Gristle

From Factory Farms to Food Safety

Miyun Park, Moby

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781595585905
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The musician and activist offers "a collection of compelling, well-researched essays... shining light on the world of agribusiness" and Big Meat ( Publishers Weekly ). For everyone from omnivores to vegans, this eye-opening guide offers food for thought on today's meat industry. Moby, renowned musician and passionate vegan, and Miyun Park, leading food policy activist, bring together experts from diverse backgrounds including: farming, workers' rights activism, professional athletics, science, environmental sustainability, food business, and animal welfare advocacy. Together, they eloquently lay out how industrial animal agriculture unnecessarily harms workers, communities, the environment, our health, our wallets, and animals. In the tradition of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Gristle combines hard-hitting facts with a light touch and includes informative charts and illustrations depicting the stark realities of America's industrial food system. Contributors include:

• Brendan Brazier
• Lauren Bush
• Christine Chavez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez
• Michael Greger, MD
• Sara Kubersky and Tom O'Hagan
• Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé
• John Mackey
• Danielle Nierenberg and Meredith Niles
• Wayne Pacelle
• Paul and Phyllis Willis

1

Health

Brendan Brazier

Unlike most other fifteen-year-olds in Vancouver, my priorities didn’t revolve around football games against high school rivals, dating, or who would win the 1990 Stanley Cup. But, like most kids my age, I was a bit obstinate and a bit reluctant not to question authority.

So, as a serious, young athlete who already knew that I wanted to compete as a professional Ironman triathlete, I found the pro-meat mantra of my coach and trainers a little hard to swallow.

An Ironman triathlon consists of a 3.2-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile marathon. I didn’t need a coach to tell me that I had a huge amount of training ahead of me. Given how much time I would need to invest in preparing my body for professional competition, I knew that, to get a head start, I needed the most effective training program possible. Since imitation can be the highest form of flattery, I looked at the training programs of some of the top professional Ironman triathletes in the world, with the plan of mimicking their routine. To see what elevated the best from the rest, I also looked at the training regimens of those with respectable, yet average, performance. What I found surprised me: the average athlete’s program differed very little from the elite’s.

If training discrepancies were minimal and natural talent can only get you so far so fast, what caused some athletes to pull out ahead of the pack?

The most significant difference I found between the upper echelon of elites and the moderately performing athletes had nothing to do with training; it was all about recovery. Breakthrough performances are hinged on the rate at which the body recovers from physical training—which makes sense. Training isn’t much more than breaking down muscle tissue, so it stands to reason that the athletes who can restore theirs the quickest will have the advantage by being able to schedule more workouts closer together. Over just a few short months, that extra training will translate into a significant performance gain. Realizing this, recovery became my focus.

As surprised as I was to discover that there were few differences in training routines between the best and the average athlete, I was even more so when I learned that diet has the single greatest impact on recovery: food choices can account for up to 80 percent of the total recovery process. If cleaning up my diet was a principal component to becoming a professional athlete, as I speculated it might be, I needed to learn more. With this newfound appreciation for diet, I decided to take mine more seriously and, for the first time, developed an increasingly growing interest in health and nutrition.

In those early years, I experimented with many different nutritional philosophies, ticking them off as I methodically continued my search for the diet that would give me the results I was looking for. At long last, I tried a purely plant-based diet. Right from the outset, my meat-, egg-, and dairy-free diet was unexpectedly met with extraordinary resistance by friends, coaches, and trainers. They all seemed closed to the possibility that a plant-based diet could support the high physical demands of professional Ironman training and racing, and I found their adamant stance intriguing. They assumed that a diet free of animal products was either too low in protein, iron, and calcium or deficient in vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids.

As only a stubborn teenager can, I set out to prove them wrong— and succeeded. I completed my first triathlon in 1993 as a high school competitor. In 1998, at 23, I began my professional career, going on to place eighth in Ironman Utah and third in the National Long-Course Triathlon Championships, and twice winning the Canadian National 50km Ultra Marathon Championships.

Throughout my research, training, dietary experimentation, and competition, I’ve benefited enormously on a professional level from adopting a diet free of meat, eggs, and dairy products, while, unknowingly, improving my overall health and protecting myself from the many diet-related diseases and disorders that have become commonplace in North America.

According to estimates published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Preventive Medicine, meat consumption accounts for up to two-thirds of the high blood pressure cases in the United States, about one-quarter of the heart disease cases, maybe 40 percent of certain cancer cases, one-third of the diabetes cases, up to three-quarters of all gallbladder operations, most of the food poisoning cases, and half the obesity cases.

Those who eat meat are twice as likely to become hospitalized, twice as likely to have to be on medications, and more likely to need emergency diagnostic procedures and emergency surgery than vegetarians. And, after the numbers are crunched, the health care costs of meat are astronomical, approaching perhaps $60 billion, comparable with the costs of smoking.

Consumption of animal products has not only elevated our risks for myriad disorders, it has jeopardized our ability to readily overcome illnesses that could once be treated effectively. As animal production has become increasingly industrialized over the decades, factory farming has relied more on dosing farmed animals with growth promotants and subtherapeutic antibiotics, which have also taken a toll on human health. In fact, this dangerous practice of feeding medically important antibiotics to factory farmed pigs, chickens, and other animals—not to treat illness, but to speed their growth and try to prevent disease contraction in the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions customary in today’s intensive facilities—led the European Union more than a decade ago to ban the nontreatment use of antibiotics of human importance in farmed animal production. In the United States, however, nearly twenty classes of antimicrobials are approved for farmed animal growth promotion, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including many critically important antibiotics, such as penicillin, tetracycline, and erythromycin. Estimates from the Union of Concerned Scientists reveal that 70 percent of antimicrobials used in the United States are fed to farmed animals for nontherapeutic purposes. Aquatic farmed animals, too, are fed antibiotics. The U.S. fish farming industry consumes a shocking 50,000 pounds of the drugs in a single year.

What does this mean for our health? Antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

It’s scary to consider and even scarier to realize it’s a reality: indiscriminate use of antibiotics in today’s factory farming systems has allowed bacteria to become more resistant to the antibiotics used to treat us when we’re ill. Studies have shown that antibiotic-resistant bacteria—and antibiotics themselves—can be found in the air, water, and soil around facilities, as well as on meat, and we can be exposed through infected animal products and water supplies contaminated by farmed animal waste.

The world’s leading medical, agricultural, and veterinary authorities—the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the World Organization for Animal Health, respectively—have concluded that animal agribusiness’s overuse of antibiotics is, indeed, contributing to human health problems. Add to that the many negative health impacts of diets laden with meat, eggs, and milk (particularly from factory farms), and plant-based diets should look even more attractive, even solely from a personal health perspective.

And nutritionists agree. Vegetarian diets, according to the American Dietetic Association, “are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence.… Vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than nonvegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; vegetarians also show lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.”

Whether it’s to enhance your athletic performance, to help to reduce your risk of heart disease or your cholesterol, or simply to achieve better health, leaving farmed animals out of your diet is a simple decision with life-long benefits.

Brendan Brazier, two-time Canadian 50km Ultra Marathon Champion, raced Ironman triathlons professionally for seven years before becoming a bestselling author on performance nutrition and the creator of Vega, an award-winning line of whole food nutritional products.

Reported an article in Ecological Economics, “[b]y changing the preferences of people away from meat consumption to more efficient foods like soy, a positive environmental impact can be made worldwide, as well as creating healthier lives and decreasing the impact of health problems on a society.”2

Dieticians “can encourage eating that is both healthful and conserving of soil, water, and energy by emphasizing plant sources of protein and foods that have been produced with fewer agricultural inputs.”3

— American Dietetic Association, the world’s largest association of food and nutrition professionals

“As an unreconstructed carnivore, I am painfully aware how much land and water go into the raising and slaughter of poultry and livestock compared to growing fruits and vegetables, and I also know how much our meat industries contribute to the destruction of the Chesapeake Bay. Every year I hear from vegetarians about the public environmental and private health benefits of giving up meat, and they’re right.”4

— Senator Jamie Raskin, Maryland State Senator, District 20

Reports the Natural Resources Defense Council, “Factory farms, which mass-produce animals in assembly-line fashion, have harmed aquatic life, human health and ecosystems across the nation. As industrial-sized farms stagger under the vast burden of manure they are generating, environmental disasters are inevitable.”5

2

Environment

Lauren Bush

For those of us who live in suburbs or cities, the idea of living near a farm may conjure a warm image of borrowing cups of sugar from the neighbors, who raise animals in healthy, open-air pastures and are good stewards to the land. In stark contrast, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said so eloquently—and startlingly—“the vast majority of America’s meat and produce are controlled by a handful of ruthless monopolies that house animals in industrial warehouses where they are treated with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty. These meat factories destroy family farms and rural communities and produce vast amounts of dangerous pollutants that are contaminating America’s most treasured landscapes and waterways.”

Hardly good neighbors, today’s farmed animal factories are devastating the environment as they inflict unacceptable cruelties on those cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals confined in their intensive facilities. Industrial meat, egg, and milk factories often pollute the water, land, and air of the communities in which they are located. One of the primary causes of rampant factory farm pollution? Manure.

estimated annual production of farmed animal manure and human urine and feces (in tons)

Confining so many animals—thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even more than one million on some factory farms—exclusively or primarily indoors generates an incredible amount of excrement. Unbelievably, some operations produce as much waste as an entire U.S. city. In fact, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Health
• 2. Environment
• 3. Taxpayers
• 4. Animals
• 5. Climate Change
• 6. Children’s Health
• 7. Workers
• 8. Communities
• 9. Zoonotic Diseases
• 10. Global Hunger
• Epilogue
• About the Contributors
• Notes
• Illustration Credits and Information