-->| Deltakeeper, an environmental group that monitors California's waterways50
A cultural shift toward a plant-based diet would mean far fewer animals in factory farms and feedlots, far less manure produced, and far cleaner water. It would mean that our water would be healthier and far less likely to harbor dangerous pathogens from animal waste. It would be a major step toward restoring the life-giving waters of our planet. |  What to Avoid
Meat
Meat should be avoided, and this is especially true of meat from animals raised on factory farms, because these animals are given high levels of hormones. Estrogenic compounds are routinely injected into commercially raised animals to fatten them up. Once eaten, these hormones are stored in gonadal tissue, whether it be ovarian, testicular, or prostatic, where they overstimulate the body's own hormones, and lead to cancer. If you must eat meat, small quantities of meat from animals raised naturally is a safer alternative. |  Yet amazingly, there is currently no requirement in the United States that such farms be tested for these dangerous pathogens. As a result, unsafe meat and eggs are shipped every day to processing plants, where they contaminate clean product and in turn the human food supply.
Meanwhile, the U.S. meat industry has aggressively fought any legislation that would require factory farms to be tested for bacteria that cause food-borne illness, and has repeatedly opposed regulations that would ensure a safer product.
In June 1998, Rep. | | H7 that increasingly breed in today's factory farms and slaughterhouses.
Rather than clean up the conditions that produce these pathogens in the first place, the U.S. meat industry has strongly supported food disparagement laws that make it illegal to criticize perishable food products, and then has used such legislation to sue those who challenge their control over your wallet. They even sued Oprah Winfrey for saying that, based on what she'd learned about meat production in the United States, she was never going to eat another burger. |  It continues to hire and underpay an unorganized work force that sells greasy, fatty food grown with pesticides on factory farms, sold by an international franchise that destroys community economic diversity, advertised with billions of dollars that target children using bigger-than-life millionaire sports celebrities. |  The us© of chemical fertilizers on our ever-larger corporate and factory farms causes the situation to deteriorate even more. For example, excess ootassium leads to greater deficiencies of magnesium and excess ammonia from fertilizers is responsible for deficiencies of copper. It is easy to see why there are now sound arguments for seeking other forms of natural minerals that are easy for the body to assimilate. | | Most meat, poultry, and animal products on the market today come from factory farms, where animals are confined in dark, crowded quarters, fed a diet high in drugs and chemicals, and deprived of exercise and fresh air. These animals are highly stressed, deformed, and diseased, and this method of raising them produces much environmental pollution and waste of resources, as well as inferior food.
Many animal-rights activists point out that the ultimate cruelty is to kill an animal and that by using animal products we support the abuse of animals. | | For this reason, many people who boycott meat from factory farms also do not wear wool. By choosing carefully, it is possible, especially through catalogs mentioned later in this chapter, to buy sweaters and other items made from sheared wool.
After shearing, the wool fleece is washed a number of times in a soapy alkaline solution. This "scouring" removes the lanolin, a natural oil that keeps the fleece soft and waterproof. "Unscoured" wool retains the natural water repellency of the lanolin. |  These animals —confined on hundreds of factory farms in North Dakota and Canada—are impregnated, then hooked up by surgical tubing to a catheter-like device to extract their urine. The mares are kept dehydrated, in order to concentrate their urine, and forced to stand constantly on hard, cold, concrete floors, unable to take more than a couple of steps, and unable to lie down comfortably, for 7 of the 11 months of their pregnancy. Each year, 90,000 foals are "disposed of" as an unwanted "by-product. | | Nor has it helped that we've been feeding more than half of our nation's entire production of antibiotics to livestock in factory farms. Most of today's cows, hogs, and chickens are fed the drugs in every meal they eat. The conditions in which these creatures are housed, and the diets they are fed are so unnatural, cruel, and disease producing that a steady supply of these drugs is needed to keep the animals alive. This use has contaminated the food chain with drug residues, and contributed enormously to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria. | | The USDA is proposing to irradiate increasing numbers of foods to combat the deadly food-borne diseases such as E. coli 0157:H7 that increasingly breed in today's factory farms and slaughterhouses.
Rather than clean up the conditions that produce these pathogens in the first place, the U.S. meat industry has strongly supported food disparagement laws that make it illegal to criticize perishable food products, and then has used such legislation to sue those who challenge their control over your wallet. | | In June 1998, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) proposed an amendment to the agriculture appropriations bill that would have given the USDA the power to assess fines for unsanitary conditions in meatpacking plants. The House Appropriations Committee, however, rejected it by a vote of 25 to 19. A subsequent investigation found that the 25 members who voted against Lowey's motion received six times the campaign contributions from the meat and poultry industries as the 19 who voted for it. | |
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