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Precautionary Principle #2

By Kurt Heidinger on Dec 30, 2009 in Director's Notes

Happy Blue Moon Year! Time, perhaps, to make a resolution or two about what you eat?

The industrial meat-producing techniques used by factory-farms are accelerating evolutionary transformations in sickness-causing bacteria and viruses: think Swine Flu. The more the factory-farms use pharmaceutical drugs to prevent disease outbreaks, the more drug-resistant bacteria and viruses are being generated:

Pressure rises to stop antibiotics in agriculture

E. coli-tainted beef infects 21 people in 16 states

As the AP article reports, Europe is once again ahead of the US in preventing the poisoning of consumers and the generation of pandemics: “The European Union and other developed countries have adopted strong limits against antibiotics. Russia recently banned pork imports from two U.S. plants after detecting levels of tetracycline that the USDA said met American standards.”

And the reason Europeans are protected is because, in keeping with the precautionary principle, they value human health over pecuniary profit.

Since we in the US value “free market principles” over our health, we have supermarkets stocked with meats that can kill us. And if we do get sick because we ate a cheeseburger, it is our privilege to sue the meat-producer and “prove harm”:

Paralyzed Woman Sues Cargill in E. coli Lawsuit for $100,000,000

Perhaps a rational New Years’ resolution might be: until the FDA and USDA show they are capable of regulating industrial meat-producers, we will avoid factory-farm meat?

After all, if nobody is looking out for you and your loved-one’s health, you have to look out for yourselves:

“Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.”