This article is part of a series by Sarah Rodeo ’13 called “Musings on the Meat Industry.” To view more posts, browse here.
Usually, we enjoy our daily food indulgences without ever considering how they arrived on our plate. Details regarding their manufacturing, production, and potential effects on our health tend to slip right by us. Did you ever imagine that in eating last night’s salmon fillet, you not only digested a fish and perhaps some seasoning, but also hundreds of toxic residues and artificial animal feed?
You heard me. Over the past 50 years, there has been a huge increase in the number of drugs fed to the 10 billion animals raised annually for slaughter in our country alone. Here’s a taste of what animal feed truly consists of:
Every year, about 22 million American cattle are injected with growth hormones in order to make them grow physically larger, begin milk production at earlier ages, and produce up to 100 gallons of milk a day (compare this against the usual 10 gallons produced daily). Some of the health effects that these hormones have on the cattle are addiction, hoof diseases, internal bleeding, open sores, deformation, udder infections, and severe malnourishment.
In addition, 29 million pounds of antibiotics are used on cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys every year. Steroids are also fed to 45% of all American pigs, despite the side effects of hyperactivity, muscle breakdown, vomiting, seizures, heart problems and death. Millions of pounds of herbicides, insecticides, pesticides and fungicides are also fed to our livestock to ward off insects and bacteria. But wait, there’s more! The F.D.A. lists only 2,000 drugs approved for animal feed when there are in reality more than 35,000 being used.
But how does this affect us? Growth hormones disrupt our natural human hormone balance, causing reproductive problems, various cancers, early-onset puberty, and a host of other developmental issues. The exponential growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is in part due to the fact that humans are ingesting animals that were fed antibiotics once upon a cruel time, far, far away from human consciousness. To top it all off, the toxic substances that we are feeding to the to-be-consumed animals have been linked to the skyrocketing epidemics of obesity, asthma, diabetes, ADD, and ADHD.
The most repulsive substance fed to livestock is perhaps “rendered waste removal,” which consists of–prepare yourself–ground-up, dead, rotting animals, including their blood, insides and waste. “Rendered waste removal” is responsible for diseases such as Mad Cow Disease, Tuberculosis, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and Alzheimer’s Disease.
It is vital that we understand what exactly we are putting into our bodies when we eat that seemingly-innocuous salmon slice. Every time that we eat an animal product, we ingest growth hormones, steroids, antibiotics, animal waste, drugs, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. We must be aware of the potentially serious health effects of these toxic chemicals; the realization that we are often ingesting far more than just a serving of meat, poultry, fish or dairy can continue to guide us as we question our stance on the industry of animal food products.