TO MEAT OR NOT TO MEAT - THAT IS THE QUESTION

On a recent post from Blog Fodder, a beef expert from Canada now living in the Ukraine, he discussed the fear, being disseminated by the media, about the safety of the beef meat supply and more especially the addition of ‘pink slime’ into ground beef. 

This post is well worth reading, and presents the argument for safely obtaining the maximum food product from a beef animal.   He also makes the passive argument that such hyped scare tactics financially effects beef suppliers and results in businesses failing and the loss of jobs (at a time when unskilled jobs are critical.)

I do concede the point that the maximum product should be extracted from a commercial beef animal (animal suffering and killing aside – we are by nature omnivores and the demand for meat will continue.)  

I also concede that with the world population doubling every forty years food production on a commercial scale will soon become the only way to supply the food needs of the countless billions.  

I do believe, however, that our food (and water – a need for another post) have had unintended effects on the human body.  

When I was young, a boy six foot tall was considered unusually tall.  Today, when I attend the gym at the local university I notice a large percentage of the young men are six-four or larger.  The bulk of many school age children seems massive compared the children of my day; and, I have heard statements that young girls are reaching puberty at a much younger age.    All of this, I believe, is the consequence of growth hormones that are regularly added to the commercial animals that compose our meat supply.  

Doctors are concerned about humans building up immunity to antibiotics; and yet eighty percent of our antibiotics are supplied to our meat industry and administered to the animals we eat. 

The reality is that people will have to come to terms with the manipulation of food animals in order to produce the maximum weight in the shortest time; the processing of animals to obtain the maximum yield of edible product from each animal; and, we will have to accept the problems and solutions inherent with large numbers of animals being raised in confined or limited spaces.  

Because small family farms can not compete with industrial farming, we may be the last generation to appreciate clean, organic, locally raised products available at an affordable price. 

Commercial food production is conducted for a maximum profit margin – but it must have independent oversight in order to insure a safe product.  This is a scary thought when today the Republican Party is hell-bent to defund the Food and Drug Administration that is charged with the oversight of our food production. 

the Ol’Buzzard

MARVELOUS CURES SOON TO BE AVAILABLE

Oops!

During the twelfth century there are records of the Christian church forbidding the practice of medicine.   People who attempted to comfort the sick and the dying were often proclaimed witches or heretics and tortured and killed.   Though opiates were available they were forbidden for the relief of pain for the seriously injured.   It was felt that pain was God given and to interfere with it was heresy.   Priest often administered treatment by touching the infirmed with the bone of a saint, and with prayer. 

This was the teaching drawn from a book that was written by a primitive desert people who considered a wheelbarrow cutting edge technology.

In 1998 biologist James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin cultivated the first line of human embryonic stem cells.   The work was revolutionary and offered potential cures for cancer, Alzheimer, Parkinson, HIV; as well as the ability to grow and replace damaged organs and tissue.   But this curative research required the destruction of human embryos.

When our President George W. Bush, supported by the fundamentalist ignorant still clinging to two thousand year old religious dogma, restricted the use of human embryonic stem cells the genetic advancement in the treatment of human infirmity screeched to a stop.  

In the years since, numerous biologists have attempted to create compatible stem cells by regressing adult human cells back to an embryonic stage.  In every case when these regressed cells were tested they were attacked by the human immune system and destroyed.  

The misconception promulgated by the religious right has been that stem cells would be procured from aborted fetuses and that women would become pregnant in order at sell their fertilized eggs for money; again, stirring up the female phobia of the Republican base.   In actuality the cells would have been produced in a Petri Dish that would never have advanced to a fetus. 

The fetus obsession and scientific ignorance of the Republican base has retarded our medical research and condemned the suffering and dying to new decades without relief. 

But after all, suffering is God’s design, and all advancements of science must be held suspect – or denied if it doesn’t mesh with the teachings of the Primitive Age Tome that should rule all our lives.

  the Ol'Buzzard