American Meat Is Even Grosser Than You Thought

In the focus on E. coli and salmonella, meat contaminated by heavy metals, veterinary drugs and pesticides has been slipping through the bureaucratic cracks.

'In 2008, Mexican authorities rejected a shipment of U.S. beef because the meat exceeded Mexico's regulatory tolerance for copper. The rejected meat was returned to the United States, where it was sold and consumed, because the U.S. has no regulatory threshold for copper in meat.

Incidents like this are why the food safety arm of USDA, known as the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), is under USDA scrutiny. While the public has gotten used to microbes like E. coli and salmonella threatening the nation's meat supply, and while food safety agencies make food-borne illness a high-profile priority, contamination of meat by heavy metals, veterinary drugs and pesticides has been slipping through the bureaucratic cracks.'

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Not for the squeamish or those who wish to remain in denial about the meat they eat.

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Family-farm advocates call for U.S. to ‘bust up big ag’

Americans Need to Regain Control of Food Production - Down with Government/ Corporate Food Fascism and Up with Community Based Food Democracy.

Say NO to Factory Farms!

Minnesota farmer decries consolidation of seed industry at Iowa Town Hall.

'Fred Dowered, a Minnesota farmer, told the audience that when he began farming 34 years ago his state had 50 seed companies. Now, however, there are only four.

“When there were 50 seed companies, the price of seed corn was held to its own. Now they just let it go rampant,” he said.

That’s a situation that Jim Kalbach, an Adair Couty grain farmer, knows all too well.

“Monsanto soybean seed was $31 a bag last year. Now they jumped it up one third to $41 a bag — in one year,” he said. “That’s highway robbery.”

Many of the men and women in the audience also took exception to the belief that the U.S. food supply boasts the most healthy and inexpensive food in the world.

“The two things we are going to hear over and over on Friday is that we’ve got the cheapest and safest food supply in the world. Both of these statements are damn lies” said Gary Klicker, a southern Iowa producer that can trace his family’s agricultural roots to 1666.

Klicker believes that taxpayers will be out “billions if not trillions” of dollars cleaning up rivers, nourishing soil and dealing with abandoned animal confinement facilities.'

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Five Million Pounds of Meat Can’t Be Wrong, or Can It?

Just say, NO!

'The truly shocking thing about the latest and exceptionally massive recall involving Huntington Meat Packing Inc. out of California (read the details here) is not the fact that more than five million pounds of beef and veal were recalled, nor is it that “the company made the products under unsanitary conditions failing to take the steps it had determined were necessary to produce safe products,” and it is not even the mere fact that the recall involves immeasurable amounts of potentially tainted and/or compromised meat that was sold over the last 12 months and has likely been consumed ages ago. No, the truly shocking aspect of all of this is that within a week, this seeming act of gross negligence will be all but forgotten.'

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The Dark Side of the Dairy Industry

'The story of dairy's downhill slide is familiar throughout the food world. "There has been a real drive to get cheaper and cheaper food and that is one factor that led to factory farming, not only in the dairy industry but throughout all of agribusiness. We think of food as being cheap but in reality there are a lot of external factors that we don't really pay for when we go the supermarket," said Shapiro. "Those are increased animal suffering, increased environmental degradation, and increased food safety risks."'


'The vast majority of dairy cows in the U.S., around 75 percent, will never graze in pasture and most won't spend any time outside. And most cows that are outside aren't nibbling on greener pastures, but are instead confined in barren dirt lots, a report by Farm Sanctuary details. This will sound familiar if you know anything about beef cattle raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).'

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