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As the year comes to an end it's become a tradition of mine to write a note of gratitude to Big Ag for the many "gifts" they've given us all throughout the year. Gifts that we didn't really want, need or -- in some cases -- didn't even know about. Here's my top 10 for 2013. It's just a shame they didn't include a gift receipt...
Yet another industry assurance about the safety of the controversial practices used in intensive livestock production has been exposed as a falsehood. Hot on the heels of recent public health and environmental scares associated with industrial livestock farming—including the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, ractopamine residues in pork, and arsenic residues in poultry meat—new scientific research on an anabolic steroid which is routinely used in industrial beef production in the U.S. is causing alarm.
In this era of uninformed, “silver bullet” solutions to the plague that is industrial farming, it’s great to see that Dan Imhoff—the author of the seminal book CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories—is making a stand against the reckless abuse of antibiotics in industrial livestock production. And he’s making real sense, too. In a bold move, Imhoff has launched a new public petition which targets the largest—and yet possibly the most responsive—player when it comes to U.S. meat production and consumption: Walmart, our nation’s largest retailer.
You can download AWA’s free Food Labels Exposed app from Apple’s App Store or from Google Play.
Talk about paranoia: I’ve just read that the catering company which runs the various cafeterias on Capitol Hill is stopping its promotion of “Meatless Mondays.” The reason? An intensive meat industry front group, the entertainingly-named Farm Animal Welfare Coalition, has pressurized the catering company to cease supporting Meatless Monday on the basis that the promotion is actually an “acknowledged tool of animal rights and environmental organizations.”
Unapproved, unwanted, and now out of control: the news that an unlicensed genetically modified (GM) wheat has been found growing on a field in Oregon – almost 10 years after it was supposed to have completely destroyed – sent shivers down my spine. I've been blogging about the known and unknown risks of GM crops for a while. But we are now witnessing a real ‘escape-from-the-laboratory’ nightmare and, in a worst-case scenario, the impacts on U.S. agriculture could be truly devastating.
