Inhumane Conditions In The Slaughterhouse Since 1993?? They Told Us California Cows Were Happy Cows!!

With this week-end’s meat recall, 143 million pounds of beef, the largest recall in history, comes an even more disturbing possibility. A video has surfaced that shows inhumane conditions may have occurred since 1993. That’s 15 years!! Did the government do anything to safeguard that consumers eat healthy food? Did the greedy big business slaughterhouse have the least thought about the public school children who would eat tainted meat? Are California cows happy cows as the advertising slogan claims? You decide.

Check out Tad Cronn’s article and look at the video he posted.

Blog Action Day — Environment and Organic Foods

The environment is at the forefront of the news these days, but today the issue was right in front of me at my local grocery store, and the opportunity for an instant consumer poll arose.

As I was looking at my choices in the meat and fish cases, I noticed a woman reaching into the new organic meat section. Having wondered about it myself, I asked her if she had tried it already.

Well, her face lit up and a giant smile emerged. “Yes, it is soooo good,” she said closing her eyes to savor the memory. She told me she was surprised at how much of a difference “organic” made. She had bought organic meat originally as more of a whim than anything else. She now uses it for all her special dishes and said even just a spaghetti dinner is brought to a whole new level. It is well worth the extra money, she advised, especially when considering the health benefits.

Double the money to be exact. The beef had a much more intense color, much darker. I thought it was just like the difference between farmed salmon that is pale despite the artificially added coloring, and wild salmon that is a dark reddish orange.

The label stated, “raised without antibiotics or added growth hormones, in pastures free of chemical fertilizers and fed only certified organic feed.”

And as I thought, “Shouldn’t it always be like that?” I recalled the cattle we see for miles as we go up the state on Highway 5. Those poor beasts do not have a pasture. They are sitting — sardine style — in mud, and the stench is sickeningly powerful even when the cattle have long gone out of sight.

We can’t tell what they are fed when we drive by at highway speeds, but if these cattlemen “care” enough to make their cattle sit in mud and breathe in highway pollution, I can imagine they also care enough to feed them all sorts of hormones, chemicals and perhaps even the best recipe for mad cows.

I’ll be cooking the organic beef tonight for a special birthday dinner and I’ll let you know what we all thought tomorrow.

In the meantime, please let me know what you think of organic meats and foods in general and if you’ve tried organic, how do you think it compared.

Personally, I can’t wait for the prices to get lower as more people start using organic meat and it stops being some exotic product. Good, natural, organic foods should be the norm, not the exception. Where has the pride of our cowboys and cowgirls gone? Isn’t that what America was made of? Our cowboys and our farmers made our country what it is. So why the negative, greedy trend of late?

We need to be conscious of the total disregard for healthy foods by growers and manufacturers across the board unless they think they can “make a buck.” We need to stand up and demand that we not be fed hormones, chemicals, pesticides, cloned meats, engineered flavorings, engineered trouts to turn them into salmons, etc., etc., etc.; the list of Frankenstein science experiments that turn up on our table without our direct approval is too long and much too frightening.

For my related posts, please click on the following:

Salmon + salmon = trout

Popcorn lung

You can’t trust anybody

Farmer’s Market

Blog Action Day is October 15, when bloggers around the web unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. All bloggers post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topics. The aim is to get everyone talking toward a better future.

For more information about Blog Action Day or to participate next year, please go to their website at blogactionday.com. And beside their acronim, B.A.D., it is a good thing.