The Unhealthy Meat Market, ignored by liberals.

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/opinion/kristof-the-unhealthy-meat-
market.html

Where does our food come from? Often the answer is Tyson Foods, America’s
meat factory.

Tyson, one of the nation’s 100 biggest companies, slaughters 135,000 head
of cattle a week, along with 391,000 hogs and an astonishing 41 million
chickens. Nearly all Americans regularly eat Tyson meat — at home, at
McDonalds, at a cafeteria, at a nursing home.

“Even if Tyson did not produce a given piece of meat, the consumer is
really only picking between different versions of the same commoditized
beef, chicken, and pork that is produced through a system Tyson
pioneered,” says Christopher Leonard, a longtime agribusiness journalist,
in his new book about Tyson called “The Meat Racket.”

Leonard’s book argues that a handful of companies, led by Tyson, control
our meat industry in ways that raise concerns about the impact on animals
and humans alike, while tearing at the fabric of rural America. Many
chicken farmers don’t even own the chickens they raise or know what’s in
the feed. They just raise the poultry on contract for Tyson, and many
struggle to make a living.

Concerned by the meat oligopoly’s dominance of rural America, President
Obama undertook a push beginning in 2010 to strengthen antitrust oversight
of the meat industry and make it easier for farmers to sue meatpackers.
The aim was grand: to create a “new rural economy” to empower individual
farmers.

Big Meat’s lobbyists used its friends in Congress to crush the Obama
administration’s regulatory effort, which collapsed in “spectacular
failure,” Leonard writes.

Factory farming has plenty of devastating consequences, but it’s only fair
to acknowledge that it has benefited our pocketbooks. When President
Herbert Hoover dreamed of putting “a chicken in every pot,” chicken was a
luxury dish more expensive than beef. In 1930, whole dressed chicken
retailed for $6.48 a pound in today’s currency, according to the National
Chicken Council. By last year, partly because of Tyson, chicken retailed
for an average price of $1.57 per pound — much less than beef.

Costs came down partly because scientific breeding reduced the length of
time needed to raise a chicken to slaughter by more than half since 1925,
even as a chicken’s weight doubled. The amount of feed required to produce
a pound of chicken has also dropped sharply.

And yet.

This industrial agriculture system also has imposed enormous costs of
three kinds.

First, it has been a catastrophe for animals. Chickens are bred to grow
huge breasts so that as adults they topple forward and can barely breathe
or stand.

“These birds are essentially bred to suffer,” says Laurie Beacham of the
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which argues
that there’s an inherent cruelty in raising these “exploding chickens.”

Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same
rate as modern chickens, a human by the age of two months would weigh 660
pounds.

Second, factory farming endangers our health. Robert Martin of the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health notes that a farm with 10,000
hogs produces as much fecal waste as a small city with 40,000 people, but
the hog operation won’t have a waste treatment plant. Indeed, the hogs in
a single county in North Carolina produce half as much waste as all the
people in New York City, Martin says.

Another health concern is that antibiotics are routinely fed to animals
and birds to help them grow quickly in crowded, dirty conditions. This can
lead to antibiotic resistant infections, which strike two million
Americans annually (overuse of antibiotics on human patients is also a
factor, but four-fifths of antibiotics in America go to farm animals).

Third, this industrial model has led to a hollowing out of rural America.
The heartland is left with a few tycoons and a large number of people
struggling at the margins.

Leonard writes in his book that in 68 percent of the counties where Tyson
operates, per capita income has grown more slowly over the last four
decades than the average in that state. We may think of rural America as a
halcyon pastoral of red barns and the Waltons, but today it’s also a land
of unemployment, poverty, despair and methamphetamines.

It’s easy to criticize the current model of industrial agriculture, far
harder to outline a viable alternative. Going back to the rural structure
represented by the inefficient family farm on which I grew up in Oregon
isn’t a solution; then we’d be back to $6.48-a-pound chicken.

But a starting point is to recognize bluntly that our industrial food
system is unhealthy. It privatizes gains but socializes the health and
environmental costs. It rewards shareholders — Tyson’s stock price has
quadrupled since early 2009 — but can be ghastly for the animals and
humans it touches. Industrial meat has an acrid aftertaste.



--
Barack Obama, reelected by the dumbest voters in the history of the United
States of America.

Eric Holder, racist black murdering United States Attorney General, still
has his job.

Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact to
improper vetting of Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obama, a confirmed
felon using SSAN 042-68-4425, belonging to a dead man.

Obama ignored the brutal killing of an American diplomat in Benghazi, then
relieved American military officers who attempted to prevent said murder
in order to cover up his own ineptitude.

Obama continues his goal of disarming America while ObamaCare increases
insurance premiums 300% and leaves millions without health care.

Obama backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt prior to their removal for
failing to represent the people and constitutional violations.

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[RichTrasky]