Our World and Everything in It

I’ve been wondering how long it would take for religious communities to recognize the cruelty of animal farming; how extremely opposite it is from the idea of kosher where animals are tended with kindness and the ” method of slaughter is a quick, deep stroke across the throat with a perfectly sharp blade with no nicks or unevenness. This method is painless, causes unconsciousness within two seconds, and is widely recognized as the most humane method of slaughter possible.” A condition under which the meat is further processed is supposed to be extremely sanitary.

This is hardly the definition of a CAFO, where animals are so depressed and frustrated, they chew on the metal bars of their confinement. I’ve written so many blogs about CAFO’s and animal farms. That’s why I was so happy to read an article in the Summer publication of All Animals, by the Humane Society of the U.S., about America’s churches stepping forward to start a grassroots endeavor to restore humane farming.

Methodists support totally natural systems of farming. Jewish rabbis recommend that humans strive to prevent animal suffering. While many other denominations condemn factory farms altogether.

HSUS’s “All Creatures Great and Small” campaign plans to call on the religious, I like to say spiritual, individuals to only purchase cage-free eggs. The article says that “participants can make an on line pledge to do so and pass it along to friends as a form of networking. It also said, “They can then download materials to use in youth groups, Sunday schools, sermons, and bulletins.” There is also a documentary from “people whose religion inspired them to make dietary changes.” This particular campaign will be this October during the monthlong feast of St. Francis of Assisi, saint to all animals.

This one small pledge is designed to spread grassroots style and hopefully bring awareness to the spiritually minded about the guidelines in the bible as to what and how we eat. People can argue that the guidelines are in the Old Testament that we’re living the New Testament now. Yet we cannot simply disregard the entire part of the bible that tells us where we came from can we? Without it, we would have no heritage.

At very least, in America, where spiritualism seems to abound these days, it might make us pay better attention to not only what we eat but how it was raised. It could make a big difference in our health and diminish the amount of pollution we unleash into the environment from factory farms. Not bad by-products for a little extra awareness about what we eat.   

I ran across this article on the AP. It makes me think worse than I already thought about the EPA.  I sometimes get the feeling we are all guinea pigs to some extent. The subject is sludge, which as the article so succinctly states is “the leftover semisolid wastes filtered from water pollution at 16,500 treatment plants.” It goes on to say the federal policy for the past three decades has been that this sludge can be turned into something harmless, even if swallowed, (I may skip dinner tonight).

There is a 1978 memo where the EPA makes the argument that the sludge contains nutrients and organic matter ‘which have considerable benefit for land and crops.’ Does this not sound like the spreading of so-called nutrients from CAFO lagoons onto farm land irregardless of all the bacteria and low levels of toxic substances?

The particular sludge in the article wasn’t sprayed on farmland however. “Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange, they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department. Nice, real nice.

Researchers believe that the sludge contains phosphate and iron that binds to lead and other hazardous metals in the soil so that it would pass right through a child if they ate any of it. This little experiment was done elsewhere also in a poor neighborhood, and without much fanfare. The problem is there has been no medical follow up. Isn’t that curious?

It looks like the EPA is looking to utilize semisolid waste in unlikely places. If the EPA was truly in earnest using this waste to protect the health and safety of children against lead, wouldn’t there, shouldn’t there be medical tests over a period of time afterward to see if it worked? The only way I can see that there are no follow up records of this experiment is that it’s not 100% but only a theory and the poor neighborhoods chosen were guinea pigs.

The frightening part is that this idea about sludge/pollution being a nutrient still reigns. So where else has sludge been spread or dumped masquerading as a nutrient? We better not have any more tainted vegetables turn up this year.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/hea?guid=20080414/4802d6c0_3ca6_15526200804141768367295

I’ve complained about an unscrupulous EPA before, showing that some of its exiting hierarchy was tied to the oil industry. I’ve also tried to get the point across that the Bush administration has dismantled the federal government in small increments handing out contracts to for-profit corporations to do the work our agencies used to do, while cutting the budget drastically in many departments across the board. Sound alright? A lot of people think so—less spending. But do we know who is doing the work instead, how the contract was awarded, who is responsible if something goes wrong, or how much the contractor was actually paid for the job?

Cuts are going to happen. We must pay for the war.  But we just don’t know all the things that have been cut, until it’s too late that is. Just last year around this time, the Bush administration planned to cut some $500 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and was met with fierce opposition in congress. The complaint was that it would shortchange vital environmental programs and was unacceptable. Do ya think?

Now it’s the FDA. The cover of the April 2008 Reader’s Digest asks “Can We Trust the FDA?—Must Read Special Report,” and reveals the Food and Drug Administration is in crisis. Most of the article is about the drugs we take, but the department is responsible for regulating $1.5 trillion in food, as well as, animal feeds and drugs. The article stated that insiders say, “it’s [FDA] woefully underfunded, dangerously understaffed and fractured by bitter internal tensions.” I immediately suspected feuding within the department exists because some people have ethics. In 2004, the FDA came under fire for silencing a staff scientist about antidepressants causing suicidal tendencies in teens. Ditto for the EPA, when scientists testified before congress last year that they were tired of being suppressed, and their findings/reports compromised.

The FDA receives only $2 billion in funding, which sounds like a lot but as the article says “is about what Fairfax County, Virginia, pays for its public schools.” It’s really frightening to read words like “chilling new report” in reference to the department in charge of our food and medicine. Worse yet the “chilling” report was commissioned by the FDA’s own advisory Science Board that also describes it as “nearly out of control.”

Congress has just begun to help shore up the FDA, increasing their funding by $145 million, but hey compared to billions, that’s a drop in the bucket. Of course about a quarter of that went to the drug review branch, another reason to read this story to see how much conflict of interest there is within the FDA relative to the drug industry. But special interests and conflict of interest on the food side of this equation cause an equal amount of damage. We start seeing problems like tainted food, beef, and chicken recalls, lax inspection of CAFO’s and runoff from them that may make its way into our tributaries, and of course really lax inspection of imported food. I watched a program where farm raised shrimp in an Asian country were swimming in polluted water with feces from farm animals. I check what I buy now. I steer clear of imports. I know the FDA isn’t checking.

The article said the public needs to weigh in. Weigh in? Scream for Pete’s sake. This is our bread, this is our health and it’s being handled shabbily. This type of decision-making and ethics is repetitive in the EPA, and more than likely throughout our federal agencies at this point. As I read the five key problems in this industry, they were similar to the EPA’s problems:

· The FDA suffers pressure from industry to speed decisions, and soft-pedal problems.
· Safety of New Drugs. Safety decisions are many times based on inefficient industry studies.
· Sloppy Record Keeping
· Conflicts of Interest
· Muzzled Experts

This list just about says it all doesn’t it? From the looks of things, we’re on our own.

Read the article: http://www.rd.com/national-interest/special-reports-and-surveys/problems-in-the-fda/article55513.html

Last week on Good Morning America there was a guy who has been fueling his little diesel car with Chinese oil. What is Chinese oil? It’s the leftover oil from Chinese restaurants. He said the restaurant was only too happy to give the oil away. He put it in a plastic gas container and uses a funnel to put it in his car. He said he probably saved $3,000 last year by not buying gas. So if you have a little diesel car you drive to work, why not? The Welsh do it. The Welsh were using so much vegetable oil in their cars they had to come up with laws to stop it because the country wasn’t getting enough money from gas tax. The big clue? Everytime there was a new delivery of cooking oil to the supermarkets, the shelves were wiped out in hours. Now the Welsh police are allowed to stop a car and look at what it’s running in its tank. 

On that note, I ran across something good from an oil company. While I was researching oil company contributions to alternative energy, I read that Conoco Phillips is working with Tyson foods to use chicken fat for fuel.  Reuters.com has the entire article. The article stated: “Beef, pork and chicken fat from Tyson rendering plants will be processed at ConocoPhillips refineries to create transportation fuel.” They plan in the future to produce about 175 million gallons per year of this biodiesel. Conoco Phillips is already preparing some of their refineries for processing the animal fat. The first one is in Borger, Texas. ConocoPhillips is processing soybean oil as a biodiesel fuel already at its Whitegate refinery in Cork, Ireland. Tyson said “the fats will be processed with hydrocarbon feedstocks to produce a high-quality diesel fuel that meets all federal standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel.” And unlike ethanol, this fuel can run through pipelines. 

This is good news. These two companies are making good use of leftover pollution, and there is a lot of it in the meatpacking industry. Since Conoco Phillips doesn’t stand to gain or lose from doing this, this is a very generous move.  I just hope finding a way to get rid of rendering material doesn’t cause a spike in eating more meat, or establishing more CAFO’s! There is a humane and ethical side to the treatment of animals that figures in here, not just the environment, or money. Industrialized farming is extremely horrific for animals, totally inhumane, and we end up with sickly meat.

http://www.reuters.com/article/consumerproducts-SP/idUSN1629340720070416?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

There was more on the news today about water contamination in America on ABC news. It seems trace amounts of hormones, antibiotics, and antidepressants are turning up in fish everywhere. This time it was Lake Mead near Las Vegas. Our filtration methods seem to be failing more and more.

It’s been quite a few years since I first heard about genderless, or unisex fish in the waters of New York due to unusually high amounts of human waste in some areas due to poor filtration. I started wondering if that water would have the same gender/hormonal affects on humans eventually? We know that baldness is not just hereditary but also related to hormones, and that it is on the rise. Children are reaching puberty far too early. Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?

The next time I heard about gender problems in fish, it was in the Potomac River as reported by Robin Roberts of Good Morning America. That was a year, or more ago. I reported not long ago the same contaminants,  hormones and antidepressants, were found in trace amounts in Lake Michigan. This is an obvious and growing problem—that’s been ignored.

I’ve harped over and over again about CAFO’s and their practice called nutrient loading. I can clearly see a link between nutrient loading and tainted crops. Nutrient loading is when the holding lagoons from farm animal excrement is blown all over the surrounding land as some sort of fertilizer. Read the article link below. It states that: “In several recent studies of soil fertilized with livestock manure or with the sludge product from wastewater treatment plants American scientists found earthworms had accumulated those same compounds [widely used antidepressants] while vegetables — including corn, lettuce and potatoes — had absorbed antibiotics. “These results raise potential human health concerns.” This really needs to change.

If drugs show up in crops from manure, why not e-coli from manure as fertilizer on lettuce and spinach? It’s a disgusting situation any way you look at it. I saw the pics of what happened when too much spring rain caused an overflow of those CAFO lagoons down south. It killed all the fish in the subsidiaries all the way to the ocean where more fish were instantly killed.

I remember all these reports.  It seems to be spreading.  Does anyone in charge, truly care about our freshwater?  We keep getting reports that our air, water, and foodstuff is getting increasingly better. Just go ahead and drink tap water, breathe the air from around coalburners, and eat whatever is served up.  We’re just asking for poor health by not being more involved and demanding in the way we want our basic air, food and water. We should really be questioning what’s happening. With all the recalls, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see something very wrong is most certainly happening. It’s not a natural phenomenon that’s happened before. It’s us. It’s not a stretch to think we’re causing global warming, the more we’re aware of the pollution we create by something as simple as flushing our pills.  

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=4422001

The U.S. just had the largest beef recall in history.  Who can tell? We’ve had so many. Is it slowing anyone down from eating more burgers? Probably not. Most of the beef, 143 million lbs. was heading to school cafeterias. There was enough tainted beef to provide two burgers to every man, woman, and child in the U.S. according to ABC. Finally, ABC news aired film footage showing how sick, downed animals that are too ill to stand are pushed, prodded, even fork-lifted into a slaughterhouse to be hacked into our food. The news said: “It might be disturbing.”

Disturbing? If we really wanted to cure obesity in America, everyone should have to visit a petting zoo and interact with farmyard animals, pet their soft muzzles, feel their innocence, then visit a CAFO and a slaughterhouse. How about inhaling some fumes from the open-air lagoons while we’re there? It just might work to cure our eating disease.

What I saw on TV this morning is why I quit eating pigs and cows. If the average American experienced where our food came from, how it is processed, we would be a much, much thinner nation. We are an absolutely cruel nation in our utilization of Confined Animal Factories or CAFO’s, and are neglectful in paying any attention to the treatment of our farm animals. The only thing we are interested in is putting the feedbag on ourselves. 

Since the average American is not likely to come near a slaughterhouse, the next best thing is to watch the movie, “Fast Food Nation.” The movie gives many ideas as to why our food industry is serving us up tainted meat. We are processing everything far too quickly and completely neglecting what is known as  “Kosher” or clean and humanely raised food. I honestly don’t think that some of the pigs and cows that are sent into the slaughterhouse are completely dead before being cut up into steaks. The cow on this morning’s newscast was so sick it couldn’t stand, yet someone was screaming at it, scaring it, prodding it to actually walk into the slaughterhouse on its own. I sometimes hate the modern world. It progresses but with less and less empathy for other living things.

Thus is our sustenance these days. Not pretty. CAFO’s and industrialized farming should be stopped. We’re all too fat anyway. I could lose ten lbs. and never miss it. How about you and especially in light of the latest link between obesity and cancer? I’ve often thought the two somehow go together, but hey I’m not a scientist. I just know lugging around 20 extra lbs. is a lot of extra heft. I know that every time I buy 20 lbs of cat litter, or topsoil, or landscaping mulch. I can lift it. I can fling it still, but I can’t imagine walking around every day with that excess hanging about.  
 

 My mind works in strange ways and so all the things I’m blogging about here go together in my mind. I was watching the Super Bowl and I caught the beginning where everyone was reciting the Declaration of Independence. I thought I just wrote something with the Declaration of Independence in it, and sure enough I did a blog on the 4th of July. I was urging people to be patriotic and contact their reps to support a moratorium on CAFO’s in Michigan. That didn’t happen. As a matter of fact thanks to the MI Farm Bureau and Republican Senate, it’s easier than ever to come to Michigan with a CAFO. Go to the link about CAFO’s below and check out the aerial pictures. Tell me during downpours of rain that those lagoons don’t breach. Groundwater runoff in Michigan ultimately ends up in a lake somewhere. So the opening of the Super Bowl brought up a sore subject for me.

Today, I’m reading an article in the Detroit Free Press about botulism killing Great Lakes birds. It said: “The deaths of hundreds of loons, cormorants, gulls, long-tailed ducks and grebes were scattered across the sand washed up and rotting.” There were 2900 dead birds along a 14-mile stretch of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. That’s ugly. The botulism is being blamed on two foreign, Black Sea area, mussels and round gobies that look like minnows but fatter. Biologists think they are the cause, and it looks like warmer weather, and lower water levels contribute to the problem. The botulism is native to the Great Lakes but hasn’t been around for more than 20 years. The cycle of botulism works like this:

The lakes are warmer and more shallow. The mussels are so numerous they filter the water, which becomes clearer. The sun penetrates to the bottom farther in clear shallow water, and a type of cladophora algae over grows from the sunlight. When the algae dies, it rots and the botulism comes to life. The mussels absorb the botulism, the gobie fish eat the mussels, the birds eat the gobie fish—and ultimately die from botulism.

The article in the Free Press said that the cladophora algae flourished in the 60’s and 70’s because it was nourished by the phosphorus from fertilizer runoff and poor sewage treatment. Bans in Michigan on phosphorus and improved sewage treatment reduced that algae in the 80’s and 90’s. Well, it’s back. 50,000 birds have died from E botulism since 1999.

I remember yesterday’s game, the Declaration of Independence, the CAFOs, and now sewage. I started thinking about a proposal I did for septic systems in Michigan as an assignment for class. Boy was that an eye opener. I found a fairly current article in the Sanitation Journal that said there are over 1.2 million septic systems in Michigan, and up until a few years ago Michigan didn’t have a state sanitary code. Over 40 percent of the new homes in Michigan are in rural areas where septic systems are necessary, and new homes near the water must have above-the-ground engineered septic fields now. But what about older homes like mine?

My husband is a stickler about our septic system, but there are homes along my road that are 40 years old with the original owner in them. Many of Michigan’s septic fields are only inspected when a home sells. Get the picture? The Sanitation Journal said one of the biggest contaminants of our lakes and streams, rivers, springs and such, is failed septic systems, so that’s something the state is really watching.” I don’t know about that, not all of it anyway. I thought we were supposed to be keeping a watchful eye on the ballast water of freighters too, and look at all the mussels.  

The Detroit Free Press story link is below. It was an exceptionally poignant story because one of the biologists rounding up the dead birds found one with a band on its leg. It was an old loon he tracked for 14 years or more. A loon that kept a mate for one of the longest pairings ever recorded, and most amount of chicks raised. That would have really got to me.

 http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/?p=87.

If you want to see what I mean about CAFO’s: http://www.mythinglinks.org/FactoryFarms_WalmartManureDoc.html

More about CAFO’s: http://www.ccofdc.org/documents/CAFO.pdf

http://www.sanitationjournal.com/mstadavesnyder.html.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008802040334

I wrote a blog called “Pig Poo Who Knew” about the meatpacking business and CAFO’s when I read Rolling Stone’s incredible expose by Jeff Tietz called “Boss Hog.” It was such an eye opener about the cruelty of industrialized farming that I took a look at the horrid conditions in which chickens are raised too. http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/?p=100.  We seldom see any documentaries about the plight of farm animals on network television in the U.S. I presume it’s because of the food industry lobby. But in Great Britain it’s another story.

I ran across an article on Reuter’s online that states: “McDonalds sees animal welfare gaining ground in the UK.” McDonalds is anticipating that a British documentary airing on TV over there will really make a difference to farm animals particularly poultry. Admittedly, 91% of all the British know nothing about their food farms. In that case, insight into how the hens are raised should arouse quite a lot of concern. We don’t know all that much over here either and probably don’t know that chicken outsold beef at US McDonalds last year. So much for the Big Mac, and Quarter Pounder. The Reuter’s article stated that: “McDonald’s in Britain has served only free range eggs during the last 10 years,” and that “the company was currently looking at providing canopy cover for chickens to encourage hens to range more.” UK McDonalds is also looking into pig-rearing practices. It seems the poor pigs are confined, and distressed in such close proximity all the time they chew each other’s tails. The tails end up getting docked. There are infection issues I imagine, and all would be unnecessary if the pigs were raised humanely in the first place. Concern for their tails is a start. This is an intelligent animal also remember?  McDonalds UK said they don’t mind the added costs of humane farming if it served the public well. Everything comes back to the consumer. It’s our responsibility no matter how hard we try to shrug it off because if we don’t buy, things change. It’s that simple.

The actual UK documentary about the horrific way chickens are raised was highlighted in “The Independent” UK news and showcased on a website called “Chicken Out, Campaign for a Free Range Future.” “Chicken Out” is kind of catchy isn’t it? The covert filming for the documentary was done by an animal welfare group called “Compassion in World Farming” or CIWF. The article said it was about the grim life inside a chicken coop for 25 to 50 THOUSAND chickens. Imagine the ammonia stench? That would knock you down. It also stated: “Britain’s RSPCA called on supermarkets to quit selling the mass produced chickens.” Go RSPCA!

The British documentary will air on mainstream British television and be given a boost by chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver. They want to highlight what food animals go through in order to keep prices down and mass production up, and that free range chickens and organic birds are the way to go if the industry is ever going to change. Imagine some of our stellar chefs hosting a show on NBC or Fox that would air the extremely bad conditions of farm animals perpetuated by one of our big, national food suppliers? Yeah, that’ll happen. 

So what’s wrong with our media? Sure I’ve caught many articles in magazines and documentaries on PBS, and subscription TV channels about the horrid conditions for our farm animals, but 20 million Americans don’t have subscription TV. The rest that do aren’t getting-in-your-face documentaries. Let’s face it, our news media is not going to upset a major lobby like big meatpacker, Smithfield Foods, unless it’s Rolling Stone magazine of course. So I have to say kudos to the UK and the spirit of revealing the unnecessary cruelty of the food business to the mainstream public in an effort to change, whether their food industry takes a hit or not.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL0447565920080104
http://www.chickenout.tv/news.html?newsid=67.

Whether or not cloned meat is safe is not an issue. It’s not a good idea based on what the meatpacking business does with real animals on industrialized farms and CAFO’s, the fact that Americans disregarded health warnings and boosted our obesity quotient some 30% last year, and our propensity to waste half of our food supply to begin with. Do we really need to clone animals for food?

It’s highly doubtful looking at these pictures of dead hogs stacked sky high that lived from birth to death confined in a box, chewing on metal bars out of distress, then died for no good purpose whatsoever:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters.

As you look at this stack of pigs, remember that science has declared them to be highly intelligent animals. If we do this to regular farm animals, what will we do with clones? Our cruelty quotient will go up and it’s not all that good now. We turn our heads to all types of cruelty already.

We don’t need to fuel obesity either. Type II diabetes is on the rise and linked with obesity from pounding down too many burgers, 20 oz. steaks, and slabs of ribs. Producing more food from cloned animals is contrary because we’re already stuffed on only half of what we produce. The average family throws away 14% of all their food. If beer and pop counts, I’m surprised it’s not higher. Rounding up cans and bottles from party aftermath is a little unnerving. There are always a bunch of them half empty and a few completely full.

So the push for cloning for more food doesn’t make sense, but the push for cloned animals for research does. We’ll be off and running in that direction all too quickly and with little recourse because we didn’t protest cloning animals for food in the first place. The FDA stated they wanted to get public opinion about cloned animals for food. So let them know.

I just got through reading some current worldwide environmental news and have to say, we don’t seem to have a clear-cut view of anything. What we profess, what we say, and what we actually do is all contrary.  First, I saw the Pope give his blessing and speak on behalf of peace and the environment over the Christmas season to over one billion Catholics. And the World Council of Churches that represents 560 million Christians worldwide is calling concerns over global warming a matter of faith. The WCC has had a program about climate change since 1992 and books about ecotheology (I’m interested).  Dr. Samuel Kobia the Secy. General of the WCC stipulates that Christians are well aware that dominion over all living things was given to us. He said that meant, “We were entrusted with the care of the rest of God’s creation.” The emphasis is on the word “CARE” here.

Care doesn’t come under savagely taking a machete to an orangutan trying to defend it’s young, or hooking a live dolphin in the side and sending it to be stripped of skin before it’s even dead, while the resulting meat is basically poison from ingesting too many pollutants, or shooting 6 elephants dead for stepping into a coffee field that is supposed to be their sanctuary. We should actively try to get this stopped, but our demands for things like lumber and coffee encourage it.  Oh and don’t forget about native animals and the latest Internet hunting websites that have yet to be banned in over 20 states.