most Americans are fecal matter and e-coli.
We watched “Food Inc.” last night. Wow. The film is full of fun facts. Most of it did not surprise me, as I have been on the anti-GMO, anti-factory-farmed wagon for a long time, so in that sense, this movie just reinforced my confidence in the food choices I make.
But here is a fact I did not know -
85% of e-coli is destroyed when a cow eats grass (as nature intended) instead of corn (which is what factory farmed cows eat). Makes sense though. Stick a cow on a field, let her graze. That is what cows are supposed to do.
It’s like chickens. Did you know that chickens that scratch and dig and eat bugs (as nature intended) produce eggs with 75% less cholestrol than all of your factory-farmed eggs? (That fact was not in the movie, it’s a fact my husband picked up from “Mother Earth News” a few years ago).
For me, the movie’s essence did not lie in the disgusting food we eat so much as it did in the unconscionable way we treat animals, workers, and the land, and how that ends up affecting us. For instance, down in the pig-belt, where there are tons of migrant workers, the Big Name Producers hire the illegals to work for next to nothing in squalid conditions and with no safety net (you might want to say a thank-you to those workers the next time you bite into a BLT). These workers have no recourse for their ill treatment. They are illegal, so they don’t get minimum wage, paid sick days, overtime, and their families do not get compensation if their breadwinner is killed in a factory accident. Furthermore, every so often the workers who have been there a while and who are starting to fight for their rights - get raided in the middle of the night and sent back to Mexico. And for anybody who is niave enough to think, “Yeah, but they are ILLEGALS, taking jobs from Americans”, remember this. When American Big Producers bought off the USDA, the FDA, and every other regulatory office under the sun, that dropped the cost of doing business drastically, so all the similar jobs that were in Mexico went bye-bye. The Mexican workers did what any of us would - they followed the money in order to feed their families. If you want somebody to blame, blame yourself for letting not keeping an eye on your regulatary agencies (it is SO easy to do these days, takes like five minutes a week on the internet).
Of course, the EVIL Empire of Monsanto featured hugely in the movie. And it left me wondering. Today’s political climate is one inwhich many of us are hearing “the government just wants to run our private lives” sentiments, and as I watched Monsanto sue, financially-destroy, SPY on, and put out of business, farmer after farmer - it dawned on me. This is what the anti-governmenters are afraid of, but ironically it is coming from PRIVATE industries, not public institutions.
(Why is there so much irony in anti-government talk???????????????????)
Next -
I was happy to learn that Walmart now carries a large array of organic selections…as Walmart goes, so goes the country. So, while I do not shop there myself, I am glad the organic choices are available for those who do. Choose them, please (they taste better anyhow).
Finally, there was a Virginian farmer (whose name escapes me), who I developed an instant crush on and here is why. This guy raises beef, chickens, pork, and he grows his own food for them. He personally cares for each and every animal, he personally has a hand in the butchering and packing process, and he personally walks his own farm daily to check on how his fat, happy, free-range livestock is doing. He said (this is a paraphrase but it is close, and this is why I fell hard and heavy for the guy), “When you see how these factories treat the source of them income - their animals, their workers, the land upon which their stuff is grown - then it makes you wonder how they treat the rest of life.” He said it better, but the essence was - if you haven’t compassion toward that upon which YOU rely (your money-makers), then you haven’t compassion at all. Amazing!
Anyhow, one fact about this farmer’s food. People come from as far away as a five hour drive, just to get the meat he raises. The film showed he and a couple workers butchering, cleaning, preparing chickens. It was under a very makeshift building, with a roof and no walls. He was dipping the carcasses in water to clean them, then flopping them out - right there in plain sight and in the open air. Factory farms don’t do it this way. They have huge sanitation facilities, they dunk the carcasses in amonia, bleach, and they wear gloves. Yet their carcass bacteria level is still - after all of that - over 3000 times what good ol’ Farmer Sexy’s is - out in the field where there lurk bugs and dust and germies, oh my.
Figure that one out. Or let me do it for you. Food raised as nature intended (grazing, scratching, bug-eating, wing-stretching) is healthy. When you eat it, you are eating the end result of a happy, healthy creature that had a naturally strong immune system (if it didn’t, it would have died early-on since this farmer does not use antibiotics in order to keep as many alive as possible for max profit). When you eat a factory-farmed animal (which most store-bought meat is) you are eating filth, disease, bacteria, and poison.
Then you wonder why you have such bad gas and heartburn. LOL. Wonder no longer.
The FDA makes such a big deal about “safe handling of meat” and we are scared out of our minds about getting a raw meat disease, when in reality, back in the day, people butchered and prepared then cooked with rarely a foodbourne disease anywhere EVER. (Improper canning practices caused much more deaths than under-cooked meat.) How many elk hunters freak out about the raw meat? There is probably one out there somewhere. That is because naturally-raised food has a healthy immune system and thus is not harboring microtons of strange icky diseases.
In case you care, here are a few causes to check out -
You will never look at dinner the same way again if you have the guts to watch this film.
Tags: e-coli, factory farming, Food Inc., health, organic, sustainability
