Practical Issues >
Health - Index > Vegan
There are many
subsidies to the meat industry, but the biggest break it enjoys by far
comes inconspicuously via the federal Animal Welfare Act, which does not
apply to animals raised for food. The states only minimally take up the
legal slack, allowing cruelty and abuse of farm animals to be the norm. If
farmers were forced by law to give their animals truly humane living
quarters, such as spacious environments, clean surroundings, fresh air,
sunlight, and companionship--if it were illegal simply to administer drugs
to animals who would otherwise die from the conditions they live in--cheap
fast food could never exist. Time and again, the industry fights proposed
measures designed to ameliorate conditions for farm animals, even
slightly, because they would cost it literally pennies more per animal.
Ultimately, low prices have allowed demand to stay high and the industry
to grow. Virtually all of the over 8 billion animals slaughtered for food
in the U.S. every year are the product of a swift-moving assembly-line
system, incorporating dangerous, unprecedented, and unsustainable methods
of efficiency. Farming in the U.S. has been allowed over the last
generation to grow into a grim corporate monstrosity, the scale of which
is hard to comprehend or even to believe.
When the Clean Water
Act went into effect in 1972, agriculture as a source of pollution was
overlooked. The EPA has identified agricultural runoff as a primary
pollution source for the 60 percent of rivers and streams considered
"impaired." A 1997 Senate report said that every year, U.S. livestock
produce 10,000 pounds of solid manure for every U.S. citizen (see #22).
After reviewing 4,500
scientific studies and papers on the relationship between cancer and
lifestyle, a team of 15 scientists sponsored by two leading cancer
research institutions advised that those interested in reducing their risk
of many types of cancer consume a diet that is mostly fruits, vegetables,
cereals, and legumes. They declared that up to 40 percent of cancers are
preventable, with diet, physical activity, and body weight appearing to
have a measurable bearing on risk.
According to the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, two-thirds of the
world's major fishing grounds and stocks are now exhausted or seriously
depleted. Fishers, using modern techniques such as sonar, driftnets,
bottom-fishing super trawlers, longlines, and floating refrigerated
fish-packing factories, are ultimately not only putting themselves out of
business but rapidly destroying ocean ecosystems. Early in 1998, 1,600
scientists from around the world declared that the oceans were in peril.
They warned that swift action is imperative to prevent irreversible
environmental degradation (see #92).
The Humane Slaughter Act requires that an animal be rendered
unconscious with one swift application of a stunning device before
slaughter. In today's slaughterhouse this requirement can easily be
violated, thanks to increasingly fast line speeds that result in animals
being cut up while fully conscious. Sped-up conveyor belts produce more
profits for packing plants, but the cost is borne by the animals and by
the laborers who have to work on the petrified creatures as they fight for
their lives. And for birds (not legally recognized as animals), "humane"
preslaughter stunning is not administered (see #72).
6. Cardiovascular disease and cancer cost the
country nearly $500 billion every year. Although smoking, lack of
exercise, heredity, and environmental exposures are other causative
factors, these diseases are inexorably linked to diets high in calories
(meat), high in saturated fat (meat), and low in fiber (meat).
It might be easy on
your conscience to consume the flesh of a creature perceived to be stupid,
dirty, and brutish. It may be surprising to some, however, that pigs are
highly intelligent. Ask Professor Stanley Curtis of Pennsylvania State
University. He taught several pigs to understand complex relationships
between actions and objects in order to play video games. Curtis, along
with his colleagues, found pigs to be focused, creative, and innovative,
equal in intelligence to chimps.
figures for feed-to-flesh ratios are 7:1 for cattle, 2.6:1 for pigs, and
2:1 for chickens. Many factors, however, can influence feed conversion. By
virtually all accounts, eating food derived from animals is wasteful. And
when the industry does accomplish more efficiency, improvements usually
come at the expense of the animals, via genetic tinkering and
the 36 million pounds of antibiotics used annually for all purposes in the
U.S., 70 percent are administered to healthy animals to make them grow
faster on less feed. Though perfectly legal, the practice is promoting the
selection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. More and more, these bacteria
are causing human illnesses that physicians are finding difficult and even
impossible to treat. The practice is adding to the general worldwide
crisis of drug-resistant disease.
Every year, Americans suffer 76 million illnesses, over 300,000
hospitalizations, and over 5,000 deaths from something they ate. That
something was probably of animal origin. The government's strategy for
controlling dangerous bacteria is to inspect meat during
processing--something it isn't doing well nowadays (see #24). Except in
rare instances, neither the USDA nor the FDA has any regulatory powers on
farms where pathogens originate. With the exception of E. coli
O157:H7, dangerous bacteria are legally considered "inherent" to raw meat.
It's up to consumers to neutralize pathogens with cooking. Two of the
legal ones--campylobacter and salmonella--account for 80 percent of
illnesses and 75 percent of deaths from meat and poultry. One hamburger
can contain the meat of 100 different cows from four different countries.
One infected animal can contaminate 16 tons of beef.
11. Heart disease does not have to be a death
sentence or mean a life of cholesterol-lowering drugs and bypass surgery.
By prescribing a vegetarian diet, regular exercise, and spiritual
nourishment for his heart patients, Dean Ornish, M.D., proved that the
progression of this number-one killer can be halted and even reversed (see
Jim Mason and Peter
Singer write in their book Animal Factories, "Instead of hired
hands, the factory farmer employs pumps, fans, switches, slatted or wire
floors, and automatic feeding and watering hardware." As with any other
capital-intensive system, managers will be concerned with the "cost of
input and volume of output....The difference is that in animal factories
the product is a living creature."
Eating a plant-based diet guards against disease, first in an
active way, with complex carbohydrates, phytochemicals, antioxidants,
vitamins, minerals, and fiber, then by default: The more plant foods you
eat, the less room you have for the animal foods that clog arteries with
cholesterol, strain kidneys with excess protein, and burden the heart with
saturated fat. The American Dietetic Association acknowledges a
correlation between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk of coronary-artery
disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and certain types of cancer.
Meat packing is the most
dangerous occupation in the nation. Workers may be crushed by animals
falling off the line. Poultry workers typically make a single movement up
to 20,140 times a day and suffer repetitive-stress disorders at 16 times
the national average. Turnover at plants can be as high as 100 percent per
With so many fish
species on the brink of extinction (see #4), governments continually try
to regulate fishing gear, catch size, and catch season. But the
regulations almost never work. Policing is expensive. Illegal fishing
around the world is estimated to be between 25 and 50 percent of the
reported catch. And this does not include catches from ships that avoid
interdiction from patrol boats by registering with "flag-of-convenience"
countries--states that have not signed on to international fishing
treaties that regulate environmental and labor conventions. These boats,
which bring in a full quarter of the world's fish, are often owned by
phantom companies in the U.S., Europe, or Japan. This legal "pirating" of
the seas doubled during the 1990s.
Factory hens today are
forced to live in "battery" cages stacked in rows, four high, by the
thousands. Each is confined to about 48 to 86 square inches of space.
After months of confinement, necks are covered with blisters, wings bare,
combs bloody, feet torn. Manure fumes and rotting carcasses force poultry
workers to wear gas masks. When the hens become what the industry
matter-of-factly calls spent, producers truck the mutilated
birds--often long distances--to slaughter, or gas them, or grind them up
while still alive, to be used as feed for the next flock.
17. Campylobacter, which most commonly infects
chicken, is the leading bacterial cause of food-borne illness in the U.S.
Infections give victims cramps, bloody diarrhea, and fever, and lead to
death for up to 800 people in the U.S. each year. A Minnesota Department
of Health study tested a hundred chicken products from processing plants
in five states in 1999 and found an 88 percent contamination rate. Of
these, 20 percent were resistant to quinolones, a family of powerful
antibiotics. Scientists blame the resistance on the mid-1990s FDA approval
of two of these drugs for therapeutic use on commercial chickens (see #9).
An English study that
compared the diets of 6,115 vegetarians and 5,015 meat eaters for 12 years
found that the meatless diet yielded a 40 percent lower risk of cancer and
a 20 percent lower risk of dying from any cause. According to William
Castelli, M.D., director of the famed Framingham Heart Study, vegetarians
outlive meat eaters by 3 to 6 years.
19. Half of every butchered cow and a third of every
butchered pig becomes either by-product material or waste. In addition,
920 million animals die on U.S. factory farms before reaching slaughter.
What's an industry to do with all this death and gore? Call the renderer
straightaway! Recycling, they call it. Lips are exported to Mexico for
taco filling; horns are made into gelatin; other parts are fashioned into
everything from drugs to aphrodisiacs and cosmetics. The rest is minced,
pulverized, and boiled down for more products. Much is dried to a powder
to be mixed into animal feed. There are some regulations: Since 1997,
feeding ruminant-based slaughterhouse by-product to cattle is illegal (see
#63). In 2001, however, the FDA found hundreds of animal feed producers in
Essentially, if a
farming practice is established as "accepted," "common," "customary," or
"normal," no matter how cruel, anticruelty statutes do not apply. Such a
legal environment serves to grant meat producers carte blanche for the
development of still other cruel practices and technologies. In general,
the animal cruelty laws that do exist are rarely enforced. Fines for
violations are negligibly small, and prosecutors may have to demonstrate
that a defendant was in a particular mental state when a cruel act was
committed. Basically, the meat industry enjoys a privilege unique in the
world of law: Instead of society judging which of its actions should be
legal or illegal, it makes this determination itself. Is there any wonder
that precious little economic loss comes for the benefit of farm animals?
Our modern dairy cow lives
with an unnaturally swelled and sensitive udder, is likely never to be
allowed out of her stall, is milked up to three times a day, and is kept
pregnant nearly all of her abbreviated life. Her young are usually taken
from her almost immediately after birth. A cow living in today's modern
milk factory is, as John Robbins puts it in his book
Diet for a New
America, "bred, fed, medicated, inseminated, and manipulated to a
single purpose--maximum milk production at minimum cost."
22. Waste from livestock in the U.S. amounts
to 130 times that produced by people (see #2). Every time it rains, excess
phosphorous and nitrogen from the urine and feces seep into our waterways,
causing algal blooms, or red tides. Another result of agricultural runoff
has been the proliferation of dinoflagellates, named for their
characteristic dual flagella, the appendages they use to propel
themselves. In 1991, Pfiesteria piscicida was discovered to be a
particularly nasty variety, with the ability to ambush its prey by
stunning it with a disorienting toxin before sucking its skin off. This
nearly indestructible one-celled creature, or "cell from hell," as it soon
became known, killed a billion fish during just one flare-up off North
Carolina during the early 1990s. People who come in contact with the tiny
predator often experience memory loss as well as grotesque sores on their
skins. In 1982 there were 22 known species of harmful dinoflagellates. In
1997 there were over 60.
Castration makes bulls much easier to handle. It makes their meat
more marketable also. There are three castration methods, two of which
shut off the blood supply so that the testicles either are reabsorbed into
the animal's body or simply fall away after a couple of weeks. In a third
method, the scrotum is cut so that the testicles can be pulled out.
Anesthesia is rarely given before any of these procedures, and sometimes
operations are botched. One livestock expert advises would-be
emasculators, "Sloppy castration means lower profits."
24. By concealing a camera on his body, an
employee of a Rapid City, South Dakota, slaughterhouse was able to obtain
a videotape for CBS-TV's "48 Hours." The tape showed how a plant with over
300 employees that processes an average of 50 cows per hour with only four
USDA inspectors "keeps the line moving." It showed workers taking
dangerous shortcuts in cleaning up fluid that had broken out of an abscess
from a piece of chuck beef--a severe violation of USDA rules, which
require an extended clean-up procedure. A USDA veterinarian commented, "I
can say from my experience of nine years and in talking to other food
inspectors around the country, this probably goes on on a daily basis."
In 2000, the USDA came out
with its official dietary guidelines, as it does every five years, and as
always it told people to eat less meat. Of course it didn't use those
words; when it did, in 1979, the meat industry sounded such a hue and cry
that the U.S. agency quickly retreated. Reduce "saturated fat and
cholesterol" it says now, something that means almost nothing to most
egg-laying hen is kept crammed with four to eight other birds for life
inside a small wire cage. The birds remain perpetually tortured and
frustrated as their eggs fall through the wire mesh to roll out of reach
but not out of sight. Egg laying is such a personal matter that a hen
seeks privacy when performing the function.
27. The senseless waste of the world's growing meat-centered
diet is illustrated by a hypothetical statement put forth by the
Population Reference Bureau: "If everyone adopted a vegetarian diet and no
food were wasted, current [food] production would theoretically feed 10
billion people, more than the projected population for the year 2050."
In 1997 a bird virus jumped
to a human for the first time in history. By early 1998, the avian
influenza strain H5N1 had killed six people as well as entire flocks of
chickens in Hong Kong. Fearing that the strain might be signaling the
beginning of a pandemic of human influenza (see #35), authorities
slaughtered and buried 1.3 million poultry-market chickens in the city
over a chaotic three-day period.
As gigantic hog-confinement operations dot the nation more and
more, issues of odor impose themselves on entire communities. Fumes carry
150 volatile compounds that can become airborne on dust particles. "In the
summer, when they start pumping effluent, it wakes you up. You are
gagging," vented one neighbor of a hog factory in a March 1998
York Times article.
male calf born to a dairy cow--what does a farmer do with this by-product
of the milk industry? If he is not immediately slaughtered or
factory-raised, he is made into fancy veal. To this end, he is locked up
in a stall and chained by his neck to prevent him from turning around for
his entire life. He is fed a special diet without iron or roughage. He is
injected with antibiotics and hormones to keep him alive and to make him
grow. He is kept in darkness except for feeding time. The result? A nearly
full-grown animal with flesh as tender and milky-white as a newborn's. The
beauty of the system, from the standpoint of the veal industry, is that
meat from today's "crate veal" still fetches the premium price it always
did when such flesh came only from a baby calf. But now each animal yields
much more meat.
12, 1999, the population of the world hit 6 billion, at least in theory.
This number is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. The Green Revolution,
which fueled much of the recent growth, appears to have come to an end.
Indeed, grain production worldwide has been declining since 1983, and
biotech is not likely to reverse the downturn. Today, 70 percent of grain
in the U.S. and 40 percent of grain worldwide lavishly goes to feed
livestock. And just when the world seems to think it needs more land to
cultivate grain to feed to animals so more people can eat them, per-capita
world cropland has declined by 20 percent in the 1990s alone. The World
Health Organization says 1.2 billion people in the world don't get enough
to eat. Increasing meat production is definitely not the answer.
(PCBs) are highly toxic chemicals, once used widely in a number of
industrial applications. Though they are now banned in the U.S. and other
Western countries, their residues have become part of the food chain,
lodged in the fat of fish, beef, pork, milk, and other dairy products.
Various studies have linked prenatal exposure to PCBs--even tiny
amounts--to impaired intellectual development in children. Women who plan
to become pregnant are advised to avoid foods containing them, because the
chemicals can accumulate in their bodies for years.
33. Some farmers feed their chicken flocks
manure. No, it's not illegal, and yes, animals will grow by eating it.
According to the FDA, the practice is safe if, during composting, the
feces are allowed to reach high enough temperatures to destroy harmful
bacteria. The problem is, farmers rarely take all the necessary steps in
the composting process.
late parent advisor Dr. Benjamin Spock maintained that cows' milk "causes
internal blood loss, allergies, and indigestion and contributes to some
cases of childhood diabetes." In the last edition of his famous baby book
he recommended that children after the age of 2 essentially adhere to a
vegan diet. But he also believed that dairy milk was not good for infants.
According to renowned nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell, "Cows' milk
protein may be the single most significant chemical carcinogen to which
humans are exposed."
of animal agriculture, the world sees a global pandemic of influenza three
or four times per century. Ducks are often the original incubators for a
new subtype. In turn, pigs are periodically able to act as hosts for both
the avian viruses and human ones. Within the pigs' lungs, the transspecies
viruses swap genetic material, creating a new strain that may be passed
back to humans. Historically, the most fertile place for this to happen
has been south China, where billions of pigs, domesticated ducks, and
people all live in close proximity to one another.
36. Beef cattle are best suited to moist
climates, like those of Europe, where they evolved. But in the U.S., many
are concentrated in the West on the driest land. Native grasses long ago
were overrun by heartier foreign varieties brought here on bovine hooves.
Grazing usually takes place along fragile riparian zones--the strips of
land along rivers and streams where wild species of plants and animals
concentrate and regenerate. These delicate ecosystems, which serve as
natural purifiers of the water, are summarily trampled flat by cows and
contaminated by manure.
Adult-onset diabetes is irrefutably linked to fat in the diet.
Researchers have found that when diabetics adhere to a low-fat,
high-fiber, complex-carbohydrate (vegetarian) diet they are often able to
reduce or even eliminate their insulin dosages. Tragically, as people
around the world increasingly adopt meat-based diets, incidences of this
disease--which leads to aggressive atherosclerosis, gangrene, blindness,
and kidney failure--rise dramatically.
38. After years of selective breeding and with the help of
modern milking practices, a cow today is robbed of many times the milk her
calf would take. The strain on her body is equivalent to what a human
would experience jogging six hours per day. On the farm of yesteryear,
"Bessie" might have lived 20 years. Today, once her milk-producing
abilities diminish, after about four years, she is slaughtered and ground
to hamburger. In February 1994, the Monsanto company inflicted yet another
horror on our friend: a genetically engineered bovine hormone that boosts
milk production by as much as 40 percent. And this is an industry that
receives government price supports because it perpetually produces gluts.
U.S. subsidies to ranchers
on public lands cost American taxpayers about $500 million annually. To
eliminate livestock predators--real or anticipated--one program uses
steel-jaw leghold traps, firearms, cyanide, and poison gas to exterminate
thousands of black bears, mountain lions, bobcats, foxes, and coyotes
osteoporosis is a disease of calcium deficiency, it is not one of low
calcium intake. The main cause for the bone disorder is too much protein
in the diet. Excesses can leach calcium from the bones. The typical
meat-eating American is eating about five times as much protein as needed.
Technology can save your
life after a heart attack (see #11), but ultimately you'll have to live
with the consequences. In the case of congestive heart failure-a
$19-billion-per-year industry that involves 550,000 afflicted people every
year--your heart is so damaged that it is unable to circulate blood to the
rest of your body adequately. Often your only hope is to get a transplant,
but you'll have to wait in line for that.
42. An egg farmer, when faced with a flock of spent hens,
knows he can induce them to resume egg production via a forced
molt--accomplished with starvation and water deprivation for periods of up
to two weeks. No U.S. law prevents the regimen, and in fact most hens are
molted at least once in their lives. So cruel is the practice that even
McDonald's couldn't stomach it. In August 2000 the burger giant announced
that it would not purchase eggs from suppliers that employ the procedure.
The dictate was the first from any major U.S. food company to reflect
concern over the treatment of chickens.
43. According to the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration, poultry processors have the worst record for not allowing
their employees to use the toilet when needed on the job. In March 1998,
the agency announced that the abuses were so bad that it would have to
implement explicit directives to protect workers.
44. In any factory-farm operation, a
percentage of the animals are sick or crippled. The industry calls them
"downers." Federal law does not protect them in any way. Downers are dealt
with conveniently. Veterinary care is not wasted on them. If unable to
walk, a downer is often dragged by chain or pushed by a tractor or
forklift to slaughter. Such animals may be left to starve or freeze to
death. The downer phenomenon would be drastically reduced if stockyards
refused to receive and process them.
45. When researchers at Cornell University took on the task
of developing menus for long-term space travel, prolonged and sustainable
life support was their mission. Astronauts not only would have to prepare
their own food; they would have to grow it first. In such lifeboat
conditions, meat and dairy would have to be off the menu. Too bad not
enough people see planet Earth in a similar way! (See #101.)
46. Cattle thrive best on grass and hay. But
to give beef its signature fatty marbling and to speed growth, ranchers
fatten cattle with a high-grain diet. Without the use of antibiotics, the
rich feed would cause abscesses to form on the livers of 75 percent of the
animals. Unfortunately, such routine drug use raises the risk for the
development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (see #9).
47. If you like the idea of being welcome at
the places where your food is produced, don't count on your local poultry
grower allowing you to see his birds anytime soon. Just barely holding
onto life in their drugged-up, overbred, and chronically immunodeficient
state, chickens and turkeys in today's factory systems must be carefully
segregated from the possibility of infection being brought in from the
outside. If even slightly lax in applying rigorous measures of
"biosecurity," farmers over wide geographic regions can be forced by a
mass outbreak to destroy millions of birds at a time.
48. Animal feces and urine, in today's
quantities, need to be categorized as hazardous industrial waste because
of the bacteria, wormy parasites, and viruses they carry. Fumes can be so
potent and even explosive that a plume can kill a man on the spot. Still,
the most common method of storage for animal waste is an open-air cesspool
Eating fish from
coral reefs is like burning the Mona Lisa for kindling. Reefs are the home
to 25 percent of all known marine fish species. Yet a burgeoning demand
from restaurants for live coral-reef fish has created huge incentives for
divers to capture the fish with cyanide. First they dissolve concentrated
tablets of the poison into plastic squirt bottles. Once the prey is
stunned, full immobilization tends not to take place until after the fish
have had a chance to burrow back into the reef. Divers extract their catch
with destructive tools. Some reefs are over a million years old. Yet 20
percent have been destroyed in just the past two decades.
50. One of the most important things you can
eat isn't even a nutrient; it's fiber. Plant foods, and grains in
particular, are replete with it. Animal muscle has next to none, which is
why societies with meat-based diets have such high incidences of colon
cancer. Early fiber researcher Denis Burkitt, M.D., observed: "The only
reason you have a laxative industry is because you've taken fiber out of
In 1991 the
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine came out with the New Four
Food Groups: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes (beans and
peas). Meat and dairy are termed "optional," not considered necessary for
agriculture routinely mutilates farm animals for its own convenience.
Animals are branded or ear-notched for identification. They are debeaked
or tail-docked to minimize the destructive effects of their naturally
violent responses to intense confinement. Calves and piglets are castrated
for other economic reasons (see #23). And perhaps the most abhorrent: Boar
bashing is also common. Justification? Boars with broken noses are less
likely to fight.
chick born with the genes of an egg-laying hen is an annoying by-product
to the industry. Not biologically worthy of becoming a broiler, and with
no law to protect him, he is disposed of in the least expensive way that
hatching operations can devise. Most commonly, he is thrown into a bag
with a thousand other male chicks to suffocate.
54. Though sometimes considered a panacea for
our time, fish farming, or aquaculture, is even more disruptive to the
environment than fishing the seas. ?The construction of pens along
shorelines is a major reason for the decimation of mangrove forests, where
fish reproduce. ?Some fish will not breed in captivity, so fish farmers
must acquire stock from the wild. These species will have less chance to
replenish their numbers in nature. ?Farmed fish often escape into the
wild, corrupting the genetic purity of wild species and spreading disease
at the same time. ?Shrimp are fed on a mashed-up aquatic protein mix.
So-called biomass fishing, used to derive the feed, is done with fine
nets. (Normally, nets are wrought loosely to allow juvenile fish to escape
and reproduce--thus assuring future stocks.) Biomass fishing extracts fish
indiscriminately. The fish that are caught may be endangered or may be the
food on which endangered fish live. ?Huge amounts of nitrogenous waste
emanate from fish farms, just as with all intensive animal agriculture.
The continued adoption of
high-fat diets in newly affluent nations around the globe threatens to
wreak financial disaster on fragile developing economies. Without
treatment infrastructures in place, the inevitable need for high-tech
therapies puts a strain on national coffers.
56. A report issued by the National Academy of Sciences in
the summer of 2000 said that 60,000 children are born in the U.S. each
year with neurological problems caused by mercury exposure. Environmental
groups later concluded that the toxic threat of mercury in seafood was
greater than previously thought, especially for children and pregnant
women. Their warning advised that certain ocean fish, not just species of
freshwater fish, should be avoided.
Hoof-and-mouth disease is rarely fatal, but for its victims it's
still a death sentence. When blisters form on hooves and lips and when
growth slows because of fever and loss of appetite, it's off to the
abattoir. At press time, over 2 million animals in Great Britain had been
slaughtered and burned. Only about 1,400 were actually sick; the rest were
destroyed to halt the contagion. The pyres of burning carcasses were found
to emit huge amounts of dioxin into the air. The ultimate disaster,
however, could be if wildlife becomes infected. Wild animals can become
long-term or even permanent reservoirs for the disease.
58. If you want to find a lawless industry,
you don't have to look farther than the people who produce animals foods:
Labor, environmental, and health violations--often of the most
unimaginable varieties--are a regular feature in the trade journals if not
the general press. Occasionally, even a "humane handling" violation comes
before public scrutiny. In February 2000, USA Today
particularly shocking story about two IBP slaughterhouses in Nebraska. The
Justice Department was alleging that IBP emitted up to 1,800 pounds of
hydrogen sulfide a day from one of its plants. Some of the town's people
walked around with tanks of oxygen, but most were just gagging. "It's this
progressive loss of brain," explained one expert. Hydrogen sulfide also
corrodes the lungs and destroys a person's ability to breathe. We learned
that IBP had a 20-year history of environmental misconduct.
59. The efficient mass production of animal
bodies for gustatory purposes is keeping researchers in genetic
engineering and cloning busy. These virtually unpoliceable technologies
are threatening to usher in a brave new feedlot of animal monoculture and
cruelty. The future will bring us perfect-fat-to-lean-ratio designer pigs,
genetically engineered fast-growing fish, prevaccinated chickens, and more
super-milk-producing cows. Josef Mengele would be impressed.
60. In 1982 hamburger sickness--or
O157:H7 poisoning--was rare. In 1999, the USDA revealed that the
deadly strain may infect half of the cattle that are processed into ground
beef. Every year, as many as 73,500 Americans get sick from
contamination, and 600 die from it. Milder symptoms may range from
diarrhea and abdominal cramps to red-blood-cell destruction. More serious
bouts may cause blindness, seizures, kidney failure, or paralysis, or they
may require partial bowel removal.
From the animal-feed breadbasket of the nation's Midwest, massive
amounts of fertilizer, pesticides, and manure runoff travel down the
Mississippi River till they end up in the Gulf of Mexico. This
high-nutrient mix causes an eco-chain reaction that ultimately ends with
microscopic organisms robbing the bottom of the ocean of oxygen. Animals
there need to relocate to more oxygen-rich waters. Slow and non-mobile
species suffocate. The phenomenon is known as hypoxia. Scientists have
dubbed affected areas "dead zones." Once a year the Gulf's dead zone grows
to about the size of New Jersey.
In what is still the most comprehensive study of diet and lifestyle
ever made, the China Project found that animal protein is linked to
chronic disease. The findings from this grand epidemiological study are
especially compelling because the data collected allows meaningful
comparisons between populations with similar genetic backgrounds yet with
nonhomogeneous diets and lifestyles.
63. One by one we're hearing of people downed by the very
mysterious new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,
affliction that experts say is a human version of
encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. The 100 or more victims of
the brain-wasting disease since 1986 probably became infected after eating
beef from cows who had been fed brain and nerve tissue of scrapie-infected
sheep. Death from the disease is inevitable, often prolonged, and
thoroughly hideous. Recent evidence confirming the transspecies link gives
credence to the notion that the disease, which has a 15- to 20-year
incubation period, may someday become much more widespread. Though feeding
ruminant remains back to ruminants was made illegal in the U.S. in 1997,
the imprudent practice of recycling animal parts back to livestock has
been going on for decades. It could be only a matter of time before
America suffers its own version of the English saga, which saw over
200,000 cattle infected with mad cow disease. That will be something to
worry about if it comes. Until then, it may be a good idea to remember
that about 2,600 Americans die from cardiovascular disease every day. Beef
eating has plenty to do with it, too; there's no mystery about that.
Though considered more
healthful than beef, fish is still a high-fat, high-calorie, fiberless
food imbued with artery-clogging cholesterol. It is concentrated with
protein (see #62), so it raises the risk of osteoporosis and kidney
problems, and it often is laden with dangerous toxins absorbed from
polluted environments (see #32 and #56).
65. When researchers installed videocameras in the kitchens
of 100 homes to watch meals being prepared by unsuspecting study
participants, it was found that up to 42 percent of the pathogen-prone
meat dishes were undercooked. The meat industry claims that it doesn't
have to provide pathogen-free products, because bacteria are killed by
cooking. Perhaps this policy needs to be reconsidered--or people need to
From farm to
table, animal foods are a filthy business. Antidotes to the many pathogens
they harbor is an ever-burgeoning industry. ?On the farm, there are
ionizing systems to reduce pathogen-laden dust. ?In the slaughterhouse,
there are steam, saline and acidic solutions, irradiation, ultra-high
pressure, competitive exclusion (which adds benign bacteria to crowd out
the lethal kinds), electrolyzed water, liquid nitrogen, and ozone gas. ?In
the supermarket, detection tabs monitor food temperature. Other detection
devices include scat scanners and fiber-optic pathogen sensors that use
vibrating quartz crystals. ?In the kitchen, a silver-coated cutting board
kills food bacteria. ?Then, if you still get sick, you can take a drug to
absorb the toxicity. What'll they think up next!
67. In 1995, a USDA study found that "greater
than 99 percent of broiler carcasses had detectable
Though in most cases the E. coli
strain was not the deadly one
(O157:H7), the finding points to the unsavory fact that nearly all chicken
comes in contact with fecal matter at least some time during processing.
Today the poultry industry
is a vertically integrated oligopoly, meaning that a few giant chicken
companies control production, from chick hatching to grocery-store
delivery. Squeezed into the arrangement is the contract grower. The big
company owns the birds; the grower supplies the labor and the factory
confinement hardware. The situation often appears good to the grower when
she signs her first contract and goes into debt by several hundred
thousand dollars. It's not long before she finds that the
multi-billion-dollar corporation she has contracted with is now calling
all the shots, and that the debt she's incurred has reduced her to little
better than indentured servitude.
The passage of local laws favoring massive corporate pork
operations in North Carolina recently propelled the state into the
number-two spot in national hog production. In terms of sewage, twice the
human population of New York City might as well have moved to North
Carolina. University studies estimate that half of the 2,500 open
hog-manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now an inevitable
part of hog production there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate
into the groundwater. In the summer of 1995, at least five lagoons broke
open (see #48), letting loose tens of millions of gallons of hog urine and
feces into rivers and onto neighboring farmland. No mechanical method of
retrieval exists to clean contaminants from groundwater; only nature is
able to purify things again. And that can take generations.
70. Between 1984 and 1994 a third of U.S.
packinghouses went out of business thanks to lax enforcement of the
antitrust laws. Consequently, a more powerful industry was able to get
faster kill speeds approved even while the number of line employees was
being reduced. Meat and poultry safety has been suffering ever since. In
1996 alone, USDA regulators made 138,593 "critical" citations against the
country's 6,400 processing plants. Each infraction had the potential to
sicken consumers if the food had been distributed. Thanks to loopholes in
the law, plants were almost always allowed to continue operating.
Turkeys today have been
selectively bred to such an extent that their huge breasts make it
impossible for them to accomplish the sex act on their own. The industry
must artificially inseminate them. The job is nearly as dehumanizing for
the workers--who must work rapidly for long hours and low wages--as it is
deplorable for the tortured breeder birds, who are essentially raped once
or twice a week for 12 to 16 months until slaughter.
72. In most large commercial chicken slaughter
plants the heads of doomed birds are first plunged into an electrified
brine-water bath. The electric current is set at a voltage just high
enough to immobilize the birds and to promote bleedout without hemorrhage.
The birds not only are sentient during slaughter, but must suffer the
excruciating shock. The current serves to minimize any inconvenient
flailing that might interfere with the slaughter process.
73. Legally, the term free-range
virtually meaningless. The federal government has only the vague
requirement that the animals from which such meat is derived have access
to the outdoors. This could mean one small opening for thousands of birds.
There is nothing in the law to prevent these "free-range" animals from the
same kind of cruel treatment imposed on any other factory-farmed animals.
In March 1998, Consumer Reports found free-range poultry actually
more contaminated with salmonella and campylobacter than other poultry.
New York State's Department
of Environmental Conservation and its Department of Health put out a flyer
called "Eating Sport Fish." The advice speaks for itself: No one should
eat more than one meal of fish per week from any of the state's fresh
waters; chemical contaminants may be a problem; trim all fat; don't
consume cooking liquids. On the other hand, if you still want to enjoy the
"fun" of sport fishing but don't want to contaminate yourself, the flyer
suggests "catch and release." But don't tear out the hook, "cut its
leader." Also avoid playing fish to exhaustion, the flyer advises.
The tiny, mostly
impoverished nation of Albania recently became the setting for an
epidemiological study that compared the diets of two segments of its
population. One segment subsists on foods that are mostly of animal
origin; the other enjoys what is today termed the Mediterranean diet,
which consists mainly of fresh fruits and vegetables, cereals, and olive
oil. Death rates were notably higher in the segment that primarily
consumes animal foods. The researchers announced that the study could well
serve as a model for health-policy planners everywhere.
76. As the trade in meat becomes more global,
"carnivore" conflicts inevitably come to the fore. A recent glaring
example was the 2001 hoof-and-mouth disease disaster (see #57), when
countries quickly severed trade with the entire European Union, though the
disease was mostly confined to England. Meanwhile, the hormone-in-beef
dispute between the U.S. and the EU remains a sticking point, and meat
safety standards from nation to nation also continually need to be hashed
out. Furthermore, disagreements over fishing rights regularly bring
nations to the verge of armed conflict: In 1997 the United Nations
reported that over 100 countries were involved in fishing disputes.
The population explosion
should not be thought of exclusively in terms of people--not when the
combined weight of the world's 1.3 billion domesticated cattle exceeds
that of the entire human population. Cattle disrupt ecosystems over half
the world's land mass. In the past half century alone, more than 60
percent of the world's rangelands have been damaged by overgrazing, the
most pervasive cause of desertification.
78. Overwhelming evidence has indicted red meat because of
its fat content. Now, this all-American disaster food just got more toxic,
thanks to numerous studies that link its high iron content to heart
disease and atherosclerosis. Iron, it is believed, generates free
radicals--unstable particles that damage cells. It may also interfere with
nitric oxide in the body, a chemical that allows blood to flow through the
blood vessels more freely. New research is also poking holes in the belief
in the heart-protective effects of estrogen in pre-menopausal women. That
protection may be because of the monthly loss of iron through
are high in sodium, which causes the blood to retain water. They also
cause plaque to build up in the arteries, narrowing the flow area for
blood. Combine these phenomena and you have a recipe for a disease that
afflicts about 50 million Americans: high blood pressure. You can take
calcium channel blockers and diuretics to control it, but studies warn
that you risk losing intellectual function if you do.
80. In the early twentieth century man learned
to extract nitrogen from the air, cheaply and in large quantities. The
discovery has allowed 2 billion more people to inhabit the Earth and given
farmers the luxury of feeding cropland to livestock. Yet what gives the
world abundance has poisoned waterways from the China countryside to the
Ohio Valley. Billions of animals recycle excess nitrogen into the
environment with their manure. Even human sewage has become more
nitrogen-rich, especially with the many more meat eaters that the world
can now support. Waterways in North America and Europe have 20 times the
nitrogen they did before the Industrial Revolution. To produce a gram of
meat you need over 15 grams of nitrogen; to produce a gram of wheat flour,
only 3 grams.
are transported in all weather. When it is brutally cold, animals may
freeze right to the sides of trucks or become frozen in the urine and
feces that build up on truck floors. In hot weather, heat stress will kill
many. Losses, however, are figured into the cost of doing business.
According to swine specialist Kenneth B. Kephart, "Even with a zero death
rate that might be associated with providing more space on a truck, the
hogs that we save would not be enough to pay for the increased
transportation costs of hauling fewer hogs on a load."
82. When meat, fish, or poultry is barbecued,
dripped fat over the open flame sends up plumes of smoke that coat the
food with carcinogens. Other unhealthful chemicals are created just by
extended cooking times. Chemists are telling meat eaters today to keep
those grill times down. Even environmentalists are saying that restaurant
grilling is a major source of soot and smog. But you still need to cook
your meat thoroughly: How else are you going to kill all of the deadly
As a result of the
introduction of cattle to this hemisphere, major forest fires in the
American West occur today at the rate of one every three years, where
earlier they may have occurred only once in a century. Historically,
ranchers suppressed "cool" grass fires on the bovines' behalf, allowing
tinderboxes of dense foliage to build up below taller trees. Factor in
cheatgrass, a nonnative plant that would not have had the opportunity to
take root in America without the overgrazing of cattle. This prolific weed
provides dry, papery kindling in early summer, perfectly conducive to
massive forest fires.
to a growing specialization in the several stages of cattle production and
to producers seeking the best price at every step of the process, your
hamburger may have come from a steer who suffered the brutality of
transport between Mexico and the U.S. two or three times. The USDA and the
financial community hail this back-and-forth animal shuffling as a
development that shows how the various "cattle sectors" can "complement"
one another through "free trade." It's not likely that the steers who
suffer these junkets share the zeal of their analysts.
85. Clog up your arteries on a diet loaded on
saturated animal fat year after year and you're putting yourself at risk
for the great killers of the Western world: heart attack and stroke. Of
course, you can always opt to forestall the inevitable with repeated
angioplasty--a $16,000 medical procedure done with a balloon-tipped
catheter that flattens plaque against artery walls, thus opening up
passageways for blood flow. But a vegetarian diet--along with regular
exercise--can have the same effect.
More than half of the nation's seafood companies do not follow
federal food-safety rules. Regulators from the Food and Drug
Administration visit processors only once a year to oversee essentially
voluntary company sanitation measures. Inspections often entail nothing
more than an overview of paperwork. Moreover, half of all fish consumed in
the U.S. are imported. None but a few of the largest foreign processing
plants are ever seen by U.S. inspectors.
87. Rats grow more slowly on vegetable protein than animal
protein. When this fact was discovered 75 years ago, the meat industry
seized upon it as proof that people should buy meat products. Subsequent
studies, however, have shown that foods that promote rapid growth cause
rapid aging and are more likely to facilitate cancer.
88. As hog feces and urine collect in giant
cesspools around factory farms, the sludge is broken down naturally by
bacterial digestion. Hazardous nitrogen is eliminated, but in the process
it is converted into ammonia gas. With subsequent rainfalls, the ammonia
is returned to the Earth, polluting rivers and streams.
89. In central California, 1,600 dairies
produce the feces and urine of a city of 21 million people. Not enough
surrounding land is available to absorb it all. When the San Francisco
Chronicle reported that the surplus cow sludge was polluting local
waterways, only one state official was employed to track it all down. Once
he located a source, frequently far upstream, he often discovered that a
drainage ditch had deliberately been built. Violation notices that he
wrote up were often simply ignored. In one case that made it to court, the
judge imposed a relatively small fine of $10,000. The dairy was soon
polluting again. The deputy district attorney in the area commented that
the case was only the tip of the iceberg.
90. One meal of a burger, fries, and a milk shake, or a
large steak and baked potato with sour cream, can put even the healthiest
person at risk for a heart attack. The same meal is all the more lethal to
a person with clogged arteries, according to a 1996 study at the
University of Maryland (see #85). Researchers there measured the arterial
response to stress in ten subjects before and after a high-fat meal--one
with 50 grams of fat or more. Fat-filled arteries were able to expand
(respond) only 50 percent of the normal amount. After a no-fat vegetarian
meal, there was no reduction in artery function. A similar study reported
in 2001 found that a moderately high-fat meal dramatically reduces
elasticity in the arteries, which raises the risk for heart attack.
Drains and sewers at
slaughterhouses often become backed up with guts and coagulated blood. The
pools that develop may come up to workers' ankles. The muck may splash up
onto the animals, spreading contamination. Or whole heads of shackled
animals may even be dragged through it.
92. As fishermen find that their usual catch has been
diminished by overfishing, they are likely to turn to species lower on the
aquatic food chain to fill their nets. Knowingly or otherwise, people
today are putting fish that would normally be food for endangered fish on
their own dinner plates. If the trend continues, experts predict, marine
food webs will collapse in 30 to 40 years (see #4).
93. Hard, cold, strawless floors, filth, and
space hardly bigger than her own body--this is the life of a breeding sow
on today's factory farm. This highly intelligent creature will repeatedly
endure artificial insemination, pregnancy in solitary confinement, and
farrowing-stall imprisonment, where her body will be pinned in place to
expose her teats to her piglets. Relentless boredom, frustration, and
loneliness will drive her insane. When her body's productive capacity
wanes, she will be sent to slaughter.
94. At least one in every five U.S. cow herds is believed to
be infected with Johne's disease. The infection is increasingly being
linked to Crohn's disease in people, a condition of chronic diarrhea,
which requires victims to have parts of their intestines removed
periodically. In May 2001, the National Milk Producers Federation asked
the U.S. government for $1.3 billion to pay for mass herd destruction to
eradicate the cow scourge. Where did the group get such a skewed sense of
entitlement? Blame Congress: Every other dollar that goes to U.S. farmers
comes from taxpayers.
In order to grow
necessarily immense amounts of feed grains (see #31), farmers worldwide
are depleting underground aquifers faster than rainfall can keep up. The
great Ogallala Aquifer in the central U.S. is being depleted about 140
percent faster than it is being replenished.
A USDA microbiologist
declared in a TIME
magazine story on processed poultry that "the
final product is no different than if you stuck it in the toilet and ate
it." No wonder: A 1978 USDA rule allows poultry processors to "wash"
contaminated birds rather than discard them or cut away affected parts.
Wash, as interpreted by the poultry industry, essentially amounts to a
communal dunk in what industry insiders refer to as the "fecal soup,"
virtually ensuring salmonella cross-contamination.
97. To produce foie gras, male ducks are
force-fed 6 or 7 pounds of grain three times a day with an air-driven
feeder tube. This torturous process goes on for 28 days until the ducks'
livers, from which the p??is made, bloat to 6 to 12 times their normal
size. About 10 percent of the ducks don't make it to slaughter: They die
when their stomachs burst.
Every year, 24,000 fishermen worldwide die on the job, making
fishing the most dangerous occupation in the world, according to the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. In the U.S., a fisherman is 16
times as likely to die on the job as a policeman or fireman.
99. Every day 600 people in the U.S. die so
suddenly from cardiac arrest that they don't even make it to the hospital.
Of the victims, 90 percent have two or more arteries narrowed by
atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), a disease inexorably linked
to a meat-based diet.
heat wave in July 1995 killed about 4 million chickens east of the
Chesapeake Bay on the Delmarva Peninsula in a single weekend. (Unofficial
counts were as high as 10 million.) Such catastrophic mortalities are not
unusual. But you may not always hear about them; no farmer is compelled to
report when they happen, even though the mounds of dead birds can be an
environmental hazard. If local soil is sandy, as it is on the Delmarva,
burying carcasses (the cheapest, most common solution) will contaminate
the groundwater, no matter how carefully it is done.
101. A symposium of scientists predicted in
1995 that energy shortages, exhausted land, scarce water, and a doubling
population will impose more of a plant-based diet onto America's dinner
tables by 2050. They acknowledged that this diet, born of scarcity, would
"actually be a healthier one." Surely the sooner we all learn to enjoy it