Death By Supermarket (18 page)

Protein is the primary food group, crucial both for survival and for healing from the malnutrition that is keeping Americans fat and sick. Only protein can provide your body with the amino acids necessary to build muscle, tissues, bones, and other structures. Protein is essential for growth, repair, hormone production, immune function, and every single metabolic process in your body.

Examples of healthy proteins are pasture-raised or wild-caught beef, buffalo, chicken, duck, eggs, game, lamb, pheasant, quail, squab, and turkey, as well as wild fish or shellfish. Beef and lamb cooked rare are good sources of enzymes.
Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes
, and
E. coli O157:H7
breed in confinement but do not proliferate in pasture-raised animals. Never eat rare pork or chicken.

Because all fatty acids can produce free radicals when heated, meat should be cooked at a low temperature. Never eat burned or charbroiled meat.

Although the medical community has sheepishly lightened up about
eggs, people still hold many misconceptions. The truth is that eggs provide us with omega-3 fatty acids as well as cholesterol, which are both necessary for life and important factors in attaining our genetic gifts. For recipes that call for raw eggs, be sure to purchase “pasture-raised” eggs. “Cage-free” does not always mean that the chickens roamed free pecking at grass, insects, larvae, and earthworms. If you are in doubt, call the supplier and ask. Pasture-raised organic meats and fowl can be purchased at health-food stores or online. On
eatwild.com
you can find sources for grass-fed meat from all over the country. Pasture-raised, organic eggs can be purchased at health-food stores and farmers’ markets. Organically raised nitrate-free ham and bacon is available at health-food stores from farmers who allow their hogs to run, root, and roam.

North of Santa Barbara is cattle country, where small herds scatter across the hillsides. During the seven years I lived on a ranch there, I often stopped to talk to cows that congregated near the roadside mailboxes munching grass, weeds, scrub, wildflowers, and brambles. They’re sweet, timidly curious, with soulful, long-lashed eyes. Spring welcomes new calves that, left to their own devices, comically suckle their mothers until they are ridiculously too huge. I never passed these cows without pondering the plight of factory animals.

Human beings have an innate drive to survive, and a primary aspect of survival is eating food. It has only been during the last 150 years that people in the developed world have been completely removed from the hunting, raising, and slaughtering of animals. The stresses and strains of survival have taken on entirely new and modern challenges. We no longer have to think about or want the added strain of thinking about how we will obtain our food.

Many animal lovers like myself struggle with the issue of eating meat. The brilliant animal scientist Temple Grandin, Ph.D.— who has designed half of the livestock-handling facilities in the United States—writes in her book
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
, “If I had my druthers humans would have evolved to be
plant eaters, so we wouldn’t have to kill other animals for food. But we didn’t, and I don’t see the human race converting to vegetarianism anytime soon. I’ve tried to eat vegetarian myself, and I haven’t been able to manage it physically… the fact that humans evolved as both plant and meat eaters means that the vast majority of human beings are going to continue to eat both. Humans are animals too, and we do what our animal natures tell us to do.”

In Charles Frazier’s Civil War novel
Cold Mountain
, a wounded solider, Inman, travels perilously back home and along the way is helped and hindered by others, including a goat woman who takes him in and feeds him. Frazier writes, “A little spotted brown-and-white goat came to her and she stroked it and scratched below its neck until it folded its legs and lay down. The old woman scratched it close under its jaw and stroked its ears. Inman thought it a peaceful scene. He watched as she continued to scratch with her left hand and reach with her right into an apron pocket. With one motion she pulled out a short-bladed knife and cut deep into the artery below the jawline and shoved the white basin underneath to catch the leap of bright blood. The animal jerked once, then lay trembling as she continued to scratch the fur and fondle the ears. The basin filled slowly. The goat and the woman stared intently off toward the distance as if waiting for a signal.”

Most animal-loving meat eaters would like to know that the animals they are eating were raised and slaughtered as humanely as this little goat. Realistically, however, there is a huge difference between feeding two people and 300 million people. The sheer volume of meat necessary to feed our nation has resulted in corrupt, sloppy, inhumane practices in the meat industry first uncovered by Upton Sinclair. While Dr. Grandin has devoted her career to improving the lives and deaths of the animals we eat, one person cannot shoulder this responsibility alone.

In the film
The Last of the Mohicans
, Hawkeye is an Anglo-Saxon frontiersman who had been orphaned as a baby and adopted by the Mohican Chingachgook. The film opens with Chingachgook, his blood son, Uncas,
and Hawkeye running silently through a heavily canopied forest, hunting an elk. When the elk is felled by the. 59 caliber round of Hawkeye’s five-foot rifle, the three men kneel at the beast. In Mohican, Chingachgook speaks to the elk, “We’re sorry to kill you, Brother. Forgive us. I do honor to your courage and speed, your strength.”

This moving scene depicted the reverential attitude that some cultures historically held for the animals that provided them sustenance. Although many animals lovers choose to eat meat, we do have choices as to the way animals we consume are raised and killed. Today there is virtually no reason—other than protecting the shareholder profits of mega animal agribusinesses—that we cannot restore this same reverence for the animals that give us sustenance. We must care, as a nation, and we must revise the treatment of animals, or we will continue to experience the furious retribution of nature: obesity, cancer, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, infectious disease—even variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which is the bovine brain-wasting disease more commonly known as “mad cow disease.”

Since saving money is paramount to factory-animal agribusinesses, downer cattle (cows too sick or injured to stand up) were, until 1997, slaughtered and fed to humans. When public outrage stopped that practice, these sick animals were slaughtered and ground up and fed to other factory animals (this practice was also supposedly stopped). Today a cow can still eat dried restaurant plate waste that could contain beef as well as newspaper poultry litter (chicken poop) that may also contain remnants of the cattle “meal” fed to chickens. And a cow can still eat a hog that has eaten a cow and so on. Furthermore, calves are still fed “milk replacers” made from cow blood. These practices compel herbivores—creatures that eat grass and shrubs—to be cannibals. With horrifying irony, we are now experiencing the furious backlash of nature, as feeding cattle to cattle is the generally accepted theory as to how cows can become infected with BSE.

Stanley Prusiner, M.D., a neurologist, won the 1997 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering prions, which are the malformed proteins
believed to cause BSE. When infected, prions accumulate in the brain, riddling it with holes. The human variant of BSE, called variant CreutzfeldtJakob disease (vCJD), has been linked to consuming BSE-contaminated animal products. To date it’s believed that 170 people have died from vCJD, suffering unspeakable pain as their brains liquefied.

Although BSE prions are supposedly harbored only in nervous-system tissue, such as blood, eyeballs, and brain and spinal cord tissue, these tissues have routinely entered our food supply via sloppy slaughtering practices. In 2002 the USDA issued a survey showing that approximately 35 percent of high-risk meat products (hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza toppings, and taco fillings) tested positive for central nervous system tissue. And although central nervous system tissue has recently been banned for sale for human consumption, slaughtering practices pretty much guarantee that all factory meat eaters have consumed products contaminated with this tissue.
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Although BSE prions were previously thought to be harbored in nervous-system tissue, Dr. Prusiner said, “We don’t know where and how prions move through the [cow’s] body before they show up in its brain.”
¹⁸⁷
So, in addition to the possibility of meat products containing BSE prions, we have to wonder about factory milk, too. Since research has demonstrated that BSE prions migrate to infected organs, and infection of the udders is common in factory dairy cows, BSE prions could be harbored in the infected secretory tissue of these cows and could be passed to milk.

In the United States 35 million cattle are slaughtered each year. The USDA’s current BSE surveillance program samples approximately 40,000 animals per year.
¹⁸⁸

Since 1986, when BSE was first diagnosed in Great Britain, there have been more than 180,000 cases of BSE worldwide. Since then, BSE has been confirmed in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland. BSE was confirmed in Canada in May
2003.
¹⁸⁹
In December 2003, in Washington State, the first suspected case of BSE in the United States was detected in a downer cow. In June 2005, a second case of BSE was confirmed in a downer cow in the United States. It took seven months for the USDA to disclose this fact.
¹⁹⁰
In both instances Americans were fed the message that we needn’t worry and should have every confidence in the safety of our beef.

In addition to BSE contamination, although factory animals are given numerous drugs to combat disease, they are virtually all sick and often diseased. Factory pigs suffer pneumonia, dysentery, trichinosis (parasitic infestation), and numerous other health problems, including at the time of slaughter.
¹⁹¹
Chickens develop cancer and other serious health problems.
¹⁹²
So when we eat these animal products we eat diseased flesh or eggs.

In addition, since factory-animal products are exposed to feces, vomit, pus, and urine we’re also exposed to lethal infectious organisms. According to CDC, each year food-borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States Five pathogens account for more than 90 percent of these deaths:
Salmonella
(31 percent),
Listeria monocytogenes
(28 percent),
Toxoplasma gondii
(21 percent), Norwalk-like viruses (7 percent),
Campylobacter
(5 percent), and
E. coli
(3 percent).
Escherichia coli O157:H7
is the variant responsible for a diarrheal syndrome in which bloody discharges are so copious that death is often the result.
¹⁹³

Instead of addressing the root of this problem by closing down CAFOs and setting animals free to roam their natural habitats so that they don’t become diseased and aren’t wallowing in bodily fluids, the USDA has initiated a campaign to irradiate all meat as a way of controlling the spread of infectious diseases. Irradiation, also known as the more innocent sounding “cold pasteurization,” exposes food to nuclear radiation to render sterile the pests, eggs, larvae, and bacteria that decompose food. But it does not serve actually to remove the pest, egg, and larvae carcasses from produce, nor does it cleanse the feces, urine, pus, vomit, and tumors from the
meat of slaughterhouse animals. Nuclear radiation breaks up the molecular structure of the food, generating free radicals and in turn creating weird science chemicals known as unique radiolytic products, which common sense—and science—tell us contribute to cancer and cause genetic and cellular damage. Irradiation also destroys the good bacteria and enzymes that are essential to life and rapidly disappearing from our food chain. As irradiation increases the number of free radicals in food it radically decreases antioxidant vitamins that scavenge free radicals from your body.

Although the FDA maintains that irradiation is nothing to be concerned about, numerous scientists worldwide disagree. The long-term effects of eating irradiated food are not known and have not been studied, but short-term studies link irradiated food to numerous health problems in lab animals, including premature death, fatal internal bleeding, cancer, stillbirths, mutations, organ malfunctions, and stunted growth.
¹⁹⁴

In recent years, TV news has offered up chilling new reports of avian and then swine flu, read over news footage depicting hideously abused domestic birds and hogs. Although scientists have yet to understand how these flus originated, just seeing footage of CAFOs that pack hogs together and shots of live birds caged by the thousands, manhandled and stuffed, live, into plastic bags to suffocate, common sense screams,
Well, no wonder
. Still, too many people believe that humans can behave this way with impunity and believe that we can rely on the factory-food industry to supply us with nourishing food.

Bill Maher cracked up his audience in an HBO stand-up special when he said, “We feed cows too sick to stand to people too fat to walk. And then you wonder why these diseases spring up. Mad cow and AIDS and Ebola. You know nature, it doesn’t ask a lot. It really doesn’t. Don’t grind up the cattle and feed them back to each other… not big requests.”
^194a
This is an example of our affable camaraderie about our food supply. Many people laugh to cope, in part, because they don’t believe they have alternatives. The alternative to factory-produced animal products are natural milk,
meat, and eggs that come from well-treated animals, which are the same healthy historically consumed foods that produced the vibrant good health that Dr. Price documented throughout his research on indigenous peoples.