CNN Eatocracy - How animals are raised for food

Bruce Friedrich of Farm Sanctuary divulges a list of five lesser known (and perhaps surprising for that reason) facts about the meat industry.

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July 8, 2011

1. The average American eats more than 30 land animals, and countless sea animals.
2. The egg industry is even worse than the veal industry for animal welfare.
3. Broiler chickens are given more drugs than any other farmed animal.
4. There is no national legislation to protect 98.5 percent of farmed animals.
5. Farmed animals are interesting individuals, just like the dogs and cats who we know a bit better.

Click here to read the full text accompanying each fact.

Civil Eats - "100 Days of Real Food" Pledge

Major kudos to Lisa Leake and her family (fellow North Carolinians!) who have revolutionized the way they eat and live by devoting their diets to "real food" only. Check out her website and the article Leake recently posted on Civil Eats, below, to find out how this family managed to overcome the many challenges involved in abstaining from processed food, and about the many benefits (health and otherwise!) that resulted from their experiment.

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By Lisa Leake
June 27, 2011

"A little over a year ago, our family made a bold move by pledging to follow strict 'real food' rules for 100 long days. A few of these rules included no white flour, no sugar, and nothing out of a package with more than five ingredients. And there were no exceptions whether we were traveling, out to eat, at a birthday or with friends. We started this little experiment of ours simply to draw attention to how dependent Americans have become on highly processed food..."

http://civileats.com/2011/06/27/%E2%80%9C100-days-of-real-food%E2%80%9D-pledge/

This Dish Is Veg - Two major universities select "Eating Animals" for summer reading program

February 25, 2011


"Two major research universities have selected Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals for their summer reading programs for incoming freshmen. A joint committee of faculty, staff, and students from both Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill selected the book from a list of 393 nominated books as a way of strengthening the connection between the two universities, which are less than twenty miles apart..."

Huffington Post - Honoring the Food Animals on Your Plate

February 21, 2011
By Dan Imhoff, author of CAFO

"From the cream in our Monday morning coffee to the roast chicken at Sunday night dinner, we accrue an incalculable debt to food animals. We depend on them for nourishment. We gather festively around the cooking of a turkey or ham during holidays. Yet many people do not realize that most of the animals that grace our tables are the victims of harsh suffering long before slaughter..."

Click the link below to read the rest of Imhoff's piece, and to see photos from his book, CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-imhoff/honoring-food-animals-cafos_b_826016.html#243731

Huffington Post - To Meat Or Not To Meat

By Laura Silverman
February 21, 2011

"I've spent quite a lot of time ruminating over the notion of eating meat. Like a cow chewing its cud, I have tried to carefully digest what I've gleaned from reading Fast Food Nation, Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Eating Animals and Food Matters, and watching Supersize Me and the incredibly eye-opening Food Inc. At the very least, I think I can say I'm a conscious eater. I'm not going to delve into the horrifying truth of how government and industry conspired to convince us that we all need to have a big slab of (corn-fed) meat at the center of most of our meals on a daily basis, I'm just going to say that we should all be eating a great deal less of the stuff - for our own sake and that of the planet. But a recent article in Vanity Fair, where fluffy blonde wellness 'guru' Kathy Freston (Tom Freston's wife, so she can't be far from her own show on Oprah's new network) convinces a die-hard British carnivore to turn vegan really raised my hackles because of its facile presentation of this very complex issue..."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-silverman/to-meat-or-not-to-meat_b_816285.html















See this HP article for Kathy Freston's take on the issue of eating meat.

NY Times Opinionator - How to Make Oatmeal... Wrong

By Mark Bittman
February 22, 2011

"There's a feeling of inevitability in writing about McDonald's latest offering, their 'bowl full of wholesome' - also known as oatmeal. The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the GDP of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today. From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates..."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/how-to-make-oatmeal-wrong/

TakePart - Supersize Infographic Shows the Supersize Cost of Obesity

By Megan Bedard
January 24, 2011

Source: Medicalcoding.org

LA Times Op-Ed - America's good food fight

By Nicolette Hahn Niman
January 9, 2011

"Our holiday table got quite tense. We are a mixed family — Jewish, Christian, Republican, Democrat –— but the tension wasn't from differences over religion or politics. It was about food. At one end of the table sat my husband's nephew, who runs a food bank. He's an earnest man who spends his days seeking nourishment for the hungry, and favors almost anything that increases food's availability or lowers its price. My husband and I occupied the other end. We operate a pasture-based ranch, and spend much of our time advocating for farming grounded in ecology and stewardship. The food we raise is less readily available and more expensive than most of what's found at typical grocery stores. Other family members sat between us. They enjoy eating well but, especially in these tough economic times, want their meals as cheap as possible..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-niman-food-20110109,0,5891428.story

Starbucks' New 'Trenta' Size - How Big Is It?

Source: National Post

Guardian - My beef isn't with beef: why I stopped being a vegetarian

By Jenna Woginrich
January 19, 2011

"I was a vegetarian for a long time – the bulk of my adult life, actually. When I realised how most of the steaks got to my plate (and how pumped-full of antibiotics and growth hormones they were), I put down my fork and took a vow to never be a part of that system again. My research into the brutal American factory farm system and its effects on the environment was a life-changing stumble down into the rabbit hole; I discovered a twisted world of assembly-line death camps, crippled animals, radiated carcasses and festering diseases. I don't have to get into the specifics, but clearly it wasn't a compassionate way to get my suggested 46 grams of protein a day. So I stopped eating meat, cold Tofurkey..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2011/jan/19/vegetarian-animal-cruelty-meat

Huffington Post - What's in Fast Food? What's in the Non-Chicken Half of the McNugget

By Dr. Joseph Mercola
January 13, 2011

"Do you put dimethylpolysiloxane, an anti-foaming agent made of silicone, in your chicken dishes? How about tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), a chemical preservative so deadly just five grams can kill you? These are just two of the ingredients in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget. Only 50 percent of a McNugget is actually chicken. The other half includes corn derivatives, sugars, leavening agents and completely synthetic ingredients..."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/whats-infast-food_b_805190.html

Civil Eats - The American Fast Food Syndrome

Really interesting piece, I highly recommend reading all of it!

January 13, 2011
By Kristin Wartman

"Working with people as a nutritionist, I’m often met with resistance. I try to explain making healthful food choices without using trigger words like organic, sustainable, or even local. 'When I hear the word organic I think of Birkenstock-wearing hippies in Cambridge, Massachusetts or Berkeley, California,' one of my clients told me recently. Other clients have referred to whole, organic foods as 'yuppie food.' There’s no doubt that food choice and diet is an indicator of class and culture, but what perplexes me is this notion that eating a diet of processed, sugary junk foods is what the 'real' Americans eat..."

http://civileats.com/2011/01/13/the-american-fast-food-syndrome/

How to Find Real Food at the Supermarket

Originally posted on Summer Tomato.

The Atlantic - The Best Kind of Chicken Farming

By Helene York
January 6, 2011

"Fifteen-day-old chicks are cute. They are soft, spritely, and their high-pitched chatter is sweet. In most chicken houses, they have enough room to move around in the first month of life, and that's the image corporate chicken farmers want you to see. But the first month isn't the issue, as my recent trips to commercial chicken operations have confirmed. More than 9 billion chicks grow to maturity and are eaten as chicken every year in the U.S. Most are housed in 'group houses'—40 feet by 400 feet—where they are free to roam indoors as long as they aren't too big to do so. And that happens pretty quickly. An average 'broiler' grows to market live weight of seven to eight pounds in 51 to 58 days..."

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2011/01/the-best-kind-of-chicken-farming/68520/

Grist - Vote on the Scariest Food of 2010

December 17, 2010

"From slimeburgers to oily oysters and salmonella-tainted eggs, 2010 kept dishing up yucky food news like a lunch lady gone postal. In case you’ve forgotten -- put down that Four Loko, now! -- we’ve rounded up the year’s 10 biggest scandals and travesties, including the very latest exposé from the Humane Society’s undercover investigators..."

Which of these were you most afraid to put in your mouth this year? Click here to vote for the scariest -- or click through the slideshow for explanations of our fears.

The Atlantic - Why Free-Range Meat Isn't Much Better Than Factory-Farmed

By James McWilliams
December 7, 2010

"Like many people who pay attention to how food is produced, I've come to abhor factory farming and the environmental and welfare problems that accompany it. My personal choice to eliminate factory-farmed animal products from my diet largely reflects this abhorrence. Where I break from most conscientious consumers is in my decision to avoid meat from free-range animals and other alternative sources. This position hasn't won any popularity contests for me. My occasional critiques of free-range animal farming have led to, among other things, threats by a butcher to separate me from a particularly valued appendage as well as frequent charges that I'm a hired gun for agribusiness. Both concepts are equally difficult to contemplate...."

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/12/why-free-range-meat-isnt-much-better-than-factory-farmed/67569/

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - The Food, the Bad and the Ugly

See Jon Stewart's take on the media coverage of the Food Safety Bill that recently passed in the Senate. His video montage of food recalls we've had in the last few years is a good reminder of why this bill is so needed and overdue.

I was unable to embed the video clip, but you can view it by clicking here.

Mother Jones - Big Meat vs. Michael Pollan

By Wes Enzinna
November/December 2010 Issue

"Carrin Flores is a cattle rancher's fantasy come true: An attractive 26-year-old with stylish eyeglasses and glossy lipstick, she's unabashed about her love of cows. 'They are so cute. Their cute little tongues. Oh, and their eyelashes,' she says. 'But I also friggin' love to eat them.' She cooks beef four nights a week and can list dozens of ways she likes it: T-bone, tri-tip, boneless rump roast...Flores, a graduate student in veterinary medicine at Washington State University-Pullman, plans to work in the beef industry when she finishes. But she's already a graduate of the Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA), an industry-funded program that trains college students to fight back against critics of big agribusiness, like Michael Pollan...."

http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/11/michael-pollan-backlash-beef-advocacy

The Atlantic - Consider the Turkey

Some Thanksgiving reading material!

By James McWilliams
November 24, 2010

"'Humans,' Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson has written, 'seem to take a perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost entirely a question of human ignorance.' This dictum seems especially apt with Thanksgiving arriving tomorrow. No animal, after all, has been more actively dismissed for its purported stupidity than the turkey..."

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/11/consider-the-turkey/66967/

TakePart - This Thanksgiving, Adopt a Turkey

By Megan Bedard
November 18, 2010

"This turkey day, maybe you're not so keen on the slaughter of turkeys. That's a decision we all make individually, but if skipping the gobbler is your thing, there's something else festive you can do: adopt a turkey! With Farm Sanctuary's Adopt-A-Turkey Project, you can sponsor a gobbler for $30. When you do, you'll receive a photo and information about your newly adopted bird, which resides at a shelter in New York or California..."

http://www.takepart.com/news/2010/11/17/this-thanksgiving-adopt-a-turkey