The Smell of Money

When you head into Dodge City, Kansas, on Route 50 from the east, one of the first things you come to is the overlook. It’s not a scenic overlook, unless the view–and the smell–of a cattle feedlot and processing is appealing to you. I bet it’s scenic to the people who appreciate “the smell of money.” That’s the phrase used by many ranchers and managers of confined animal factory operations (CAFO). Beef processing is a lucrative business. Luckily, on our visit to Dodge City, Bill and I were up wind of the smell at the overlook.

I think Dodge City is proud of its heritage in cattle production. Excel Corporation, one of the world’s largest beef-processing facilities is adjacent to the feedlot and processes about 6,000 head of cattle a day, six days a week. Nearby National Beef, a processing plant cited in a 2011 product recall for E. coli contamination, processes 4,000 head daily. One of the signs at the overlook says, “Combined, annually these two plants annually market enough beef to feed 16 million people for one year. Kansas ranks first in the United States commercial cattle production, processing over 8 million head annually. ” That’s amazing. But it makes me ask, what’s wrong with our country that we have to eat so much beef?

I wanted to see the feedlots first-hand. So on a recent trip to the Plains, Bill and I photographed several, beginning in Dodge City and heading west to Colorado. To me, CAFOs are the smell of inhumanity. Not just the inhumane treatment of cows lying around in their excrement, but also the conditions employees endure in the processing plants.

Here’s a video I took of just one feedlot in southwest Kansas. It’s 1 1/2 minutes long taken from our car going 30 m.p.h. Notice the drainage areas, which can have negative effects on the environment.

And here are more photos from southwest Kansas.

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Wouldn’t you rather have beef from a happy cow, like these from Grassfields, raised on grass in open space?

Hit Upside the Head

I’m not a big fan of crudeness when it comes to writing. It’s not that I have a problem with expletives–I use my own share of them occasionally as a reaction to something unexpected–but using the f-word and other obscenities in a book gets pretty vulgar.

However, I see why authors Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin did it in their book Skinny Bitch. They’re trying to get your attention and, as one woman said in her testimonial on the authors’ website, she felt she was hit upside the head when she read it. Obese and frustrated at the numerous ways she tried losing weight, Skinny Bitch was like a wake-up call. She actually lost 180 pounds (from an overweight of 300+ pounds) by following the authors’ advice, which is basically to go vegan.

According to their website, Rory Freedman is a former agent for Ford Models, and a self-taught know-it-all. Kim Barnouin is a former model who holds a Master’s of Science degree in Holistic Nutrition.

I do think they know what they’re talking about even though their smart-mouthed approach gets a little old. That’s why I stuck with the book instead of being turned off by statements like, “Beer is for frat boys, not skinny bitches. It makes you fat, bloated, and farty.” Or “Eat your fiber and crap like a champ.” Or “F__ excuses about not having the time or money.” (Luckily, it’s a quick read. If I can do it, you can, too.)

The authors include facts supported by research and practical plans to “stop eating crap and start looking fabulous.” It’s not about fad dieting. Rather, it incorporates the theme “you are what you eat” throughout. The chapters on meat include hardcore facts about the meat industry and factory farming as graphic as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. The book clearly demonstrates how our food industry leaders are intertwined with our government, making it difficult for consumers to get quality, healthy food at the grocery store. The authors offer suggestions for eating well, what to avoid, and a supportive “just do it” attitude (if you can look past the accompanying f-words).

I’m still a carnivore and, even though I only eat happy meat, I have to say Skinny Bitch got me thinking about going vegan. It was more than reading (again) about the horrific conditions on factory farms. It’s about what our bodies were designed to consume. Sure, we have canine teeth but do we really need to tear apart meat anymore? Do we really need to consume dairy products (my favorite food group) after we’re weaned from mother’s milk? And how about all those food allergies? Food for thought, I guess. The only thing I can’t consider, if I were to go vegan, is fake meat. (And there are many “substitutes” listed in the resource section of Skinny Bitch for vegans.) I’m really curious why anything that looks and tastes like meat, but isn’t, would be appealing to vegans.

So, if you’re interested in learning more about our screwed up food system, or you’d like a new approach for tackling weight loss, get a copy of Skinny Bitch. And get ready for some sass.

The Cheap Food Policy: “King Corn”

I’ve been wanting to see the movie “King Corn” for awhile and finally got around to renting it. If you’re into eating happy food, this is a must-see documentary about “the stuff we’re really made from.”

It’s about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college, move from the East Coast to the Midwest to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm.

The Hidden Dangers of Feedlot Beef

Photo via TakePart.com

Feedlot beef is not a new topic for Life Is Fare, but I feel compelled to once again share an article about the beef that’s sold to most grocery stores and restaurants in the U.S.

The Kansas City Star investigated the processing methods–and their hazards for human health–among the largest beef packers in the U.S. This group includes the big four— Tyson Foods of Arkansas, Cargill Meat Solutions of Wichita, National Beef of Kansas City, and JBS USA Beef of Greeley, Colo. — as well as the network of feedlots, processing plants, animal drug companies and lobbyists who make up the behemoth known as Big Beef.

What The Star found is “an increasingly concentrated industry that mass-produces beef at high speeds in mega-factories that dot the Midwest, where Kansas City serves as the “buckle” of the beef belt. It’s a factory food process churning out cheaper and some say tougher cuts of meat that can cause health problems.”

Here’s a list of other key findings:

• Large beef plants, based on volume alone, contribute disproportionately to the incidence of meat-borne pathogens.

• Big Beef and other processors are co-mingling ground beef from many different cattle, some from outside the United States, adding to the difficulty for health officials to track contaminated products to their source. The industry also has resisted labeling some products, including mechanically tenderized meat, to warn consumers and restaurants to cook it thoroughly.

• Big Beef is injecting millions of dollars of growth hormones and antibiotics into cattle, partly to fatten them quickly for market. But many experts believe that years of overuse and misuse of such drugs contributes to antibiotic-resistant pathogens in humans, meaning illnesses once treated with a regimen of antibiotics are much harder to control.

• Big Beef is using its political pull, public relations campaigns and the supportive science it sponsors to influence federal dietary guidelines and recast steaks and burgers as health foods people can eat every day. It even persuaded the American Heart Association to certify beef as “heart healthy.”

Are you sure this is what you want to eat?

The Obesity Epidemic

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, some of the leading causes of preventable death. For many of these conditions, diet is a contributing factor. Check out the obesity prevalence by state for 2011:

• Obesity prevalence ranged from 20.7% in Colorado to 34.9% in Mississippi.
• No state had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%.
• 39 states had a prevalence of 25% or more; 12 of these states had a prevalence of 30% or more: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia.
• The South had the highest prevalence of obesity (29.5%), followed by the Midwest (29.0%), the Northeast (25.3%) and the West (24.3%).

Learn more in this  video called “The Obesity Epidemic,” which addresses the challenges of obesity in our country, especially food and eating behaviors. As a major contributor to some of the leading causes of death in the U.S., it’s time to evolve our communities into places that strongly support healthy eating and active living.

Pig Farm Without Empathy

It’s stories like this one that inspired me to start Life Is Fare in the first place. I’m warning you, this video is disturbing. It’s another undercover investigation by the Humane Society of the United States and this time the victims are pigs from Wyoming Premium Farms in Wheatland, Wyoming.

It’s not just disturbing that people treat animals this way and that the majority of consumers who eat the meat from these animals don’t realize that stress creates a poor quality product. What’s also disturbing is that people are acting this way in the first place. Any employer who creates conditions that drive their employees to commit violence should be shut down. And if those people were disturbed to begin with, they shouldn’t have been hired. They need help.

While I believe most of the human race is empathic toward people and animals, there is a small percentage that has no conscience or empathy. Often these people end up in leadership roles or positions of power. Exactly where they don’t belong.

This video has nothing to do with the carnivore-vegetarian debate. It’s about the golden rule. Please stop supporting industrialized farming. Remember, you are what you eat.

Where Do Your Eggs Come From?

Warning: This is a graphic undercover video by the Humane Society of the United States showing the horrible conditions hens endure at Kreider Farms, an egg factory in Pennsylvania that supplies eggs to grocery stores. The company is also a distributor for Eggland’s Best.

If you don’t want to watch the video, at least read about the observations of the  investigator:

• Birds were severely overcrowded in cages more cramped than the national average; each hen received only 54–58 square inches of space on which to spend her life.
• Injured and dead hens, including mummified bird carcasses, were found inside cages with living hens laying eggs for human consumption.
• Hens were left without water for days when a water source malfunctioned, causing many to die.
• Hens’ legs, wings, and heads were found trapped in cage wires and automated feeding machinery.
• A thick layer of dead flies on the barn floors caused a crunching sound when walking on it.

Not only is this a horrible way to treat animals, but the stress they endure ultimately affects their egg production. Do you want to eat those eggs?

In addition to keeping hens in deplorable conditions, Kreider Farms is one of the few egg producers in the U.S. which doesn’t support federal legislation aimed at improving conditions for America’s laying hens, and providing a stable and secure future for egg farmers.

The bill in the U.S. Congress, H.R. 3798, the Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments of 2012, would phase in new housing systems for hens over the next 15 to 18 years, providing them far more space and ensuring that cages contain environmental enrichments such as perches and nesting areas.

Is This What You Want Your Kids Eating for Lunch?

Photo via The Huffington Post

From the Huffington Post comes this article informing us that, while McDonald’s,  Taco Bell, and Burger King have rejected the “pink slime,” aka, ammonia-treated pinkish-tinted ground beef, to use in their products, the U.S. Government has moved forward to purchase it for the national school lunch program. One million pounds of “ a ground-up combination of beef scraps, cow connective tissues, and other beef trimmings that are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens like salmonella and E. coli” will be going into hamburger patties and taco meat for kids.

There are a few reasons why you should be concerned if your children are fed by this program:

• Ammonium hydroxide, which can both be harmful to eat and has potential to turn into ammonium nitrate is also a common component in household cleaners, fertilizers, and homemade bombs.
• In 2009, The New York Times reported that despite the added ammonia, tests of Lean Beef Trimmings of schools across the country revealed dozens of instances of E. coli and salmonella pathogens.
• The announcement came just weeks after the government announced new standards for school meals to ensure students are given healthier options, including more whole grains and produce as well as less sodium and fat.

Personally, I won’t go near the stuff. That’s why Bill and I buy grassfed and pastured meat from our local farmers. And, when I eat at a restaurant, I choose vegetarian options over factory farmed meats.

“Back to the Start”: A Thoughtful Short Film on Our Food System

I’m not a big fan of fast food, but I’ve heard good things about Chipotle Mexican Grill, the fast food chain that seeks “food with integrity,” which they define as “their commitment to finding the very best ingredients raised with respect for the animals, the environment, and the farmers.”

Check out this stop motion film the company did to emphasize the importance of developing a sustainable food system. Film-maker Johnny Kelly, commissioned by Chipotle, depicts the life of a farmer as he slowly turns his family farm into an industrial animal factory before seeing the errors of his ways and opting for a more sustainable future.

The Meat-Eater’s Guide

A new Meat Eater’s Guide to eating meat has been published by the Environmental Working Group to provide information about the climate, environmental, and health impact of your protein choices.

It’s based on a study that calculates the full “cradle-to-grave” carbon footprint of each food item based on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated before and after the food leaves the farm – from the pesticides and fertilizer used to grow animal feed all the way through the grazing, animal raising, processing, transportation, cooking and, finally, disposal of unused food. The life cycles of 20 popular types of meat (including fish), dairy and vegetable proteins were assessed.

While the general message is that consuming meat is bad for the environment (and eating too much meat poses serious health issues) , the guide does discuss the benefits of grassfed/pastured meat.

And vegetarians who eat cheese are not off the hook, either. As the guide says, “pound for pound, cheese generates the third-highest emissions.”

We could all do the earth–and ourselves–better by eating more plants, as Michael Pollan says. And if you choose meat, go for grassfed and pastured. It may be more expensive initially, but in the long run our collective cost from environmental and healthcare issues will be lower.