Eye Opener: CSPI

For this eye opener, I decided to take a tour of our food supply. Here's what I found out...

Shocking Statistics

• Growing grain for beef and dairy cattle requires a total of 8.5 BILLION POUNDS of fertilizer per year.

• Livestock manure releases many dangerous gases such as methane, ammonia, and nitrous oxide, and hydrogen sulfide. In fact, the methane released from livestock and their manure is equivalent in environmental destruction to the annual release of carbon dioxide from about 33 million automobiles. Talk about air pollution!

• Healthy farm animals are routinely fed antibiotics to promote healthy growth and balance out filthy living conditions. Personally, I am very wary of our overuse of antibiotics because it can lead to resistant strains. This really scares me! European nations have begun to move away from the use of administering antibiotics in healthy animals, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has done nothing of the sort.

• Small amounts of 21 different antibiotics were found in one survey of streams and rivers throughout the United States. In rural areas, those antibiotics are probably coming from factory farms.

• Livestock of all varieties are often forced to live in over crowded conditions, left to live in their own manure. Do you want to eat anything that was living in a pile of poop?

• Slaughterhouse workers have an injury rate three times higher than that of the average factory worker.

• Factory farms feed animals everything from industrial sludge to discarded restaurant oil to ground-up newspapers. This is extremely disturbing, considering these toxins and carcinogenic agents are then passed into humans who consume these animal products.

• The water used to irrigate just alfalfa – 4.7 trillion gallons per year – exceeds the irrigation needs of all the vegetables, berries, and fruit orchards combined!

• It takes about 18,000 gallons of rain and irrigation water to produce one pound of beef.

• The average American consumes about 11 more pounds of red meat, 54 more pounds of poultry, 5 more pounds of fish and shellfish, and 24 more pounds of cheese per year than he or she did in the early 1950s.

• Livestock manure is often the source of disease-causing bacteria on fruits and vegetables. Gross!

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that contaminated food causes about 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths each year.

• The overall cost of diet-related diseases is about $90 billion annually.

My Thoughts

Those are just a few of the new facts I learned. The more I read, the more I just felt sick to my stomach. How are factory farms allowed to operate like this? I mean, yes, I had heard horror stories, but for some reason I chose to believe that was the exception rather than the norm. Now I am not so sure...

In the last couple of years, I have greatly reduced the amount of meat in my diet, but I do still eat a lot of dairy products. From now on I will definitely think twice about the foods I am purchasing and eating. I had no idea how many resources it took to raise these animals! And all the pollution from the livestock? It's almost too much to process at one time.

The thing I find most frustrating about trying to change my diet is that some people just don't understand, and they consider others to be "food snobs" if they don't want to eat certain foods. For instance, my family would be very upset if I refused to eat what they were having for dinner the next time I visit them. I feel that since food is such a huge part of culture, it can be a very touchy subject and a difficult habit to change. I think the best way to go about it is to just take small steps and try to educate people about these issues without offending them.