The current, August 31, edition of Time Magazine has a plastic covered packet of ground beef on the cover, which has warning label on it: "This hamburger may be hazardous to your health. Why the American food system is bad for our bodies , our economy and our environment -- and what some visionaries are trying to do about it." The headline is "The Real Cost of Cheap Food."
The story inside, by Bryan Walsh, is accompanied by pictures of animals living in disgusting conditions on factory farms. For example there is a picture of piglets, focusing on one particular sad looking little cutie, with the caption, "Stuffed Pigs. On a factory farm 10,000 or more swine are kept in tight conditions -- torture for the animals and risky for us."
A couple of weeks ago, when I blogged mostly about in vitro meat, I also plugged a superb documentary out now called Food Inc. You'll find a trailer to that film on my blog at www.thankingthemonkey.com/blog . If it is playing in your town I hope you will go see it and take all of your friends and family. The current Time Magazine cover story might be considered to be the written alternative for people who can't see the film. It covers a lot of the same ground. I will share the first paragraph here, which will give you an idea as to the article's coverage of animal cruelty, human health issues and environmental devastation, wrought by our current food production system:
"Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into
the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009."
Please check out the article on line at
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html
Email it to all of your friends to spread the word, and so that it stays on the site's "most emailed" list.
And please send a letter to the editor, at letters@Time.com
You might want to discuss any aspect of animal cruelty or sing the praises of vegan diets.
Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Remember that shorter letters are more likely to be published.
I thank Peggy Reist for making sure we saw this story.
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)
Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com for a fun celeb-studded promo video and information on Karen Dawn's book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals," which was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of 2008." And check out Karen's new blog at www.ThankingtheMonkey.com/blog !
To discontinue DawnWatch alerts go to http://www.DawnWatch.com/nothanks.php
----------------------------------------
You are subscribed to DawnWatch using the following address:
example@example.com
Date: Thu Aug 27 17:51:55 2009
