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From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Sep 25, 2006 8:24 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Artificial hormones in cows’ milk on Boston Globe front page — 9/25/06

The Monday, September 25 Boston Globe has a front page story headed, “2 Dairies to End Use of Artificial Hormones; Hope to Compete with Organic Milk.”

It opens:

“The region’s biggest dairies are rushing to rid their bottled milk of artificial growth hormones in a bid to draw back customers who have switched to organic milk.

“Dean Foods, which operates the Garelick plant in Franklin, and H.P. Hood, which operates a plant in Agawam, are demanding that regional farmer cooperatives supply them with milk from cows that haven’t been injected with synthetic hormones that boost milk production.

“Over the next few weeks, jugs of Hood and Garelick milk with labels pledging ‘no artificial growth hormones’ should start filling supermarket shelves a strategy the dairies hope will satisfy the chief concern of consumers going organic and do so at less than half the retail price of organic milk.”

Demonstrating that artificial growth hormones are not the only concern of organic milk buyers, we read:

“But Nasser Hussain, a teacher from Boston, said he buys organic milk largely because he opposes industrial farming. ‘Organic to me means they let the cows out of the pen,’ he said.”

(Note: Unfortunately that is somewhat misleading. An August 20 front page story in the Chicago Tribune shared complaints that cows on large organic dairy farms are hardly able to graze. It referred to guidelines being sought by the Organic Standards Board that would organic require dairy cows to get about one-third of their diet from pasture four months out of the year — i.e. one ninth of their diet from pasture. See http://tinyurl.com/mz56s for more on that Tribune story.)

You’ll find today’s front page Globe story online here OR http://tinyurl.com/o6blp

It opens the door for letters about the treatment of cows on dairy farms, and from those who have found happy substitutes for cow’s milk.

A nice source of information is http://www.dumpdairy.com

The Boston Globe takes letters at letter [at] globe.com

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

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. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Sep 25, 2006 8:11 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times editorial condemns pig industry consolidation 9/23/06

The Saturday, September 23, New York Times, included an editorial (the paper’s official editorial opinion) headed “The Ultimate Agricultural Efficiency.”

It opens:

“Any American history of pork — the meat, that is — shows a steady concentration of more and more hogs in the hands of fewer and fewer producers. That is what modern agricultural “efficiency” looks like. It’s good for the bottom line of the big industrial players, but bad for farmers, hogs, the environment and, ultimately, consumers. That history took another step in the wrong direction when Smithfield Foods — the biggest pork packer — agreed to buy the second biggest pork packer, Premium Standard Farms.”

The piece explains that as pig farming operations are increasingly consolidated, small farms are dying out, and pig farmers are becoming “janitors in confinement barns across rural America where the packers’ huge herds of pigs are crammed in stalls to live out their short lives.”

The reference to pigs being crammed into stalls points to the cruelty of factory farming, but the piece doesn’t focus on it, which is why letters to the editor can help. Since it was photographs of pigs living in individual in stalls so small that they cannot even turn around that first piqued my interest in animal rights, I urge anybody who has not seen those photos to check out the photo gallery at http://www.FactoryFarming.com .

You can read Saturday’s New York Times editorial on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/opinion/23sat3.html.

You can send a letter to the editor describing the cruelty of modern farming or singing the praises of Fakin Bacon. (Not literally — in your own words please.)

The Times takes letters at letters [at] nytimes.com

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

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. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Sep 22, 2006 5:44 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times op-ed points to cattle farming as cause of E.coli spinach care 9/21/06

This week, America shunned spinach after some was found to carry a deadly strain of E.coli bacteria. The Thursday, September 21, New York Times, however, included an op-ed, by Nina Planck, author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why,” who suggests that the spinach farmers are not the culprits.

In the piece titled, “Leafy Green Sewage” (pg A31) Planck writes:

“Indeed, this epidemic, which has infected more than 100 people and resulted in at least one death, probably has little do with the folks who grow and package your greens. The detective trail ultimately leads back to a seemingly unrelated food industry — beef and dairy cattle.

She explains that E. coli O157:H7 is different from most E.coli which is harmless to humans. She writes:

“Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It’s not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms.”

And she discusses “the contamination of ground water, flood water and rivers — all irrigation sources on spinach farms — by the E-coli-infected manure from cattle farms.”

She writes:

“The United States Department of Agriculture does recognize the threat from these huge lagoons of waste, and so pays 75 percent of the cost for a confinement cattle farmer to make manure pits watertight, either by lining them with concrete or building them above ground. But taxpayers are financing a policy that only treats the symptom, not the disease, and at great expense. There remains only one long-term remedy, and it’s still the simplest one: stop feeding grain to cattle.”

And she concludes

“California’s spinach industry is now the financial victim of an outbreak it probably did not cause, and meanwhile, thousands of acres of other produce are still downstream from these lakes of E. coli-ridden cattle manure. So give the spinach growers a break, and direct your attention to the people in our agricultural community who just might be able to solve this deadly problem: the beef and dairy farmers.”

You’ll find the full piece on line here. It addresses a danger of factory farming from the standpoint of public health but does not mention animal welfare. Most cattle, fed on corn, live pathetic lives. Contrary to the images we remember from childhood of animals grazing in meadows, those raised for beef and milk today live in disgusting feedlots, often knee-deep in their own manure, with no protection from the elements. In 2002 the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story, ‘This Steer’s Life,’ in which Michael Pollan documented the life of a steer from birth to death. That piece is available on Pollan’s website. It is well worth reading.

Planck’s op-ed deserves some appreciative letters to the editor against factory farming. Feel free to sing the praises of a veggie diet.

The New York Times takes letters at letters [at] nytimes.com

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. And please be careful not to use any exact phrases from this alert in your letters; the editors wish to receive original reactions from their readers.

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. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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I came across this website during my blog reading recently, and I thought it could be useful to Hell Food readers. It’s called http://www.healthydiningfinder.com. The site is run by a company that has been around since 1990 evaluating restuarant nutrition.

The site allows you to search for restuarants by zip code, limiting searches by nutritional or cuisine requirements. It seems to have a special highlight for vegetarian options. However, the restuarant database is far from comprehensive, though it is growing.

I suggest you give it a try. I know I will on my next trip.

New in Grist:

The vast majority of American schools offer highly processed, heat-n-serve school lunches — and we wonder why schoolkids feast on Play-Doh and glue. Now, the corporate world that brought mystery meatloaf, neon vegetables, and half-frozen milk to generations of young palates is hoping to conquer the potentially lucrative school-breakfast market. Tom Philpott considers how we got into this unappetizing situation, and chews over what could be done to remedy it.

You can read the whole piece here.

I happened to be at the checkout line at Sam’s Club the other day, buying my usual 20 gallon jars of mustard and ketchup, when I noticed a mother ahead of me in line. She had her two little fat kids with her, begging for soda. Nothing says good parenting like buying 44 oz Cokes for eight year olds. In addition to the soda being bought, I noticed that she had two cases of Ding Dongs in her cart.

Ding Dongs are supposedly a baked good, however, they almost look like they were created with injection molding. In any case, I decided to look at the nutritional information of this “treat.”

I wasn’t surprised to find that a single serving of a Ding Dong is considered one whole Ding Dong, and that the single serving contains 368 calories, 11 g of fat, and 45 g of sugar. Technically, Ding Dongs are low in cholesterol, but who cares about that, when each Ding Dong is a chocolate brick on the road to “Diabetes City”. The picture on the box is somewhat nauseating. What is that white filling made up of anyway?

The mother either didn’t know about how bad Ding Dongs are for her kids, or just wanted to kill her kids with sugar. Judging by the round shape of her kids, I’m not sure which.