6 Horrifying Facts about Chickens:
A Wake-Up Call for the Meat Industry
By Yelena Sukhoterina
A Wake-Up Call for the Meat Industry
By Yelena Sukhoterina
Today about 9 billion chickens are raised for food in the U.S. annually, a staggering 1400% increase from 50 years ago. Back then, the chicken were raised by more than 1.6 million independent farmers, while today less than 30,000 farms — many of them concentrated factory farms — raise billions of chickens.
As you may have guessed, this increase has brought a ton of unintended consequences. Most people don’t realize it, but a “simple” chicken dinner from the grocery store could have any of these 6 horrifying backstories attached to it:
200 Million Baby Chicks Are Killed As Soon As Hatched
Annually it has been estimated that 200 million baby chicks are killed, many ground up alive, as soon as they hatch. The only reason? They’re male and therefore useless for egg production.
In the past they were killed by asphyxiation with carbon dioxide, but the American Veterinary Medical Association recently added grinding to the list of acceptable ways to kill them.
The chicks are not anesthetized before going through a grinder alive, according to this post from Discovery.
A non-profit Mercy for Animals recorded this undercover video (also below) of Hy-Line egg factory in Iowa, where factory workers threw live male chickens into the grinder.
“Given that the nervous system of a chicken originates during the 21st hour of incubation, and that a chick has a fully developed nervous system at the time of hatching, it is reasonable to conclude, as a fact of neurophysiology, that the chicks are suffering extreme pain as they are being cut up by macerator blades,” said Dr. Karen Davis, the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns.
Human Medicine Antibiotic Use in Chickens
Just like with pigs and cattle, factory farmers often use antibiotics for growing more animals as cheaply as possible, according to the NPR. Many of these antibiotics are used in human medicine, and using them on animals have caused millions of people to get sick with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. According to the CDC, a lot of antibiotic use in animals is unnecessary.
Recently a few companies have announced that they will stop using antibiotics that are used in human medicine, but will keep using other antibiotics such as ionophores.
Chickens are 4 X Bigger Today Compared to 1940s
Researchers at the University of Alberta found that chickens are four times bigger today than they used to be in the late 1940s. While they are claiming that the difference is due to selective breeding only (which may be true for the specific groups of chickens they have studied), there might be more to this picture.
It is illegal to use growth-hormones on chickens, however, use of other drugs that can promote growth is not illegal. In 2011 FDA announced that Pfizer will no longer sell 3-Nitro drug (Roxarsone) that was added to chicken feed and helped the chickens to gain weight. The halt of sale was due to inorganic arsenic being found in the chickens.
Roxarsone was banned alongside carbarsone and arsanilic acid. The fourth drug that causes weight gain, Nitarsone, is still on the market, but there is a pending withdrawal of its approval of use by the FDA. All four drugs cause chickens to gain weight, but all four became controversial over a different reason – arsenic levels in chickens who ate these drugs in their food. Which brings us to our next topic: arsenic.
Levels of Inorganic Arsenic in ChickenJohn Hopkins University published a study in 2013 about levels of inorganic arsenic found in chicken, which raised health concerns. According to the Food Safety News, FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine determined that the safe level of inorganic arsenic is 1 part per billion (ppb). Samples of chicken meat from the study found 1.8 ppb of arsenic in chicken raised with antibiotics. All types chicken still contains arsenic even if the level is “low” by the FDA standards. Antibiotic-free chicken measured at 0.77 ppb, and organic chicken measured at 0.6 ppb of inorganic arsenic.
97% of Chicken Breasts Were Contaminated With Bacteria
According to a Consumer Reports analysis, 97% of chicken breasts of 316 studied samples contained bacteria, including salmonella. More than half of the samples contained fecal contaminants. Many contained bacteria that was antibiotic-resistant. Bacteria found included campylobacter, staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, enterococcus, and klebsiella pneumoniae.
Levels of contamination were about the same for conventional, antibiotic-free and organic brands, removing the argument that usage of antibiotics and other drugs in meat protects the consumers. Most people get ill from the bacteria by improperly handling raw meat.
Consumers Reports suggest the following tips: put chicken in plastic bag while shopping in the store, buy chicken last so it does not get warm while you are shopping, wash chicken before cooking it, use a cutting board designated for raw meat, and wash your hands after handling the meat.
Chicken Waste Is Contaminating Our Water
Figuring out what to with the waste of billions of chickens has become a nightmarish problem that harms both our health and the environment, according to recent research.
“[M]anagement programs for chicken waste have not kept pace with” how fast the industry is growing, said Karen Steuer of Pew Environment Group.
Pew’s report reviews in detail the issues that come with chicken waste. Huge amounts of chicken manure is disposed on open fields and croplands. Rain washes it into waterways and pollutes our drinking water supply. Besides bacteria, the waste contains high-level antibiotics, which adds to the antibiotic-resistance in humans who later drink the water.
The report recommends stricter measures as a solution: balancing the amount of waste generated with how many crops are available for waste disposal; having the broiler industry sharing responsibility for proper waste management; better programs and required permits for transporting manure; and better cleanup programs.
This article appeared first at Alt Health Works where you can find more provocative and investigative reporting on health topics that matter to you. The alternative health movement will be mainstream soon! Like on Facebook, follow on Twitter
As you may have guessed, this increase has brought a ton of unintended consequences. Most people don’t realize it, but a “simple” chicken dinner from the grocery store could have any of these 6 horrifying backstories attached to it:
200 Million Baby Chicks Are Killed As Soon As Hatched
Annually it has been estimated that 200 million baby chicks are killed, many ground up alive, as soon as they hatch. The only reason? They’re male and therefore useless for egg production.
In the past they were killed by asphyxiation with carbon dioxide, but the American Veterinary Medical Association recently added grinding to the list of acceptable ways to kill them.
The chicks are not anesthetized before going through a grinder alive, according to this post from Discovery.
A non-profit Mercy for Animals recorded this undercover video (also below) of Hy-Line egg factory in Iowa, where factory workers threw live male chickens into the grinder.
“Given that the nervous system of a chicken originates during the 21st hour of incubation, and that a chick has a fully developed nervous system at the time of hatching, it is reasonable to conclude, as a fact of neurophysiology, that the chicks are suffering extreme pain as they are being cut up by macerator blades,” said Dr. Karen Davis, the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns.
Human Medicine Antibiotic Use in Chickens
Just like with pigs and cattle, factory farmers often use antibiotics for growing more animals as cheaply as possible, according to the NPR. Many of these antibiotics are used in human medicine, and using them on animals have caused millions of people to get sick with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. According to the CDC, a lot of antibiotic use in animals is unnecessary.
Recently a few companies have announced that they will stop using antibiotics that are used in human medicine, but will keep using other antibiotics such as ionophores.
Chickens are 4 X Bigger Today Compared to 1940s
Researchers at the University of Alberta found that chickens are four times bigger today than they used to be in the late 1940s. While they are claiming that the difference is due to selective breeding only (which may be true for the specific groups of chickens they have studied), there might be more to this picture.
It is illegal to use growth-hormones on chickens, however, use of other drugs that can promote growth is not illegal. In 2011 FDA announced that Pfizer will no longer sell 3-Nitro drug (Roxarsone) that was added to chicken feed and helped the chickens to gain weight. The halt of sale was due to inorganic arsenic being found in the chickens.
Roxarsone was banned alongside carbarsone and arsanilic acid. The fourth drug that causes weight gain, Nitarsone, is still on the market, but there is a pending withdrawal of its approval of use by the FDA. All four drugs cause chickens to gain weight, but all four became controversial over a different reason – arsenic levels in chickens who ate these drugs in their food. Which brings us to our next topic: arsenic.
Levels of Inorganic Arsenic in ChickenJohn Hopkins University published a study in 2013 about levels of inorganic arsenic found in chicken, which raised health concerns. According to the Food Safety News, FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine determined that the safe level of inorganic arsenic is 1 part per billion (ppb). Samples of chicken meat from the study found 1.8 ppb of arsenic in chicken raised with antibiotics. All types chicken still contains arsenic even if the level is “low” by the FDA standards. Antibiotic-free chicken measured at 0.77 ppb, and organic chicken measured at 0.6 ppb of inorganic arsenic.
97% of Chicken Breasts Were Contaminated With Bacteria
According to a Consumer Reports analysis, 97% of chicken breasts of 316 studied samples contained bacteria, including salmonella. More than half of the samples contained fecal contaminants. Many contained bacteria that was antibiotic-resistant. Bacteria found included campylobacter, staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, enterococcus, and klebsiella pneumoniae.
Levels of contamination were about the same for conventional, antibiotic-free and organic brands, removing the argument that usage of antibiotics and other drugs in meat protects the consumers. Most people get ill from the bacteria by improperly handling raw meat.
Consumers Reports suggest the following tips: put chicken in plastic bag while shopping in the store, buy chicken last so it does not get warm while you are shopping, wash chicken before cooking it, use a cutting board designated for raw meat, and wash your hands after handling the meat.
Chicken Waste Is Contaminating Our Water
Figuring out what to with the waste of billions of chickens has become a nightmarish problem that harms both our health and the environment, according to recent research.
“[M]anagement programs for chicken waste have not kept pace with” how fast the industry is growing, said Karen Steuer of Pew Environment Group.
Pew’s report reviews in detail the issues that come with chicken waste. Huge amounts of chicken manure is disposed on open fields and croplands. Rain washes it into waterways and pollutes our drinking water supply. Besides bacteria, the waste contains high-level antibiotics, which adds to the antibiotic-resistance in humans who later drink the water.
The report recommends stricter measures as a solution: balancing the amount of waste generated with how many crops are available for waste disposal; having the broiler industry sharing responsibility for proper waste management; better programs and required permits for transporting manure; and better cleanup programs.
This article appeared first at Alt Health Works where you can find more provocative and investigative reporting on health topics that matter to you. The alternative health movement will be mainstream soon! Like on Facebook, follow on Twitter
One of the Dirtiest Foods, and You Probably Eat It Several Times a Week
Factory Farmed Chicken May Be Cheap,
But the Ultimate Price You Pay is High
By Dr. Mercola
Factory Farmed Chicken May Be Cheap,
But the Ultimate Price You Pay is High
By Dr. Mercola
Story at-a-glance
Demand for food at cheaper prices has dramatically altered the entire food chain. Today, food production revolves around efficiency—the ability to produce more for less.
This mindset has significant ramifications for both animal and human health, and the environment.
Today, nearly 65 billion animals worldwide, including cows, chickens, and pigs, are crammed into confined animal feeding operations known as CAFOs. These animals are imprisoned and tortured in crowded, unhealthy, unsanitary, and cruel conditions.
As noted by the Cornucopia Institute,1 the price of chicken has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, becoming the cheapest meat available in the US. As a result, consumption has doubled since 1970.
Seeing how chicken is supposed to be a healthy source of high-quality nutrition, the fact that it has become so affordable might seem to be a great benefit. But there's a major flaw in this equation. As it turns out, it's virtually impossible to mass-produce clean, safe, optimally nutritious foods at rock bottom prices.
CAFOs are Hotbeds for Disease
A typical poultry CAFO measuring 490 feet by 45 feet can hold at least 30,000 chickens or more. Animal Welfare Guidelines permit a stocking density that gives each full-grown chicken an amount of space equivalent to an 8.5-inch by 11-inch piece of paper.
An example of a poultry CAFO can be seen in the video above. It's a short clip from the film Food Inc. Sickness is the norm for animals raised in these CAFOs—the large-scale factory farms on which 99 percent of American chickens come from.
These animals are also typically fed genetically engineered (GE) corn and soybeans, which is a far cry from their natural diet of seeds, green plants, insects, and worms.
This unnatural diet further exacerbates disease promulgation. Processing byproducts such as chicken feathers and other animal parts can also be added to the feed.
To prevent the inevitable spread of disease from stress, overcrowding, lack of vitamin D (as CAFO chickens may never see the light of day), and an unnatural diet, the animals are routinely fed antibiotics (hormones, on the other hand, are not permitted in American-raised chickens).
Those antibiotics pose a direct threat to human health, and contaminate the environment when they run off into lakes, rivers, aquifers, and drinking water. According to a landmark "Antibiotic Resistance Threat Report" published by the CDC,2 two million Americans become infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year, and at least 23,000 of them die as a direct result of those infections.
Research suggests you have a 50/50 chance of buying meat tainted with drug-resistant bacteria when you buy it from your local grocery store. In some cases, the risk may be even greater.
Last year, using data collected by the federal agency called NARMS (National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System), the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found antibiotic-resistant bacteria in:
Despite the well-documented health and environmental hazards, most consumers are still unaware that well over 90 percent of all chicken meat and eggs sold in the US come from CAFOs.
Most people are also unaware that these cheap CAFO foods are very different, from a nutritional standpoint, from animals raised on pasture, and that while they may be inexpensive at the checkout line, there are significant hidden costs associated with this kind of food production.
The Hidden Cost of Cheap Chicken
As discussed in the featured article,3 the hidden costs of cheap factory farmed chicken can be divided into three categories:
CAFOs represent a corporate-controlled system characterized by large-scale, centralized, low profit-margin production, processing, and distribution systems. It's important to realize that the factory farm system is NOT a system that ensures food safety and protects human health. On the contrary, it makes the food system far more vulnerable to pathogenic contaminations that have the capacity to kill—both the livestock, and the people who eat them.
For example, over the past year, nearly 10 percent of the entire swine population in the US has been wiped out by a highly lethal virus called Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv), which has been—at least in part—traced back to pig's blood used in piglet feed. In this case, the virus does not affect humans. But it's a valuable demonstration of how fragile the system becomes when you veer too far from the natural order of things.
Besides everything mentioned already, the factory feeding model also involves the mixing of animal parts (in this case, blood) from a large number of animals, which is then fed to large numbers of animals—the meat from which in turn are again mixed together in large processing plants, before it's ultimately sold in grocery stores across the nation. All this mixing and cross-contamination allows for pathogens to contaminate huge amounts of food products, and is the reason why a single food contamination can spread so far and wide, affecting people across multiple states.
Processing plant (i.e. plants where meat is cut or milk is pasteurized, for example) are primary culprits when it comes to the spread of pathogens. Due to regulations, traditional farmer-to-consumer practices have been outlawed. Now processors run the show and cut out the farmer's share, which has decimated small farmers and created this industrialized, disease-promoting mess.
Small-Scale Farming Makes for Far Safer Food
The weaknesses of the factory farm model are usually overlooked during food safety discussions. Instead, small-scale raw food producers—and raw dairy producers in particular—are targeted and vilified as sources of dangerous pathogens that threaten human health. Such attacks are completely out of order and do nothing to improve food safety on the whole, as the PRIMARY sources of pathogenic contamination actually originate in CAFOs, large-scale butchering and processing plants, and processed food manufacturing plants, where multiple ingredients are mixed together.
For example, late last year, Chobani Greek yoghurt was recalled following reports of gastrointestinal illness.9 The yogurt, which is pasteurized and not raw, was found to be contaminated with a fungus called Murcor circinelloides. In 2011, Cargill recalled a whopping 36 million pounds of ground turkey10 after an antibiotic-resistant strain of Salmonella in the meat was linked to 107 illnesses and one death.
Remarkably, as explained in a previous Food Safety News article,11 a large-scale meat producer can have 50 percent of its samples test positive for Salmonella, and still get the green light of approval from the USDA! When it hits 51 percent contamination, the meat is tagged "unsafe." But even at that point, USDA testing simply continues until illness is reported. This is factory farmed food safety for you...
Meanwhile, a small organic farmer will notice a health problem with an animal in his herd long before it gets sent for slaughter, and he can then treat that individual animal as necessary. And, should a pathogenic outbreak occur on a farm, the risk of public exposure is limited by the fact that the animal products are sold locally; they're not shipped long distances and mixed in with others. This is why a food borne outbreak on an organic farm may affect one or two people, whereas an outbreak originating from a processing plant can affect hundreds, or even thousands. One pasteurized milk contamination sickened 200,000 people!12
Organic, Pastured Chicken Is Your Best and Safest Alternative
If food safety, optimal nutrition and disease prevention really matters, the way forward is to shift into a socially responsible, small-scale system where independent producers and processors focus on providing food for their local and regional markets. This alternative produces high-quality food, and supports farmers who produce healthy, meat, eggs, and dairy products using humane methods. And it's far easier on the environment.
True free-range chickens and eggs come from hens that roam freely outdoors on a pasture, where they can forage for their natural diet, which includes seeds, green plants, insects, and worms. Keep in mind that when it comes to labels such as "free-range" and "natural," there are loopholes that allow the commercial egg industry to call eggs from their industrial egg laying facilities "free-range," so don't be fooled.
By far, the vast majority of food at your local supermarket comes from these polluting, inhumane farm conglomerations. If you want to stop supporting them, you first need to find a new place to shop. Your best source for pastured chicken (and fresh eggs) is a local farmer that allows his hens to forage freely outdoors. If you live in an urban area, visiting a local farmer's market is typically the quickest route to finding high-quality chicken and eggs. Again, free-range pastured chickens should be allowed outside, and to eat insects. To see how this looks in the real world, please watch my video below with farmer Joel Salatin.
Take Control of Your Health by Joining the Real Food Movement
If you really want to be sure your food is healthy and safe, it would be best to avoid grocery stores as much as possible, as conventionally-raised livestock, including chickens, are far from ideal. The more we all make it a point to only buy food from a source we know and trust, the faster factory farming will become a shameful practice of the past. Farmers and lovers of real food show us that change is possible. Here are a few suggestions for how you can take affirmative action to protect your and your family's health:
- Demand for food at cheaper prices has dramatically altered the entire food chain
- As a result, food production revolves around efficiency—the ability to produce more for less
- Tens of billions of animals worldwide are crammed into confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where they are tortured in crowded, unhealthy, unsanitary, and cruel conditions
- The failures of the factory farm model reveal that it’s virtually impossible to mass-produce clean, safe, optimally nutritious foods at rock bottom prices
- To prevent the inevitable spread of disease from stress, overcrowding, and an unnatural diet, the animals are routinely fed antibiotics
- Antibiotics used in livestock pose a direct threat to human health, and contaminate the environment
Demand for food at cheaper prices has dramatically altered the entire food chain. Today, food production revolves around efficiency—the ability to produce more for less.
This mindset has significant ramifications for both animal and human health, and the environment.
Today, nearly 65 billion animals worldwide, including cows, chickens, and pigs, are crammed into confined animal feeding operations known as CAFOs. These animals are imprisoned and tortured in crowded, unhealthy, unsanitary, and cruel conditions.
As noted by the Cornucopia Institute,1 the price of chicken has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, becoming the cheapest meat available in the US. As a result, consumption has doubled since 1970.
Seeing how chicken is supposed to be a healthy source of high-quality nutrition, the fact that it has become so affordable might seem to be a great benefit. But there's a major flaw in this equation. As it turns out, it's virtually impossible to mass-produce clean, safe, optimally nutritious foods at rock bottom prices.
CAFOs are Hotbeds for Disease
A typical poultry CAFO measuring 490 feet by 45 feet can hold at least 30,000 chickens or more. Animal Welfare Guidelines permit a stocking density that gives each full-grown chicken an amount of space equivalent to an 8.5-inch by 11-inch piece of paper.
An example of a poultry CAFO can be seen in the video above. It's a short clip from the film Food Inc. Sickness is the norm for animals raised in these CAFOs—the large-scale factory farms on which 99 percent of American chickens come from.
These animals are also typically fed genetically engineered (GE) corn and soybeans, which is a far cry from their natural diet of seeds, green plants, insects, and worms.
This unnatural diet further exacerbates disease promulgation. Processing byproducts such as chicken feathers and other animal parts can also be added to the feed.
To prevent the inevitable spread of disease from stress, overcrowding, lack of vitamin D (as CAFO chickens may never see the light of day), and an unnatural diet, the animals are routinely fed antibiotics (hormones, on the other hand, are not permitted in American-raised chickens).
Those antibiotics pose a direct threat to human health, and contaminate the environment when they run off into lakes, rivers, aquifers, and drinking water. According to a landmark "Antibiotic Resistance Threat Report" published by the CDC,2 two million Americans become infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year, and at least 23,000 of them die as a direct result of those infections.
Research suggests you have a 50/50 chance of buying meat tainted with drug-resistant bacteria when you buy it from your local grocery store. In some cases, the risk may be even greater.
Last year, using data collected by the federal agency called NARMS (National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System), the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found antibiotic-resistant bacteria in:
- 81 percent of ground turkey
- 69 percent of pork chops
- 55 percent of ground beef
- 39 percent of raw chicken parts
Despite the well-documented health and environmental hazards, most consumers are still unaware that well over 90 percent of all chicken meat and eggs sold in the US come from CAFOs.
Most people are also unaware that these cheap CAFO foods are very different, from a nutritional standpoint, from animals raised on pasture, and that while they may be inexpensive at the checkout line, there are significant hidden costs associated with this kind of food production.
The Hidden Cost of Cheap Chicken
As discussed in the featured article,3 the hidden costs of cheap factory farmed chicken can be divided into three categories:
- Ethical costs: Research has shown that chickens are not only quite smart, they experience suffering just as animals higher up in the food chain—including you.
- "Chickens have nervous systems similar to ours, and when we do things to them that are likely to hurt a sensitive creature, they show behavioral and physiological responses that are like ours.
When stressed or bored, chickens show what scientists call 'stereotypical behavior,' or repeated futile movements, like caged animals who pace back and forth," Cornucopia writes. - Environmental costs: CAFOs are notorious for producing massive amounts of offensive waste that disturbs and pollutes the local ecosystem.
- The featured article references a number of areas in which residents are battling nauseating odors and infestations of flies, rats, mice, intestinal parasites, and other disturbing health effects. As stated by Cornucopia:
"Tyson produces chicken cheaply because it passes many costs on to others. Some of the cost is paid by people who can't enjoy being outside in their yard because of the flies and have to keep their windows shut because of the stench. Some is paid by kids who can't swim in the local streams. Some is paid by those who have to buy bottled water because their drinking water is polluted. Some is paid by people who want to be able to enjoy a natural environment with all its beauty and rich biological diversity.
These costs are, in the terms used by economists, 'externalities' because the people who pay them are external to the transaction between the producer and the purchaser... In theory, to eliminate this market failure, Tyson should fully compensate everyone adversely affected by its pollution. Then its chicken would no longer be so cheap." - Human health costs: Besides the health ramifications suffered by those who happen to live near a CAFO and are exposed to the environmental contamination caused by these factory farms, cheap CAFO chicken and eggs are also taking a hidden toll on your health when you eat them.
- In part because their nutrition is inherently inferior; in part because they're contaminated with antibiotics; and in part because they raise your risk of contracting a foodborne illness. Most recently, Foster Farms and Kirkland chicken brands issued recalls4 for Salmonella contamination that has affected hundreds of consumers across America since March 2013.
Recalled items have "use or freeze by" dates ranging from March 17, 2014 to March 31, 2014. The identifying plant marks on the recalled products are P-6137, P-6137A, or P-7632. You can find this plant mark inside the USDA mark of inspection. One of Foster Farms' processing plants was also shut down by government mandate5 after cockroaches were discovered during a Food Safety inspection. And last fall, yet another of its plants were threatened with closure due to the presence of Salmonella contamination.6 - Your risk of foodborne illness is magnified if you fail to follow safe handling instructions. For example, washing your chickenincreases your risk of food poisoning, as it allows dangerous campylobacter bacteria to spread.7, 8
- As reported by Fox News:
- "When washed, campylobacter from raw chicken can be transferred into water droplets, which may splash onto neighboring surfaces, hands, clothing, and cooking utensils. If the campylobacter bacteria are ingested directly or via unwashed cutting boards and utensils, they can cause campylobacteriosis, characterized by symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, cramping, and fever."
- Another important safety tip is to designate separate cutting boards for meat and vegetables. Do not cut vegetables on the same cutting board you just used to prepare your chicken (or other meats). Besides avoiding cross contamination in your kitchen, also make sure you cook the chicken thoroughly, to kill off any potentially harmful bacteria.
- The Case Against Factory Farmed Foods
CAFOs represent a corporate-controlled system characterized by large-scale, centralized, low profit-margin production, processing, and distribution systems. It's important to realize that the factory farm system is NOT a system that ensures food safety and protects human health. On the contrary, it makes the food system far more vulnerable to pathogenic contaminations that have the capacity to kill—both the livestock, and the people who eat them.
For example, over the past year, nearly 10 percent of the entire swine population in the US has been wiped out by a highly lethal virus called Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv), which has been—at least in part—traced back to pig's blood used in piglet feed. In this case, the virus does not affect humans. But it's a valuable demonstration of how fragile the system becomes when you veer too far from the natural order of things.
Besides everything mentioned already, the factory feeding model also involves the mixing of animal parts (in this case, blood) from a large number of animals, which is then fed to large numbers of animals—the meat from which in turn are again mixed together in large processing plants, before it's ultimately sold in grocery stores across the nation. All this mixing and cross-contamination allows for pathogens to contaminate huge amounts of food products, and is the reason why a single food contamination can spread so far and wide, affecting people across multiple states.
Processing plant (i.e. plants where meat is cut or milk is pasteurized, for example) are primary culprits when it comes to the spread of pathogens. Due to regulations, traditional farmer-to-consumer practices have been outlawed. Now processors run the show and cut out the farmer's share, which has decimated small farmers and created this industrialized, disease-promoting mess.
Small-Scale Farming Makes for Far Safer Food
The weaknesses of the factory farm model are usually overlooked during food safety discussions. Instead, small-scale raw food producers—and raw dairy producers in particular—are targeted and vilified as sources of dangerous pathogens that threaten human health. Such attacks are completely out of order and do nothing to improve food safety on the whole, as the PRIMARY sources of pathogenic contamination actually originate in CAFOs, large-scale butchering and processing plants, and processed food manufacturing plants, where multiple ingredients are mixed together.
For example, late last year, Chobani Greek yoghurt was recalled following reports of gastrointestinal illness.9 The yogurt, which is pasteurized and not raw, was found to be contaminated with a fungus called Murcor circinelloides. In 2011, Cargill recalled a whopping 36 million pounds of ground turkey10 after an antibiotic-resistant strain of Salmonella in the meat was linked to 107 illnesses and one death.
Remarkably, as explained in a previous Food Safety News article,11 a large-scale meat producer can have 50 percent of its samples test positive for Salmonella, and still get the green light of approval from the USDA! When it hits 51 percent contamination, the meat is tagged "unsafe." But even at that point, USDA testing simply continues until illness is reported. This is factory farmed food safety for you...
Meanwhile, a small organic farmer will notice a health problem with an animal in his herd long before it gets sent for slaughter, and he can then treat that individual animal as necessary. And, should a pathogenic outbreak occur on a farm, the risk of public exposure is limited by the fact that the animal products are sold locally; they're not shipped long distances and mixed in with others. This is why a food borne outbreak on an organic farm may affect one or two people, whereas an outbreak originating from a processing plant can affect hundreds, or even thousands. One pasteurized milk contamination sickened 200,000 people!12
Organic, Pastured Chicken Is Your Best and Safest Alternative
If food safety, optimal nutrition and disease prevention really matters, the way forward is to shift into a socially responsible, small-scale system where independent producers and processors focus on providing food for their local and regional markets. This alternative produces high-quality food, and supports farmers who produce healthy, meat, eggs, and dairy products using humane methods. And it's far easier on the environment.
True free-range chickens and eggs come from hens that roam freely outdoors on a pasture, where they can forage for their natural diet, which includes seeds, green plants, insects, and worms. Keep in mind that when it comes to labels such as "free-range" and "natural," there are loopholes that allow the commercial egg industry to call eggs from their industrial egg laying facilities "free-range," so don't be fooled.
By far, the vast majority of food at your local supermarket comes from these polluting, inhumane farm conglomerations. If you want to stop supporting them, you first need to find a new place to shop. Your best source for pastured chicken (and fresh eggs) is a local farmer that allows his hens to forage freely outdoors. If you live in an urban area, visiting a local farmer's market is typically the quickest route to finding high-quality chicken and eggs. Again, free-range pastured chickens should be allowed outside, and to eat insects. To see how this looks in the real world, please watch my video below with farmer Joel Salatin.
Take Control of Your Health by Joining the Real Food Movement
If you really want to be sure your food is healthy and safe, it would be best to avoid grocery stores as much as possible, as conventionally-raised livestock, including chickens, are far from ideal. The more we all make it a point to only buy food from a source we know and trust, the faster factory farming will become a shameful practice of the past. Farmers and lovers of real food show us that change is possible. Here are a few suggestions for how you can take affirmative action to protect your and your family's health:
- Buy local products whenever possible. Otherwise, buy organic and fair-trade products.
- Shop at your local farmers market, join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), or buy from local grocers and co-ops committed to selling local foods. The following organizations can help you locate farm-fresh foods in your local area that has been raised in a humane, sustainable manner:
- Local Harvest -- This Web site will help you find farmers' markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies.
- Farmers' Markets -- A national listing of farmers' markets.
- Eat Well Guide: Wholesome Food from Healthy Animals -- The Eat Well Guide is a free online directory of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs from farms, stores, restaurants, inns, and hotels, and online outlets in the United States and Canada.
- Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) -- CISA is dedicated to sustaining agriculture and promoting the products of small farms.
- FoodRoutes -- The FoodRoutes "Find Good Food" map can help you connect with local farmers to find the freshest, tastiest food possible. On their interactive map, you can find a listing for local farmers, CSAs, and markets near you.
- Support restaurants and food vendors that buy locally produced food.
- Avoid genetically engineered (GMO) foods. Buying certified organic ensures your food is non-GM.
- Cook, can, ferment, dry, and freeze. Return to the basics of cooking, and pass these skills on to your children.
- Grow your own garden, or volunteer at a community garden. Teach your children how to garden and where their food comes from.
Read this
and you may never eat chicken again.
and you may never eat chicken again.
Photograph: Iroz Gaizka/AFP / Getty Images
Chickens roam in an outdoor enclosure of a chicken farm in Vielle-Soubiran,
south-western France.
Chickens roam in an outdoor enclosure of a chicken farm in Vielle-Soubiran,
south-western France.
Caged battery hens in a chicken farm in Catania, Sicily.
Photograph: Fabrizio Villa/AFP/Getty
Photograph: Fabrizio Villa/AFP/Getty
Most meat animals are raised
with the assistance of daily doses of antibiotics.
By 2050, antibiotic resistance will cause a staggering 10 million deaths a year.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017
by Maryn McKenna
Every year I spend some time in a tiny apartment in Paris, seven storeys above the mayor’s offices for the 11th arrondissement. The Place de la Bastille – the spot where the French revolution sparked political change that transformed the world – is a 10-minute walk down a narrow street that threads between student nightclubs and Chinese fabric wholesalers.
Twice a week, hundreds of Parisians crowd down it, heading to the marché de la Bastille, stretched out along the center island of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir.
Q&A: 'A chicken worth eating tastes like a chicken that had a life worth living'
Blocks before you reach the market, you can hear it: a low hum of argument and chatter, punctuated by dollies thumping over the curbstones and vendors shouting deals. But even before you hear it, you can smell it: the funk of bruised cabbage leaves underfoot, the sharp sweetness of fruit sliced open for samples, the iodine tang of seaweed propping up rafts of scallops in broad rose-colored shells.
Threaded through them is one aroma that I wait for. Burnished and herbal, salty and slightly burned, it has so much heft that it feels physical, like an arm slid around your shoulders to urge you to move a little faster. It leads to a tented booth in the middle of the market and a line of customers that wraps around the tent poles and trails down the market alley, tangling with the crowd in front of the flower seller.
In the middle of the booth is a closet-size metal cabinet, propped up on iron wheels and bricks. Inside the cabinet, flattened chickens are speared on rotisserie bars that have been turning since before dawn. Every few minutes, one of the workers detaches a bar, slides off its dripping bronze contents, slips the chickens into flat foil-lined bags, and hands them to the customers who have persisted to the head of the line.
The skin of a poulet crapaudine – named because its spatchcocked outline resembles a crapaud, a toad – shatters like mica; the flesh underneath, basted for hours by the birds dripping on to it from above, is pillowy but springy, imbued to the bone with pepper and thyme.
The first time I ate it, I was stunned into happy silence, too intoxicated by the experience to process why it felt so new. The second time, I was delighted again –and then, afterward, sulky and sad.
I had eaten chicken all my life: in my grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn, in my parents’ house in Houston, in a college dining hall, friends’ apartments, restaurants and fast food places, trendy bars in cities and old-school joints on back roads in the south. I thought I roasted a chicken pretty well myself. But none of them were ever like this, mineral and lush and direct.
I thought of the chickens I’d grown up eating. They tasted like whatever the cook added to them: canned soup in my grandmother’s fricassee, her party dish; soy sauce and sesame in the stir fries my college housemate brought from her aunt’s restaurant; lemon juice when my mother worried about my father’s blood pressure and banned salt from the house.
This French chicken tasted like muscle and blood and exercise and the outdoors. It tasted like something that it was too easy to pretend it was not: like an animal, like a living thing. We have made it easy not to think about what chickens were before we find them on our plates or pluck them from supermarket cold cases.
I live, most of the time, less than an hour’s drive from Gainesville, Georgia, the self-described poultry capital of the world, where the modern chicken industry was born. Georgia raises 1.4bn broilers a year, making it the single biggest contributor to the almost 9bn birds raised each year in the United States; if it were an independent country, it would rank in chicken production somewhere near China and Brazil.
Yet you could drive around for hours without ever knowing you were in the heart of chicken country unless you happened to get behind a truck heaped with crates of birds on their way from the remote solid-walled barns they are raised in to the gated slaughter plants where they are turned into meat. That first French market chicken opened my eyes to how invisible chickens had been for me, and after that, my job began to show me what that invisibility had masked.
My house is less than two miles from the front gate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that sends disease detectives racing to outbreaks all over the world. For more than a decade, one of my obsessions as a journalist has been following them on their investigations – and in long late-night conversations in the United States and Asia and Africa, with physicians and veterinarians and epidemiologists, I learned that the chickens that had surprised me and the epidemics that fascinated me were more closely linked than I had ever realized.
I discovered that the reason American chicken tastes so different from those I ate everywhere else was that in the United States, we breed for everything but flavor: for abundance, for consistency, for speed. Many things made that transformation possible.
But as I came to understand, the single biggest influence was that, consistently over decades, we have been feeding chickens, and almost every other meat animal, routine doses of antibiotics on almost every day of their lives.
Antibiotics do not create blandness, but they created the conditions that allowed chicken to be bland, allowing us to turn a skittish, active backyard bird into a fast-growing, slow-moving, docile block of protein, as muscle-bound and top-heavy as a bodybuilder in a kids’ cartoon. At this moment, most meat animals, across most of the planet, are raised with the assistance of doses of antibiotics on most days of their lives: 63,151 tons of antibiotics per year, about 126m pounds.
Farmers began using the drugs because antibiotics allowed animals to convert feed to tasty muscle more efficiently; when that result made it irresistible to pack more livestock into barns, antibiotics protected animals against the likelihood of disease. Those discoveries, which began with chickens, created “what we choose to call industrialized agriculture”, a poultry historian living in Georgia proudly wrote in 1971.
Chicken prices fell so low that it became the meat that Americans eat more than any other – and the meat most likely to transmit food-borne illness, and also antibiotic resistance, the greatest slow-brewing health crisis of our time.
Most meat animals, across most of the planet, are raised with the assistance of doses of antibiotics on most days of their lives
For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden epidemic unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected.
Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support and few patients’ organizations advocating for them.
If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in daycare, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym.
And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse.
They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses – 2m annually just in the United States – and cost billions in healthcare spending, lost wages and lost national productivity.
It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100tn and will cause a staggering 10m deaths per year.
Disease organisms have been developing defenses against the antibiotics meant to kill them for as long as antibiotics have existed. Penicillin arrived in the 1940s, and resistance to it swept the world in the 1950s.
Resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths each year
Tetracycline arrived in 1948, and resistance was nibbling at its effectiveness before the 1950s ended. Erythromycin was discovered in 1952, and erythromycin resistance arrived in 1955. Methicillin, a lab-synthesized relative of penicillin, was developed in 1960 specifically to counter penicillin resistance, yet within a year, staph bacteria developed defenses against it as well, earning the bug the name MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
After MRSA, there were the ESBLs, extended-spectrum beta-lactamases, which defeated not only penicillin and its relatives but also a large family of antibiotics called cephalosporins. And after cephalosporins were undermined, new antibiotics were achieved and lost in turn.
AdvertisementEach time pharmaceutical chemistry produced a new class of antibiotics, with a new molecular shape and a new mode of action, bacteria adapted. In fact, as the decades passed, they seemed to adapt faster than before. Their persistence threatened to inaugurate a post-antibiotic era, in which surgery could be too dangerous to attempt and ordinary health problems – scrapes, tooth extractions, broken limbs – could pose a deadly risk.
For a long time, it was assumed that the extraordinary unspooling of antibiotic resistance around the world was due only to misuse of the drugs in medicine: to parents begging for the drugs even though their children had viral illnesses that antibiotics could not help;
physicians prescribing antibiotics without checking to see whether the drug they chose was a good match; people stopping their prescriptions halfway through the prescribed course because they felt better, or saving some pills for friends without health insurance, or buying antibiotics over the counter, in the many countries where they are available that way and dosing themselves.
But from the earliest days of the antibiotic era, the drugs have had another, parallel use: in animals that are grown to become food.
Eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States and more than half of those sold around the world are used in animals, not in humans. Animals destined to be meat routinely receive antibiotics in their feed and water, and most of those drugs are not given to treat diseases, which is how we use them in people.
Instead, antibiotics are given to make food animals put on weight more quickly than they would otherwise, or to protect food animals from illnesses that the crowded conditions of livestock production make them vulnerable to. And nearly two-thirds of the antibiotics that are used for those purposes are compounds that are also used against human illness – which means that when resistance against the farm use of those drugs arises, it undermines the drugs’ usefulness in human medicine as well.
Caged chickens in San Diego, California. California voters passed a new animal welfare law in 2008 to require that the state’s egg-laying hens be given room to move. Photograph: Christian Science Monitor/Getty ImagesResistance is a defensive adaptation, an evolutionary strategy that allows bacteria to protect themselves against antibiotics’ power to kill them.
It is created by subtle genetic changes that allow organisms to counter antibiotics’ attacks on them, altering their cell walls to keep drug molecules from attaching or penetrating, or forming tiny pumps that eject the drugs after they have entered the cell.
What slows the emergence of resistance is using an antibiotic conservatively: at the right dose, for the right length of time, for an organism that will be vulnerable to the drug, and not for any other reason. Most antibiotic use in agriculture violates those rules.
Resistant bacteria are the result.
We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost
Felicity Lawrence
Read moreAntibiotic resistance is like climate change: it is an overwhelming threat, created over decades by millions of individual decisions and reinforced by the actions of industries.
It is also like climate change in that the industrialized west and the emerging economies of the global south are at odds. One quadrant of the globe already enjoyed the cheap protein of factory farming and now regrets it; the other would like not to forgo its chance. And it is additionally like climate change because any action taken in hopes of ameliorating the problem feels inadequate, like buying a fluorescent lightbulb while watching a polar bear drown.
AdvertisementBut that it seems difficult does not mean it is not possible. The willingness to relinquish antibiotics of farmers in the Netherlands, as well as Perdue Farms and other companies in the United States, proves that industrial-scale production can be achieved without growth promoters or preventive antibiotic use. The stability of Maïsadour and Loué and White Oak Pastures shows that medium-sized and small farms can secure a place in a remixed meat economy.
Whole Foods’ pivot to slower-growing chicken – birds that share some of the genetics preserved by Frank Reese – illustrates that removing antibiotics and choosing birds that do not need them returns biodiversity to poultry production.
All of those achievements are signposts, pointing to where chicken, and cattle and hogs and farmed fish after them, need to go: to a mode of production where antibiotics are used as infrequently as possible – to care for sick animals, but not to fatten or protect them.
That is the way antibiotics are now used in human medicine, and it is the only way that the utility of antibiotics and the risk of resistance can be adequately balanced.
Excerpted from Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna published by National Geographic on 12 September 2017. Available wherever books are sold.
Plucked! The Truth About Chicken by Maryn McKenna is published in the UK by Little, Brown and is now available in eBook @£14.99, and is published in Trade Format @£14.99 on 1 February 2018.
with the assistance of daily doses of antibiotics.
By 2050, antibiotic resistance will cause a staggering 10 million deaths a year.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017
by Maryn McKenna
Every year I spend some time in a tiny apartment in Paris, seven storeys above the mayor’s offices for the 11th arrondissement. The Place de la Bastille – the spot where the French revolution sparked political change that transformed the world – is a 10-minute walk down a narrow street that threads between student nightclubs and Chinese fabric wholesalers.
Twice a week, hundreds of Parisians crowd down it, heading to the marché de la Bastille, stretched out along the center island of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir.
Q&A: 'A chicken worth eating tastes like a chicken that had a life worth living'
Blocks before you reach the market, you can hear it: a low hum of argument and chatter, punctuated by dollies thumping over the curbstones and vendors shouting deals. But even before you hear it, you can smell it: the funk of bruised cabbage leaves underfoot, the sharp sweetness of fruit sliced open for samples, the iodine tang of seaweed propping up rafts of scallops in broad rose-colored shells.
Threaded through them is one aroma that I wait for. Burnished and herbal, salty and slightly burned, it has so much heft that it feels physical, like an arm slid around your shoulders to urge you to move a little faster. It leads to a tented booth in the middle of the market and a line of customers that wraps around the tent poles and trails down the market alley, tangling with the crowd in front of the flower seller.
In the middle of the booth is a closet-size metal cabinet, propped up on iron wheels and bricks. Inside the cabinet, flattened chickens are speared on rotisserie bars that have been turning since before dawn. Every few minutes, one of the workers detaches a bar, slides off its dripping bronze contents, slips the chickens into flat foil-lined bags, and hands them to the customers who have persisted to the head of the line.
The skin of a poulet crapaudine – named because its spatchcocked outline resembles a crapaud, a toad – shatters like mica; the flesh underneath, basted for hours by the birds dripping on to it from above, is pillowy but springy, imbued to the bone with pepper and thyme.
The first time I ate it, I was stunned into happy silence, too intoxicated by the experience to process why it felt so new. The second time, I was delighted again –and then, afterward, sulky and sad.
I had eaten chicken all my life: in my grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn, in my parents’ house in Houston, in a college dining hall, friends’ apartments, restaurants and fast food places, trendy bars in cities and old-school joints on back roads in the south. I thought I roasted a chicken pretty well myself. But none of them were ever like this, mineral and lush and direct.
I thought of the chickens I’d grown up eating. They tasted like whatever the cook added to them: canned soup in my grandmother’s fricassee, her party dish; soy sauce and sesame in the stir fries my college housemate brought from her aunt’s restaurant; lemon juice when my mother worried about my father’s blood pressure and banned salt from the house.
This French chicken tasted like muscle and blood and exercise and the outdoors. It tasted like something that it was too easy to pretend it was not: like an animal, like a living thing. We have made it easy not to think about what chickens were before we find them on our plates or pluck them from supermarket cold cases.
I live, most of the time, less than an hour’s drive from Gainesville, Georgia, the self-described poultry capital of the world, where the modern chicken industry was born. Georgia raises 1.4bn broilers a year, making it the single biggest contributor to the almost 9bn birds raised each year in the United States; if it were an independent country, it would rank in chicken production somewhere near China and Brazil.
Yet you could drive around for hours without ever knowing you were in the heart of chicken country unless you happened to get behind a truck heaped with crates of birds on their way from the remote solid-walled barns they are raised in to the gated slaughter plants where they are turned into meat. That first French market chicken opened my eyes to how invisible chickens had been for me, and after that, my job began to show me what that invisibility had masked.
My house is less than two miles from the front gate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that sends disease detectives racing to outbreaks all over the world. For more than a decade, one of my obsessions as a journalist has been following them on their investigations – and in long late-night conversations in the United States and Asia and Africa, with physicians and veterinarians and epidemiologists, I learned that the chickens that had surprised me and the epidemics that fascinated me were more closely linked than I had ever realized.
I discovered that the reason American chicken tastes so different from those I ate everywhere else was that in the United States, we breed for everything but flavor: for abundance, for consistency, for speed. Many things made that transformation possible.
But as I came to understand, the single biggest influence was that, consistently over decades, we have been feeding chickens, and almost every other meat animal, routine doses of antibiotics on almost every day of their lives.
Antibiotics do not create blandness, but they created the conditions that allowed chicken to be bland, allowing us to turn a skittish, active backyard bird into a fast-growing, slow-moving, docile block of protein, as muscle-bound and top-heavy as a bodybuilder in a kids’ cartoon. At this moment, most meat animals, across most of the planet, are raised with the assistance of doses of antibiotics on most days of their lives: 63,151 tons of antibiotics per year, about 126m pounds.
Farmers began using the drugs because antibiotics allowed animals to convert feed to tasty muscle more efficiently; when that result made it irresistible to pack more livestock into barns, antibiotics protected animals against the likelihood of disease. Those discoveries, which began with chickens, created “what we choose to call industrialized agriculture”, a poultry historian living in Georgia proudly wrote in 1971.
Chicken prices fell so low that it became the meat that Americans eat more than any other – and the meat most likely to transmit food-borne illness, and also antibiotic resistance, the greatest slow-brewing health crisis of our time.
Most meat animals, across most of the planet, are raised with the assistance of doses of antibiotics on most days of their lives
For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden epidemic unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected.
Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support and few patients’ organizations advocating for them.
If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in daycare, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym.
And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse.
They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses – 2m annually just in the United States – and cost billions in healthcare spending, lost wages and lost national productivity.
It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100tn and will cause a staggering 10m deaths per year.
Disease organisms have been developing defenses against the antibiotics meant to kill them for as long as antibiotics have existed. Penicillin arrived in the 1940s, and resistance to it swept the world in the 1950s.
Resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths each year
Tetracycline arrived in 1948, and resistance was nibbling at its effectiveness before the 1950s ended. Erythromycin was discovered in 1952, and erythromycin resistance arrived in 1955. Methicillin, a lab-synthesized relative of penicillin, was developed in 1960 specifically to counter penicillin resistance, yet within a year, staph bacteria developed defenses against it as well, earning the bug the name MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
After MRSA, there were the ESBLs, extended-spectrum beta-lactamases, which defeated not only penicillin and its relatives but also a large family of antibiotics called cephalosporins. And after cephalosporins were undermined, new antibiotics were achieved and lost in turn.
AdvertisementEach time pharmaceutical chemistry produced a new class of antibiotics, with a new molecular shape and a new mode of action, bacteria adapted. In fact, as the decades passed, they seemed to adapt faster than before. Their persistence threatened to inaugurate a post-antibiotic era, in which surgery could be too dangerous to attempt and ordinary health problems – scrapes, tooth extractions, broken limbs – could pose a deadly risk.
For a long time, it was assumed that the extraordinary unspooling of antibiotic resistance around the world was due only to misuse of the drugs in medicine: to parents begging for the drugs even though their children had viral illnesses that antibiotics could not help;
physicians prescribing antibiotics without checking to see whether the drug they chose was a good match; people stopping their prescriptions halfway through the prescribed course because they felt better, or saving some pills for friends without health insurance, or buying antibiotics over the counter, in the many countries where they are available that way and dosing themselves.
But from the earliest days of the antibiotic era, the drugs have had another, parallel use: in animals that are grown to become food.
Eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States and more than half of those sold around the world are used in animals, not in humans. Animals destined to be meat routinely receive antibiotics in their feed and water, and most of those drugs are not given to treat diseases, which is how we use them in people.
Instead, antibiotics are given to make food animals put on weight more quickly than they would otherwise, or to protect food animals from illnesses that the crowded conditions of livestock production make them vulnerable to. And nearly two-thirds of the antibiotics that are used for those purposes are compounds that are also used against human illness – which means that when resistance against the farm use of those drugs arises, it undermines the drugs’ usefulness in human medicine as well.
Caged chickens in San Diego, California. California voters passed a new animal welfare law in 2008 to require that the state’s egg-laying hens be given room to move. Photograph: Christian Science Monitor/Getty ImagesResistance is a defensive adaptation, an evolutionary strategy that allows bacteria to protect themselves against antibiotics’ power to kill them.
It is created by subtle genetic changes that allow organisms to counter antibiotics’ attacks on them, altering their cell walls to keep drug molecules from attaching or penetrating, or forming tiny pumps that eject the drugs after they have entered the cell.
What slows the emergence of resistance is using an antibiotic conservatively: at the right dose, for the right length of time, for an organism that will be vulnerable to the drug, and not for any other reason. Most antibiotic use in agriculture violates those rules.
Resistant bacteria are the result.
We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost
Felicity Lawrence
Read moreAntibiotic resistance is like climate change: it is an overwhelming threat, created over decades by millions of individual decisions and reinforced by the actions of industries.
It is also like climate change in that the industrialized west and the emerging economies of the global south are at odds. One quadrant of the globe already enjoyed the cheap protein of factory farming and now regrets it; the other would like not to forgo its chance. And it is additionally like climate change because any action taken in hopes of ameliorating the problem feels inadequate, like buying a fluorescent lightbulb while watching a polar bear drown.
AdvertisementBut that it seems difficult does not mean it is not possible. The willingness to relinquish antibiotics of farmers in the Netherlands, as well as Perdue Farms and other companies in the United States, proves that industrial-scale production can be achieved without growth promoters or preventive antibiotic use. The stability of Maïsadour and Loué and White Oak Pastures shows that medium-sized and small farms can secure a place in a remixed meat economy.
Whole Foods’ pivot to slower-growing chicken – birds that share some of the genetics preserved by Frank Reese – illustrates that removing antibiotics and choosing birds that do not need them returns biodiversity to poultry production.
All of those achievements are signposts, pointing to where chicken, and cattle and hogs and farmed fish after them, need to go: to a mode of production where antibiotics are used as infrequently as possible – to care for sick animals, but not to fatten or protect them.
That is the way antibiotics are now used in human medicine, and it is the only way that the utility of antibiotics and the risk of resistance can be adequately balanced.
Excerpted from Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna published by National Geographic on 12 September 2017. Available wherever books are sold.
Plucked! The Truth About Chicken by Maryn McKenna is published in the UK by Little, Brown and is now available in eBook @£14.99, and is published in Trade Format @£14.99 on 1 February 2018.
