A call for action

this is an important post and really deserves the added attention.

i think i'll bring over the movies/documentaries post to go with this one.

"Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger,
how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man?"
~The Patrician in 'Snuff' by Terry Pratchett

According to a USA Today story Eating can be energy-efficient, too "The production of 1 pound of beef creates 14.8 pounds of C02, the same amount produced by 20.59 miles of driving." Also "It takes about 15 pounds of feed to make 1 pound of beef."

By that calculation when an E. coli contamination caused 545,699 pounds of ground beef to be recalled last week over 8 million pounds of C02 was generated. The carbon emissions equivalent of driving from New York to San Francisco 3,867 times were produced for far worse than nothing. Since it would have taken 8,185,485 pounds of feed to get this tainted beef to market, at 43,655 tons the combined total of grain that was mostly left behind as manure and garbage beef placed in landfill are comparable in weight (but far larger in mass) to the ill fated ocean liner Titanic.

This recent recall that also killed two people sounds extremely wasteful but it is only a drop in the bucket when you look at the bigger picture. Using The Food Poisoning Journal to go back three years, we might be able to find a little comfort in numbers that the beef industry would like to forget. More recalls may imply more testing but the waste!

Beef companies recalled over twenty-nine million pounds of meat in 2007. 2008 saw at least sixteen recalls of beef products, totaling at least 2,361,295 pounds of meat. And to date in 2009, beef companies have recalled close to two million pounds of product, if not more.

So that would make the 493,747,166 pound carbon foot print of recalled beef in the past three years the equivalent of driving 686,909,064 miles or 7.4 astronomical units, about seven and a half trips to the sun in a mid sized sedan. Using the total of 33,261,295 pounds of recalled beef, that calculates out to over 500 million pounds of feed!

To put that in perspective, since people have a slightly similar density to beef , the weight of the total beef recalled in the past three years is that of 174,142 American adult males. Taking the weight of the wasted feed into account, the combined total of feed and beef is the amount of residential trash generated by the 8 million residents of New York City over a 21 day period. That's a lot of garbage.

Pretty pathetic, don't you think?

Doing all your own cooking from scratch is, of course, time-consuming, but well worth it.  I've been doing it for years.  

Cook fresh vegetables, make your own salads and the dressings to go with them.  Need a BBQ sauce, make your own.  Just taking these steps will help you to enjoy more nutrition from your food, plus, you'll feel better.

Unfortunately, when women became a necessary part of the workforce, the corporations capitalized on that by creating all kinds of things that are unhealthy for us and the environment.

Thank you, Kathleen.