Big Food, Bigger Lies

The food industry is as bad as the tobacco industry for lying about the health effects of their products until good citizens everywhere just throw their hands up in despair of being able to figure out who's right. To wit ...

In a New York Times article that ran this past weekend, perhaps for its sense of dramatic flair, James E. McWilliams said that locavores are ruining food. He used a National Pork Producers Council study that found trichinosis antibodies (but not actual cases of trichinosis) in free range pigs to suggest that pigs allowed to freely forage in grass and root around in leaves pose a serious health risk.

Have you ever heard of a nationwide recall of farmers market pork? Me neither.

In fact, McWillams' proposed alternative, the concentrated animal feeding operations of industrial agriculture are themselves a health hazard to their workers and neighbors. Not only do CAFOs incubate and harbor antibiotic-resistant drug, the stressed and cramped animals that live in their stifling pens have their immune systems constantly battered in every way.

His argument is the equivalent of saying that human beings can be kept healthier when they're crammed 10 to a shack and a 1,000 or more to a toilet, in unplumbed slums where sewage runs freely in garbage-strewn streets. Is there anyone, anywhere, who could be persuaded to buy that bunkum?

Because that's what a CAFO is, a filthy slum for animals. A disgusting place where the manure often piles up in 'lagoons' you could drown in.

I don't know how someone could actively prefer to buy meat from that sort of environment if they had a choice. But then, I don't really understand people who get off on sadomasochistic relationships, either.

(Photo credit: treehouse1977 on Flickr.)