Say NO to antibiotic-laced meat!

Just Say No to Antibacterial Burgers

By Ezra Klein

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

"This column is based on a single and quite extraordinary statistic: Food animal production accounts for 70 percent -- 70 percent! -- of the antibiotics used in the United States. That doesn't even include the antibiotics used for animals that actually get sick. That figure is for "non-therapeutic use" such as growth promotion and disease prevention."

"The heavy reliance on routine antibiotic use is a byproduct of the way we raise animals for food: packed into dim and dirty enclosures where they live amid their own filth, eat food that they haven't evolved to digest, and are pretty much stacked atop one another. Most human beings I know can hardly spend three hours on a plane without contracting a case of the sniffles. "

These quotes are excerpted from an article on our country's overuse of antibiotics in animal products. It's pretty horrific to see how these animals are treated. You can find more information here. (Note: Not for the squeamish!) I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but I do believe in humane treatment of animals. Even from a non-emotional standpoint, do you really want to be eating meat from an animal that's been confined, bulked up too early so it can't stand up under it's own weight, or injured by other nearby animals because they're so crammed together? I don't! But that is the state of our country's food supply.

Finding low-priced food is spectacular, but when the trade off is your future health, it's pretty clear that you paid too much for that cheaper food.