Commercial Agriculture and What You Eat

BE WARNED! THIS ONE IS PREACHY AND FILLED WITH ALL KINDS OF STUFF A LOT OF YOU MAY NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT!!!


SIDE NOTE: Check out the Link of the Day! (When I change the link, I'll delete this)


This will be the first of several posts on health and food. Mostly my thoughts and experiences with them. I'll intersperse them with posts of daily stuff too, for those of you that like that better than the preachy stuff.

Most of you pretty much know about Taka's and my diet in general. Some of you even know more or less how it came about.

It started with an innocent question to Taka. I was looking through a mail order magazine from an imported foods distributor (Taka's friend works for the company). I saw an ad for New Zealand venison. I just wanted to see if Taka knew what the word venison was. She not only knew but said that I shouldn't order it because deer have mad cow disease and are even less checked than cattle.

Ha! First of all, deer can't get Mad Cow disease. It's a contradiction in terms. Ever the smartass trying to prove his point, I went to the internet. Something like five bleary-eyed hours later I had given up meat for good.

Deer (elk, sheep, pigs, goats...and humans) all can get their own version of BSE (Mad Cow Disease). Who knows how it all started? Likely with sheep, whose version has been documented earliest and is called Scrapie. Ever the doubter of popular literature, I now fully believe that versions of this disease are rampant in the commercial food markets. Without writing a book on the whole thing, I can simplify it to this: What do you expect when you feed meat products to herbivores that are already being kept in extreme conditions?

Let's get away from all that and briefly touch on the huge volumes of antibiotics injected into every meat product you consume. Why? Easy answer: Because of the extreme conditions the animals are kept in (all necessary in today's commercial market). Any farmer that doesn't do everything mentioned so far, would be out of business pretty quick. Any correlation to this and the number of antibiotic-resistant problems cropping up in hospitals worldwide? I don't know. Can't prove a thing. Interesting though, huh?

Forget the antibiotic shots, the feeding of meat to herbivores, and the unnatural and extreme conditions the animals are kept in for a minute. Do you know that massive doses of hormones are injected into every animal product you eat? Again, this is for commercial and economic reasons. Funny though; there are many documented cases of girls having their first period before the age of eight these days. Records of the past aren't clear, but seem to show that this was very uncommon. Funnier still is the fact that this occurs in the richest of countries at a FAR greater rate than that of third world nations. Is it from the hormones injected into every meat product consumed? I don't know. No real proof that I know of. Interesting though, huh?

One more thing, then I'll stop (for now). It has to do with the "protein supplements" fed to the animals you eat. Derived from meat for sure. Made in rendering plants. Where do they get their ingredients? You won't believe me, but it's a matter of record that they use any animal too sick to enter the public consumption market (and I do mean any). They also use euthanized animals from animal shelters and (I kid you not) road kill collected from animal control and highway departments. I challenge any of you to do a Google search on rendering plants and spend an hour or so wading through what you find. For that matter, check on anything written here up to this point...except the Taka story. ;-)

Wow! Heavy stuff. Feel free to comment on any of the above. I can back up pretty much all of it and go into a lot greater detail.

The next of the "serious posts" will be a lot lighter. It'll just go over all the huge benefits Taka and I have experienced over the last year and a half of our dietary changes.