Food for Thought

Pause and reflect before you take your next ill-fated trip to McDonald's, Taco Bell, Wendy's Burger King, Friday's, Applebee's, Chili's, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Kroger...

If you think the beef, pork, and poultry you are buying and consuming from these "food" outlets is the 100% real deal, you are sadly mistaken. If you are imagining pastoral scenes of cattle roaming freely on grasslands, pigs rooting in the forest, and chickens happily scratching for bugs around the farm, you should now take those images, inject them with bacteria, cut off their feet, put them in a dark and dirty place, and then take a giant crap on their heads.

Now you know what is really in your Whoppers and McNuggets.

Here are some real, and really horrifying facts:

Over half of the world's beef comes from feedlots.

Half of the world's pork and poultry come from factory farms.

A mere pound of feedlot ground beef can contain the leftover bits from hundreds of cows from several different countries.

Feedlot ground beef contains microbes that are primarily spread through fecal matter.
Hogs are raised on crap-filled feed lots too. Their crap is stored in huge uncovered lagoons, their contents seeping into groundwater. Just imagine what a flood or hurricane could do (Hurricane Floyd in 1999 caused such flooding, resulting in tons of dead fish and million spent in cleanup costs).

Factory farm chickens spend their entire lives indoors stuck in cages. They don't fly, they don't walk, they don't peck, they don't strut. To up egg production in hens, they are only given one hour of light a day. Apparently, these conditions make them more than a little crazy; they peck each other and even eat each other. To prevent this, their beaks and feet are merely cut off. Their immune systems also fail, so they're pumped full of antibiotics, just like feedlot cattle and hogs.

Ever wonder what these animals eat? Ground up in their corn laden meal is the remains of other dead animals. Yes, that's right. Cows are eating other dead cows, not to mention chickens and horses. Chickens are eating dead cows.

And here's my favorite: the beef industry buys up loads of dead cats and dogs from shelters and puts them in cattle feed. Cats. And Dogs. And roadkill too.

Not only are these practices disturbing from a moral standpoint, think about all the disease that is spread around by all the residual crap ( and I mean crap in the most literal sense here) that is ground up with all these animal parts.

Perhaps a better slogan for McDonald's could be "Da da da da da...I'm lovin' **it!"

So please, I implore you, before you swing through that drive-through or buy those frozen chicken breasts, really stop to think about what it is you are putting into your bodies. More importantly, what it is you are putting into your children's bodies.

You are what you eat.