Jonathan Safran Foer was on Stephen Colbert last night.  He is a master of good sound bites, including that the turkeys raised on farms and sold in the grocery store can’t have sex.  I looked this up and found Wendy Gordon, a self-described “Green consumer movement leader” at Simplesteps.org:

As their name implies, Broadbreasted White turkeys are valued for their large, meaty breasts, which breeding has enhanced though the process has rendered them virtually infertile. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, without artificial insemination performed by humans, this variety of bird would become extinct in just one generation.

Of course, Wendy also has a Huffington Post blog (whatever that means).

I found a story on NPR’s All Things Considered, “Preserving Historic Breeds in Kansas“.  Most of it is old news–the historic breeds have rebounded dramatically–but it also backs up that the turkeys we buy from the store can’t have sex.  The  hens are genetically bred to be so fat that they have to be artificially inseminated; the males can’t get to the holes.

On Wikipedia  the Broad Breasted White article was unhelpful, but the “Heritage turkey” article had this:

To meet perceived consumer demand and increase producers’ profit margins, the goal in turkey farming became the production of the maximum amount of breast meat at the lowest possible cost. As a result of selection for this single trait, 70% of the weight of mass market turkeys is in their breast. Consequently, the birds are so heavy that they are completely incapable of reproducing without artificial insemination, and they reach such extreme weights so quickly their overall development fails to keep pace with their rapidly accruing muscle mass, resulting in severe immune system, cardiac, respiratory and leg problems.

For over 35 years, the overwhelming majority of the 280 million turkeys produced in North America each year have been the product of a few genetic strains of Broad Breasted White. The breeding stock for these birds are owned by just three multinational corporations: Hybrid Turkeys of Ontario, Canada, British United Turkeys of America in Lewisburg, West Virginia, and Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms in Sonoma, California.

The sources for the above paragraph are Storey’s Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds and this New York Times article.

Image:  My photograph for Wikipedia of Jonathan Safran Foer at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival; also see this post for 2009  Creative Commons images of him promoting Eating Animals.

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?

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.