"Fast Food Nation"

I have been eating more healthy lately. This mostly all happened after two things occurred. First of all I went to a meeting where the speaker talked about pre-diabetes and she explained it better than anyone I've ever heard. She was from our local Health Dept. They do have classes and I'm thinking of taking them to learn more.

The next occurrence was a book I read called "Fast Food Nation," by Eric Schlosser. You can get it from your local library. Fast foods has been one of my downfalls. After reading this book I drive on past them. I don't know if I can ever eat a hamburger again unless I know where that particular cow lived and who killed it and processed the meat. Here's the part that really got to me (This book was written in 2001).

This is directly from the book:
The cattle now packed into feedlots get little exercise and live amid pools of manure. "You shouldn't eat dirty food and dirty water," the official told me. "But we still think we can give animals dirty food and dirty water." Feedlots have become an extremely efficient mechanism for "recirculating the manure," which is unfortunate, since E. coli 0157:H7 can replicate in cattle troughs and survive in manure for up to ninety days.

Far from their natural habitat, the cattle in feedlots become more prone to all sorts of illnesses. And what they are being fed often contributes to the spread of disease. The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle, especially substances with a high protein content that accelerate growth. About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes-the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle-until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as "mad cow disease." Nevertheless, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle. Americans who spent more than six months in the United Kingdom during the 1980s are now forbidden to donate blood, in order to prevent the spread of BSE's human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But cattle blood is still put into the feed given to American cattle.

Steven P. Bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry, is appalled by what goes into cattle feed these days. "Damn it, these cattle are ruminants," Bjerklie says. "They're designed to eat grass and, maybe, grain. I mean, they have four stomachs for a reason-to eat products that have a high cellulose content. They are not designed to eat other animals."

The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also being fed to cattle. A study published a few years ago in Preventive Medicine notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994. According to Dr. Neal D. Bernard, who heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, chicken manure may contain dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, parasites such as tapeworms and Giardia lamblia, antibiotic residues, arsenic, and heavy metals.
The pathogens from infected cattle are spread not only in feedlots, but also at slaughterhouses and hamburger grinders.


Now isn't that all interesting stuff to know?? When we were growing up we did kill chickens and hogs, but we knew what they had been eating and how they lived. I do not want to eat any animals that have been fed other dead animals or their manure. Good grief!!


I did find this a very interestng book from start to finish. It starts out telling how fast food got started. But it sure did some queazy numbers on my stomach!! Queazy enough that now I can drive right on past those fast food places and don't mind one bit!

CHURCH SIGN
Here's hoping everyone is having a wonderful and blessed Sunday!
This church sign falls right in place. We got over 4 inches of rain last night and today.