Biologist J. Boone Kauffman is claiming that a pound of farmed shrimp creates ten times the greenhouse gases as a pound of rain forest beef—the food long regarded as the worst of the worst when it comes to carbon footprints. Estimates like this are notoriously hard to evaluate, but the fact that Physorg.com is reporting on it suggests Kauffman’s analysis has some rigor behind it. (Via Philpott.) Link.
An unprecedented commitment today from one of America’s top food service companies. Starting in 2015, none of their food will be produced using battery cages or gestation crates.
Writing for Civil Eats, Helene York, the company’s director of strategic initiatives, explains the numerous challenges that accompany becoming a leader rather than a follower on farmed animal cruelty issues. But efforts here pay off in numerous important ways. York explains:
Good animal welfare isn’t just about the animals. It’s about starting to dismantle a system that has enormous costs for our society, including the loss of medically important antibiotics, the pollution of our air and water from animal waste, and horrible working conditions in factory farms.
Now would be a great time to meet with the director of your college or corporate dining hall, to ask about instituting Meatless Mondays and switching food service providers to Bon Appétit. If the Syscos of the world start seeing that they’re losing major dining hall contracts on account of animal cruelty concerns, we’ll see a stampede of food service companies rushing to follow Bon Appétit’s lead.
Contact me and I can email you information that will enable you to have a productive and persuasive meeting. Link.
For years, it’s been obvious that factory farms enable bacteria from humans to mutate into antibiotic-resistant forms, and then get passed back to people. The evidence that this occurs has been overwhelming, but definitively proving that this happens is extraordinarily difficult. And naturally, agribusiness has demanded conclusive proof, despite their guilt being obvious to any informed observer.
Well, NPR reports that proof of the factory farm/antibiotic connection has at long last emerged, thanks to a study published today from a team led by Lance Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute. This is a watershed moment in the decades-long struggle to curtail routine antibiotic use on factory farms. It’s now been proven that this practice is leading to the emergence of deadly bacterial infections that are extraordinarily difficult to treat. Opponents of routine feeding antibiotics to farmed animals now have clear proof of harm rather than just a mountain of evidence.
From here on in, it’s going to be vastly harder for the meat industry to resist the enactment of new antibiotic bans at factory farms. Thanks to this new study, any informed neutral observer is certain to agree that the public health risks brought about by current agribusiness practices are unacceptable. The days of agribusiness doing the tobacco industry shuck and jive on this key topic are over.
With today’s news, nobody with any credibility can oppose banning the routine feeding of antibiotics at factory farms. Link.
A galling New York Times opinion piece by former pig farmer Blake Hurst belittles efforts to improve welfare and ban gestation crates. Hurst doesn’t so much as acknowledge a single pork farming practice as being unacceptably cruel. Rather, he suggests that efforts to ban the cruelest farming practices amount to “selling expensive pork chops with heaping sides of nostalgia.”
There’s room for meat producers and animal advocates to have a productive conversation on this subject, but it starts with both sides honestly examining the compromises the industry makes in regard to animal welfare for the sake of reducing production costs. The only reference to this topic Hurst makes is that he says gestation crates, “do restrict pigs’ movements.”
That’s an interesting way of putting it. Gestation crates restrict pigs’ movements by keeping them confined, for months at a time, in a space so tiny they can’t even turn around.
By trying to sidestep this fundamental point, Hurst amply demonstrates that he’s not to be trusted about anything else he says regarding pork industry cruelty. Link.
If a molecular biologist’s claims are anything close to being accurate, the meat industry could be on the brink of some ruinous competition:
We have a class of products that totally rocks, and cannot be distinguished from the animal-based product it replaces, even by hardcore foodies.
An extraordinarily bold claim, but then the underdog Giants predicted they’d beat the contemptible Patriots in the last two Super Bowls they played and look what happened. (Via Merberg.) Link.
USA Today:
Two commonly ridiculed “junk” foods — the Doritos chip and the Taco Bell taco — are being rolled into one.
Another step toward the lowest-common-denominator abyss. Meanwhile, Chipotle Mexican Grill keeps growing and growing by offering healthful traditional Mexican food with no gimmicks. Link.
BBC News’ front page links to an article detailing recent progress. One research group expects to produce its first cultured hamburger patty later this year. But at a cost of $200,000, it’ll be more proof of concept than something ready to join McDonald’s Dollar Menu.
Still, the researchers sound convinced they’ll quickly get costs under control. And that forthcoming burger patty will be a key milestone on the road to making farmed animals and slaughterhouses obsolete. (Thanks, John.) Link.
If you’re into vegan baking and would like to use this talent to raise money for animal-friendly causes, it’s time to start thinking about the fourth annual Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale. Link.
Daren Williams of the NCBA inadvertently demonstrates that it’s extremely difficult to argue against the advantages of Meatless Mondays without sounding unreasonable. Williams would have been vastly better off not writing this article, but instead he took the bait and dug himself an incredibly deep hole. Check it out:
But make no mistake: Meatless Monday is a sinister plot to drive farmers and ranchers out of business by convincing Americans that meat is bad for your health and bad for the planet.
By asking Americans to stop eating meat on Monday this insidious effort drives the extreme vegan agenda forward with a reasonable sounding request.
The trouble with calling Meatless Mondays a “sinister plot” is that this sort of rhetoric sounds deluded and paranoid. Think about it: in Williams’ world, if you eat meat six days out of seven you are helping to drive “the extreme vegan agenda forward.” Come on—what person who doesn’t do PR for the meat industry would honestly believe this?
William’s problem is that Meatless Mondays aren’t merely a “reasonable sounding request,” but rather a thoroughly reasonable request that deliberately errs on the side of asking too little. And therein lies the genius of Meatless Mondays: by asking for too little rather than too much, vegetarian advocates have created a situation where people like Williams have no tenable counterargument.
It’s not the 1950s anymore, and it comes off as bat shit crazy to argue that we’re best off eating meat every single day. And that’s the corner that people like Williams paint themselves into when they argue against Meatless Mondays.
All that said, Williams is indeed correct that Meatless Mondays pose a profound threat to the meat industry. Once you get comfortable eating meatless once a week, it’s a snap to go to two days a week, or even to a Bittman-style Vegan Until Six diet .
And that sort of progression can produce consumption shifts that would be ruinous to the meat industry as we know it, which is why Williams refuses to respond to Meatless Mondays in a way that’s reasonable or accommodating. The Cattlemen can live with omnivores going meatless one day a week—but they correctly recognize that few people will stop there. (Thanks, Paul.) Link.
Feedstuffs reports:
Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. reported this morning losses of $85.4 million for its fourth quarter and $496.7 million for its full year in 2011, calling the year “extremely challenging.”
Let’s hope they’ll one day be calling 2011, “The year our company went down the toilet.” Link.
