Bryan Walsh wrote a great article for Time yesterday about food. I highly suggest you take a few minutes to read it. It talks a lot about farming but doesn’t get graphic about factory farming so no need to wait until you’re not eating to read it It is quite interesting how good, wholesome food costs so much more per calorie than junk such as potato chips. You also may not realize how chemical laden your cheap foods are – the ingredient list will not show them as they’re fed to the animals and sprayed on the produce. Oh, the the environmental effects are horrendous!
Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He’s fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he’ll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That’s the state of your bacon — circa 2009.
