06 December 2007

would not, could not, in a plant

hey guess what! big huge industrial meat producers are spending large chunks of change on exciting factory-style decontamination measures!

but guess what else: “If you gave me a million, zillion dollars and said give me a plant that doesn’t have E. coli, I couldn’t do it,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s not about the will. It’s about the ability.”

note the word plant in that quotation. what tyson or cargill is doing to combat e.coli is really not the issue here, because there's nothing they can do, no amount of money they can spend, that will change the fact that the industrial meat model involves taking a huge animal that is full of shit and poison, skinning it, gutting it, and hacking it apart, all on an assembly line that moves...well, really fast.

result: an environment that is so filthy that the meat has to be "bathed in streams of acid" and then vacuumed for microbes. which, eew. eew!

i am feeling very comfortable with my refusal to eat "non-happy" meat today.