rosebud.....rosebud......

Yes.

Rosebud Frozen Peas. Full of country goodness and "green pea-ness".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2015 06:38PM by Levi.

Fill a spray bottle with 1/2 vinegar and 1/2 water and ALWAYS spray down your produce before cutting and eating. Even the stuff with rinds!

Just what everyone wants to hear. Tha's bizzare behaviour.
Why would someone do that, because they 'could'?

That lends a whole new meaning to the label 'fresh peas'.

:(

"Manufactured foods often contain chemicals with known toxic properties – although, again, we are reassured that, at low levels, this is not a cause for concern. "


That reminds me of the church with it's observance of blind obedience. Thoughtless obedience instead of doing the right thing poisons our soul over time.

The TSCC claims their gospel makes bad men good and good men better. Better means arrogant, obsessed with others behavior, and eating and drinking choices.

I could never be bad enough to be a "good Mormon".

Many people cannot warp their mind around what this article tells us; that the food industry in the UK is deceptive because they would never do that to someone and the government makes it possible for us to 'trust' them.


Google the words "The high price of cheap food" about the food industry. There are a lot of great articles. I watched a movie on netfliks about it and at the conclusion of the movie the farmer said, "We will listen to what people want and if they want higher quality, we will produce it." He had just shown a lot of the shortcuts in quality that farmers use in producing cheap food; plants and animals.

In a drive to make inexpensive food the quality has gone down. Now unfortunately we seem to be upside down in our society at large.

It used to be the poor could grow their own food if they had a small plot of land. Now with the insistence that everybody live in 300 square feet and work and buy their food, there is no assurance that you'll have the job/money/health to earn enough to afford what food is available in the stores. And the cheapest will not be what is good for your health. Is this one way to kill off the "useless eaters"?

Reading about things like this make me wonder if there really is a larger agenda? There are countries where even if you have a large plot of land you are not allowed to grow your own food for personal consumption and sharing with your neighbors because you are considered an enemy of the state; a food hoarder.

When did we become a people across the globe that vilifies taking care of yourself? Growing your own food and wanting to obtain food that is not full of noxious things?

We've become very careful about what we buy. Our beef is locally raised and butchered and I make a lot of things from scratch.

RB

I once took a tour through a packing house. I did not eat baloney or hot dogs for years. Still very selective about hot dogs. Never eat baloney.

And there are lots of undercover videos being made here in Canada exposing cruel, inhumane practices in the mass food animal production industry, too. Yet, with our massive populations, it almost seems like there’s no other choice but to cram all these poor, sentient animals into crates in the cruelest of conditions in order to provide us with our food. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Some of the videos are horrendous. Horses strung up flailing by one leg (that may have been a horse that had once been bonded to humans, and had merely become old and sent away to where all old horses go.) So sad. Baby chicks culled and just thrown alive into garbage pails to later be discarded. Sick turkeys beaten with shovels, and then left in a corner suffering, when it was assumed they were dead. Pigs with nowhere else to go, beaten with sticks to keep them moving through over crowded chutes.

I don’t know what’s to become of our world sometimes. This has all arisen out of a need to feed such a huge human population. Certainly it isn’t sustainable, but what can be done? It sure is an interesting time to be alive. Who knows where we are headed. I just keep plugging along, trying to do my best. What else can you do? These are strange times.

Many of the chemicals in foods are necessary just to keep them from spoiling due to the time it takes them to get shipped to the stores. It's a conundrum of sorts. Although, there are also many chemicals that aren't necessary. Flavor enhancers, addictive components, etc. Crazy times, crazy times. :(

I developed celiac disease a few years ago (hereditary), and it has been a nuisance trying to find food that I can eat. Wheat is in everything--soup, salad dressing, sauces, ice cream, candy, flavored potato chips, seasonings, french fried fried in wheat-contaminated grease, the entire menus of KFC and McDonald's, and most other restaurants. Gluten is in the Pepto Bismol and Kaopectate I was taking for the symptoms.

What I've learned is that probably EVERYONE should eat the way I do, because I can't eat anything processed, packaged, pre-cooked, etc. So--thanks to your linked article--maybe this is a good thing.

About wheat, which wasn't mentioned in the article. Why are a higher percentage of people getting celiac disease these days, than in the past? Because wheat has been genetically altered, and it contains 20 times more gluten than the normal wheat people ate in the 1950's.

Kosher foods can be a good source of food that hasn't been tampered with very much.

Jack Lalane (remember him?) used to tell people to eat food in as close to it's natural state as possible. When I was a skinny athlete at BYU, I never ate gravy, sauces, butter, extra salt on my food. I didn't like it, anyway. I also hated grease, and would wipe it off with paper towels. Girls in the dorm used to get mad at me because I could eat all the food I wanted. I didn't like people forcing me to eat something I didn't like--and I still don't understand why people do that.

I really hate the smell of ammonia when I walk into the meat section of the grocery store. When I buy meat, I get it from certain suppliers for grass-fed beef or free-range pork. I swear the taste is better, and the smell when it is cooking is a HELL of a lot better. Regular grocery-store beef smells like a wet dog when it is cooking, and it really lacks good flavor, too.

The grass-fed stuff I get is expensive, so sue me: I'm a meat snob.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2015 06:02PM by metatron.

>> The grass-fed stuff I get is expensive, so sue me: I'm a meat snob. <<

Me too. Grass fed, free ranges, no filler, etc. But it is expensive.

I have several things that I only by from the health food store. People say it's a scam (organic stuff), but when you can notice the difference, in some cases considerably, then it can't be a complete scam. My belly can tell the next morning between good beef and bad.

I once offended a TBM online a few years ago when I said that grass fed beef was healthier than grain and corn fed beef. That was because I had somehow said something against the WoW about grain being for cattle. I agree that there's a difference between grass fed, free range meat and meat produced in factory farms where the animals are fed grains and other stuff, and kept in large pens with their own waste.

Well I gotta say this folks.

My biggest beef with Ezra Daft Benson has nothing to do with some obscure cult from Salt Lake City.

It was during his tunure as Ike's legendary spud-digger secretary that the whole agri-business/government partnership shotgun wedding took place.

Rescue style farming to the rescue!

Few of us barely noticed until suddenly the usual forkfull of food inexplicably lost its savor.

Bon apetit amigos.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2015 08:31PM by Shummy.

Ruminants who cannot fully digest grain provide a veritable feast for e-coli infestation.

Not to worry, they simply add more anti-biotics to the grain that could be better utilized in human bellies to begin with.

Rescue agriculture.

It's what's for dinner.

This is why i went vegetarian....
I will only eat meat if I know where it came from. Thank goodness there's a lot of hunting and fishing up here :) come hunting season I'll be eating meat again.
Every time I really want some chicken, I remember WHY that store chicken is so cheap, and i remember what a life that poor chicken had, and i remember that all those chickens were breathing, bathing in, and stepping in their own shit dust and dander.
I don't eat things that breathe in their own shit dust. And I can't support an industry that is so disgusting and inhumane.
I try to buy organic when I can, not because I think there are incredible health benefits (are there? theres a potential for there to be), but because the thought of dumping chemicals on the ground, that contaminate our food and water and air is just plain stupid to me.
And I don't eat genetically modified corn either... ew. Fuck monsato, and fuck eating something that's been programmed to grow pesticides inside itself.. its meant to grow pesticides to kill everything that eats it. WE eat it! So nope. No bt corn for me.

This is exactly why I'm considering transitioning to a vegetarian. I have some kinks to work out due to health reasons, but I really have a hard time dealing with what those poor creatures go through. Eating meat doesn't mean having to torture and abuse the animals that provide us with food.

In Idaho, someone recorded some sicko raping a cow on a dare before in the feedlot. After that video was released, that's when ID started the process to ban videotaping at feedlots and slaughterhouses.

High-fructose corn syrup. It’s in everything. I’ve read before that if the corn syrup wasn’t in there … sugar basically … that there would often be no actual food value in these ‘ foods’ at all. That’s why they add it, the only ‘nutrition’ you derive from it is from the sugar energy in the High-fructose corn syrup. That’s also why they think we have such high rates of diabetes in our society … we’re all living off High-fructose corn syrup. Nice. Corn, corn the magical fruit, the more you eat the more you … die?

My wife is a vegan. Wish I could get there, but I have O- blood, I don't do well without my meat. Hrmph.

My nephew has been a chef or sous-chef in nationally ranked restaurants. For many years he has been a proponent of locally sourced, in season, fresh foods. He is very, very careful about his suppliers. Back then, I didn't get it. Now I do.

I've noticed and said for the last several years that food today is not like it used to be. All this GMO crap they're shoving down our throats. I think Alex Jones is right when he says we're all being 'slow killed'.

Speaking of Ike, do you know anything about how the dairy industrial complex is currently run ? .....????

the milk may be worse than the meat!

I once thought of those who criticized our ag system as all PETA nutcases.

Then I became a veterinarian, and worked a short stint as health consultant for a feedlot owned by a former bishop. Turned out that he didn't want my advice. Just wanted my signature so he could order more drugs. Lots of antibiotics, especially for pneumonia due to stress. When he had one with scarred lungs with chronic cough, he would inject cortisone into the trachea to temporarily suppress coughing and run it to the auction. Not the ethics I was taught in Sunday School.

Anyway, when I objected, he simply found another veterinarian who would sign for drugs without comment.

Feedlot cattle suffer stress from fear, which results in chronic release of cortisol from the adrenal gland. Which cortisol causes immune suppression, leading to pneumonia, etc. In addition, they are exposed to more bugs as they are shuffled through auctions.

This all starts as calves at the ranch are weaned abruptly, thrown on a truck and hauled to the auction and shuffled around. After being bought, they are thrown on a truck and hauled hundreds of miles while off feed and water. Then they get to the feed yard and are run through a chute and injected with hormones and potentially preventive antibiotics, and put in pens with strangers and have to figure out new feed and water systems. We understand what is going on, but they have no idea, and fear death the whole time.

The immune suppression from stress can lead to pneumonia and more injections. As one veterinarian put it, with all the stress, we shouldn't ask why some die, but we should ask why any of them live. As my brother who worked at the feedlot said, "You're not a real cattleman until you have a dead pile!"

In addition, ruminants are designed to live on forage/grass, not carbohydrates as found in grain. Yet most of the ration is grain, as you can gain weight cheaper, and government subsidizes grain growers. The starch causes a shift in rumen microbes to those that make acid, which causes ulcers of the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the bloodstream and go to the liver and cause abscesses. In some studies, up to 40% of cattle on feed have abscesses. To control these, antibiotics are added to the feed, to hopefully keep the rate of abscesses down to 15%.

The antibiotics are a concern, especially considering resistance problems, but the less obvious question I have is this. How on earth is it considered acceptable to intentionally make animals sick in order to save or make money? If someone was beating their cattle with a 2X4 they would be arrested, but if you abuse them to make money through the feed, it is okay?

This is the primary reason I have a pair of cows out back - to save them from the system. And I would urge others to either do that, or find someone with grass-fed cows and pay them some extra bucks for their trouble.

The system won't change as long as people are supporting it. And as usual, our government programs make it worse, with money taken by force through taxes, or printed out of thin air by our central bank. Few understand or care.

Just what is so bad about rBGH anyway?

Cows injected with rBGH produce milk under severe physical and mental strain from cramped quarters. They're subject to more disease and antibiotic resistance from repeated use of antibiotics by handlers hoping to quell chronic infection like mastitis, (an infection of the milk ducts that in nursing human moms can be highly painful). RGBH has also been linked to reproductive problems in cows.

In humans, studies indicate milk from cows treated with rBGH may contain elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IFG-1), which can increase the risk of breast cancer and other types of cancer.