agribusiness
revere | March 12, 2010When last we visited the US food safety system during the Bush administration it was busy serving up peanut butter with a side of Salmonella. That one caused over 4 thousand product recalls, 700 Salmonella cases and at least 9 deaths. Now it's Salmonella serovar Tennessee in hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP), a common flavor enhancer used in all sorts of food products, including, according to the FDA, soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips and dressings. An important difference -- so far -- is that there are no illnesses traced to the contaminated…
revere | December 11, 2009I got an email yesterday about "a disturbing undercover video showing sick and injured pigs being dragged, beaten, pushed with forklifts and shocked with electric prods by workers to get them onto slaughterhouse kill floors." I'm glad I didn't see it as the whole thing disturbs me enough. I'm not a vegetarian, although for about a year and half Mrs. R. and I decided the only meat we would eat was fish (that's when I discovered I liked fish; for most of my life I thought I didn't and never ate it). The occasion for that meatless except for fish interlude was reading a long New York Times…
grrlscientist | June 12, 2009tags: agribusiness, agriculture, dairy farm, cows, industrial dairy farm, milk, dairy products, streaming video
This is an interesting video of a modern mega-dairy farm, with "all" aspects visible to the public (well, I'll bet not all aspects are visible, since they don't show how sperm is collected, packaged and stored, nor do they show the process of artificial insemination). Visitors get a close up and personal view of the entire process, from the milking barns where they observe cows being milked and fed, and they even can witness live births. This mega-farm also recycles manure into…