If you want to lose weight, the late comic Gilda Radner used to say, eat your lunch next to a car wreck. But this summer all you have to do is eat the food the FDA approves. Recent recalls of pathogen-tainted milk, meat, chicken, and cheese make you wonder if E.coli, campylobacter, salmonella, and listeria are the new four food groups.
Of course just because our food harbors harmful microbes, doesn’t mean it’s not also full of antibiotics, especially since dosing farm animals with antibiotics is why so many resistant microbes are in the food.
Seventy percent of all U.S. antibiotics are fed to farm animals, according to the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (PAMTA) introduced by Louise Slaughter (D-NY) this spring. Over 80 percent of pig and sheep farms and cattle feedlots put antibiotics in the feed or water to produce growth with less feed and to compensate “for crowded, unsanitary, and stressful farming and transportation conditions,” says the bill.
Forty-eight percent of our national streams are tainted with antibiotics, according to the bill, and meat and poultry bought in U.S. grocery stores show “disturbingly high levels of Campylobacter and Salmonella bacteria.”
Nor are the antibiotics only in the stream.
In April the FDA wrote Nappanee, Indiana, dairy farmer Lyle J. Borkholder that a cow he sold “for slaughter as food” had excessive sulfadimethoxine—an antibiotic that affects the thyroid–hypothalamus axis—in its liver and muscle. In May, it wrote dairy farmers Alva Carter Jr. and Allen Carter in Portales, New Mexico, that their cow, also sold as human food, had excessive levels of two other antibiotics: flunixin in its liver and desfuroylceftiofur in its kidneys.
Both farmers were told, “You hold animals under conditions that are so inadequate that medicated animals bearing potentially harmful drug residues are likely to enter the food supply.”
Worse, veterinarians who condemn the use of gentamicin (a tenacious antibiotic that destroys kidneys and hearing in humans) in food animals revealed in a survey in the current issue of Journal of Dairy Science that they believe Ohio farmers routinely and illegally use the drug in the cows they market.
Nor is mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy a distant fear after the largest meat recall in U.S. history last year, with much of the meat destined for school lunch programs.
In its final report on Chino, California-based Hallmark Meat Company in November, the USDA found disease-spreading tissue called Specified Risk Material (SRM) is routinely left on edible carcasses—and Food Safety and Inspection Services staff members believe hand sanitizers kill prions. Not even radiation, formaldehyde, or 18 minutes in an autoclave kills prions, the agent that spreads mad cow disease.
The American Medical Association, Union of Concerned Scientists, Pew Charitable Trusts, most of the antibiotic-taking public, and even Chipotle Gourmet Burritos and Tacos support the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA). But the pharmaceutical industry, also known as the American Meat Institute when it is selling animal drugs, does not.
Not only would the legislation ban its current gravy train of penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, lincosamides, streptograminds, aminoglycosides, and sulfonamides, the pharmaceutical industry wants to replace human drug profits with animal now that insurers are saying about new blockbuster drugs, “You want us to spend what?”
Nor is Big Meat happy. When the FDA announced a ban of just one type of antibiotic—cephalosporins—last year, shills from the egg, chicken, turkey, dairy, pork, and cattle industries stormed the Hill complaining that a ban would threaten their ability to keep animals “healthy.”
But what do they mean by healthy? Veal calves described in a government slaughter manual as “unable to rise from a recumbent position and walk because they are tired or cold”? Tyson chickens, 11 percent of which “die of respiratory insufficiency; their bodies not found until six weeks later—or on slaughterhouse day,” according to Yanna Smith in Namibia’s SPACE Magazine?
Antibiotic-enabled animal “health” was manifest when officials raiding an egg farm in Turner, Maine, in December—on a tip from Mercy For Animals—had to be treated by doctors for breathing distress after entering the egg barns.
Photos show dazed state workers in Hazmat suits leaving the Quality Egg of New England barns as disoriented by the sanitation abuses as the cruelty.
Nor were they hungry for lunch.
Martha Rosenberg is a writer living in Evanston, Illinois.
