Eye Opener: CSPI

For this eyeopener I took a tour of our food supply.  This actually coincides pretty well with the section of my book I'm reading.  It's all about our food supply, water supply, and the cattle industry.  After reading some of the facts about our food supply it seems to me that many of our problems involving food and how it relates to the environment stem from the cattle industry.  We clear and burn down much needed rainforests just for grazing ground for more cattle that will eventually be shipped to the US, we use trillions of gallons of water to grow feed for them, and we pump them full of antibiotics that end up creating strains of micro-organisms that are antibiotic resistant meaning that when they infect humans, treatment becomes very difficult.  A fact that I found even more stunning is this: "Livestock are often fed newspapers, industrial sludge, sewage, and other trash. The feeding of cattle remains back to cattle, a practice now banned, led to mad cow disease, which causes always-fatal brain disease in humans."  Although something might be "banned", it doesn't mean it still doesn't occur.

When I leaved in England for 9 months many of their meat and dairy products offered choices entitled "Free Range".  This means that the animal who laid this egg, or this piece of steak is from an animal that wasn't caged up, feed trash, and pumped full of antibiotics.  I never really paid much attention to it, but now that I've gained some environmental knowledge from this class, I realize the importance of free range animal products. Click here to check out an article about the EU banning antibiotic use!