With all the news on pink slime this past week, now seems like a good time to talk about CAFO’s and the American Meat Packing Industry
CAFO’s are Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and make up most of the American Meat Packing Industry.
There are three major problems with these operations
1. Treatment of Animals
A six foot by eight foot room can house up to 1,152 chickens
2. Pollution
CAFOs in the US produce 6 times the volume of fecal matter of all humans on the planet, but free range animals enrich the soil
3. Health
This is the big sticking point for me and most Americans. There are so many animals in this environment which causes stress and diseases in the animals. As a result they are routinely fed antibiotics… despite this over 70% of supermarket chickens have salmonella and/ or campylobacter bacteria.
In other meat packing industry news: Pink Slime was the most popular search term on Google on Friday. What is pink slime? It’s the leftovers of cattle, sprayed with ammonium. It has been said that pink slime is “safe” to eat, but it has an extremely high tendency to be contaminated with e-coli and salmonella. The ammonium that it is sprayed with should techinically kill the bacteria, but it has not been entirely effective.
70% seems to be the golden number—in this case 70% is the amount of ground beef in the supermarket with pink slime added to it.
The government school lunch program orders 7 million pounds of pink slime. Both Burger King and McDonald’s has stopped using Pink Slime in their burgers after the recent response, but the USDA continues to order it for school lunches. A Texan blogger has made an online petition against using “pink slime” in school lunches… Here’s the link if you want to sign it.
How to avoid both of these problems in your own home? Buy organic/locally grown/ free-range chicken. Whole Foods sells ground beef without this filler. Or go vegetarian like me!
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