The swine flu that is now an epidemic in the United States is likely traced back to a farm in North Carolina, and its first appearance in Mexico occurred near farms owned by Smithfield Foods. We inject dairy cows with so many hormones that women who drink regular milk are three times more likely to have twins than women who drink organic. The pollution from factory meat growing farms accounts for a fifth of greenhouse gases; that’s more than cars.
All of this occurs while 96% of Americans believe animals deserve some legal protection from harm. We like animals. It doesn’t matter our politics nor our backgrounds, we all agree that animals shouldn’t suffer.
These two ideas, the need to fix and protect the environment and the desire to not have animals suffer, was the common ground that Jonathan Safran Foer sought in his new book Eating Animals. Tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble he read from it, discussed those statistics above and took questions. His desire, he said, was to highlight the consensus we have on the environment and animal suffering to find ways to make better choices.
Foer has received a good deal of media attention for re-writing Fast Food Nation and Making Kind Choices, but that’s not a criticism. It’s Foer’s own take, and every new voice that reaches new minds gets more of society thinking about what we are doing with factory farm meat growing.
We don’t think about its effects on our health, and we don’t think about how it’s hurting our environment. Add Foer to the growing chorus of people who say: when will the mainstream media report this issue?
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1 – The headline of this article has been specifically debunked. It has been clearly shown by the veterinarians involved in the case that the NC swine flu outbreak was in no way associated with the current H1N1 flu virus. The NC flu lacked the avian component and has never been detected again despite years of monitoring.
2 – The very article you link to on the supposed link between twinning rates and rBST states that the link is speculative at best. I would call it a wild blind leap that only a researcher with an agenda would take. There are probably hundreds of possible factors involved besides a difference in milk consumption.
3 – The Pew Charitable Trust most certainly has an agenda. They are not non-partisan in their views on animal agriculture, yet you and others present them as such. Even refering to the members of this group as “Commisioners” is a very thinly veiled attempt to give them the legitimacy of some offcial governmental agency.
You whine that the mainstream media doesn’t present your version of the truth as often as you would like. Maybe it’s because even they would have trouble looking at themselves in the mirror knowing the have truths and out right lies they would be feeding the public. There is nothing the mainstream media like better than good horror stories and nothing they hate more than being caught report inaccuracies. Bloggers never worry about being caught, I guess.
Twitter: davidshankbone
says:
@John Thomson, “Ph.D. Nutrition”
Regarding your response No. 1 (from Wired.com):
Regarding your response No. 2 that “There are probably hundreds of possible factors involved besides a difference in milk consumption.” It’s funny that only with our health and environment–things that should matter most to humans–are we asked to “assume the best” about practices that likely are hurting us. We saw that with anti-global warming arguments. For some reason, with the environment and factory meat growing, we’re supposed to latch on to the smallest doubts to keep doing what we are doing.
Let’s forget the cancer link to dairy; what is most likely the reason for the twins? Why do we play Russian Roulette hoping for the best that the anti-biotics that we feed cows aren’t reducing their efficacy in our own bodies, and that the hormones aren’t changing our physiology.
While your supposed Ph.D. in Nutrition is sort of impressive, I’d prefer to believe a scientist like Ganmaa Davaasambuu, who is a physician (Mongolia), a Ph.D. in environmental health (Japan), a fellow (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), and a working scientist (Harvard School of Public Health):
Regarding your Number 3 – stating that there is an agenda doesn’t prove that there is, it’s just an invalid ad hominem attack. That’s all your response was.
I am President of Waterkeeper Alliance an environmental group and a leader of a national coalition of family farmers, fishermen, environmental and animal welfare organizations, religious and civic associations, and food safety advocates who are fighting Smithfield Foods in the United States. During the past eighteen months, I have come to Poland twice to alert the Polish people about the dangers of allowing Smithfield a foothold in this country, most recently at the request of the Animal Welfare Institute.
Smithfield is one of a handful of large multinationals who are transforming global meat production from a traditional farm enterprise to factory style industrial production. Smithfield is the largest hog producer in the world and controls almost 30% of the U.S. pork market. Smithfield’s style of industrial pork production is now a major source of air pollution and probably the largest source of water pollution in America. Smithfield and its cronies have driven tens of thousands of family farmers off the land, shattered rural communities, poisoned thousands of miles of American waterways, killed billions of fish, put thousands of fishermen out of work, sickened rural residents and treated hundreds of millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.
[Editor's note: This comment was an anonymous cut-n-paste of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s statement on Smithfield Foods that I truncated; to read the full version, go here.]
I have to say I don’t really see any personal attacks in the first post here. On the other hand, I do see a a lot of pseudoscience and heavy bias in this post masquerading as fact. You’re playing the same game as creationists David. You have an ideological point of view that you are trying to tack (rather tenuous) evidence onto post-hoc. That’s not how good science works, and it’s not how a good skeptic should think.
Twitter: davidshankbone
says:
Thanks for the opinion, but as you see I have supplied multiple links to scientific and reliable sources. What a pity your post didn’t do the same.
Well, my intent wasn’t to play a fun game of link bingo with you where we endlessly present each other with each of our most favorite cherry picked research papers from around the web. I’ve played that game and it gets tedious pretty quickly. My point was that you are presenting what is still a very fringe idea about the origin of H1N1 as established fact, because it neatly confirms your open biases about the nature of factory farms (among other things). My point is simply that this is dishonest, you’re putting the cart before the horse. Maybe you’re right, maybe this will turn out to be the zoonotic origin of this particular strain of flu. But the evidence upon which your convictions should await judgment on the matter, shouldn’t be a blog post on wired about a public health mailing list note.
Twitter: davidshankbone
says:
Yes, true, if people are playing games then link bingo is annoying; but the alternative is to just sit around blustering our opinions. At least with links, people show the source of their opinion, and can allow other people to judge the value of the sources and information upon which a person bases his or her view. A good skeptic would supply the source for his or her skepticism.
So okay, I’ll bite: If the North Carolina link is ‘fringe’, then what do you suggest is the mainstream view on its origin?
The mainstream view on its exact origin is simply that we DON’T KNOW with any degree of certainty yet. You wouldn’t believe it listening to the media, but scientists are actually OK with saying we don’t know something when that’s the case. The last concrete evidence in the literature that I’ve seen on the matter, was published in late June, http://bit.ly/6FzTrz and suggested a Mexican origin. I’m sure that if and when we are able to deduce the precise origin of this particular pandemic strain (something I wouldn’t hold my breath for), it will be front cover news on Science, Nature, the BMJ or the NEJM.
Despite Mr. Foer’s smug assertions on Ellen that not only has the origin already been traced to a single farm in NC, but that this is a “very, very well documented fact that nobody is talking about because it makes us feel better about ourselves to assume it came from Mexico”, we don’t in fact know that any of that is true at all. He is a an author and if we’re being charitable, a journalist, not a scientist. I’m not so cynical as to go as far as to say that his confident conspiracy weaving here is merely in the service of book sales, but I doubt it would hurt him in that regard, and the fact that this soundbite (with all its accoutrements of implied racist assumptions and liberal guilt about the plight of Mexicans) has already made the usual blogosphere rounds (Huffpo etc.) suggests that he knows exactly what he’s doing. All of the legit arguments against factory farming notwithstanding, this particular assertion is patently false and on par, at least with respect to lack of evidence, with AIDS denialism and anti-vaccinationist nonsense. By the way, if the opportunity to receive the H1N1 vaccine is availed to you. TAKE IT. Everyone is saying that it should be ‘mild’ and not a problem if you are healthy, but after spending two full days barfing my fucking guts out every hour on the hour last month, I can say there was nothing ‘mild’ about it. You probably will not die from getting swine flu, but I can say that you will certainly wish you were dead.
My brother got infected with H1N1 or Swine Flu in Mexico. He got a mild fever and luckily he did not die.