Thank you Steve, I admire your stance on the issue and can agree the way our industry processes and produces is most harmful. Greed is almost always the underlying factor. Mass production- becoming so large, and motivated by profit, we neglect things like compassion. This is true in most any industry, and dominates East and West.
Factory-farmed animals are fed cheap, mass-produced grains because it fattens them quickly at low cost. That means they're eating GMOs and pesticides. They're pumped full of hormones and antibiotics because these make them bigger and fatter, too. And it gets scarier: Under federal regulations, it's perfectly legal to feed livestock and poultry things you would never eat or want any animal to eat. Yet 'additives' that are allowed under the law include 'feather meal' (ground-up feathers); both dried and unprocessed 'recycled' animal waste (that's poop to you and me); food adulterated with waste from rodents, insects, or birds; 'polyethylene roughage replacement' (that's plastic filler); bacteria, including some that are resistant to antibiotics; toxic chemicals such as PCBs and dioxin; and a long list of other substances that don't sound like anything you would want to feed an animal.
Taken from, "Food: What The Heck Should I Eat?" By Dr. Mark Hyman
http://spiritualportal.net/index.php/topic,8288.msg40667.html#msg40667I watched a show last night that revealed just how much micro-plastics we eat a year. It's in almost everything, even sneaking in the vegetarian diets. Literally we have an entire jar full of micro-plastics in our system.
I suspect even if the world was mostly vegetarian there would still be much larger issues- where meat is not solely to blame for the underlying problem of greed.
