Salmonella

Image via WikipediaOn Twitter - @coorganic just tweeted "Wright County Egg, one of the two factory farms responsible for the current salmonella scandal, has 7.5 million egg-laying chickens!"

7.5 million. So these chickens, kept in small cages (and they'd need about 500,000 employees to keep those cages well cleaned), lay eggs daily that get sent across the country, packaged in whatever brand package is popular in your area, and you eat it. These chickens never see sunshine, and eat whatever food is given to them -- that is usually a huge mix of foods that no chicken would ever dream of eating naturally.

We are seeing this over and over again with meat, pork, chicken, and egg infestations. Is it any wonder that chickens raised in this environment would get salmonella? And the answer...give them vaccines against salmonella. So rather than treating animals right, giving them feed that they were meant to digest, and keeping them in good conditions, the answer is to vaccinate them and pasteurize the eggs so that they can continue to sell you meat and eggs that are raised in these kinds of conditions.

That's what pasteurization made possible -- back at the turn of the 20th century, they were keeping milk cows in cities in facilities that were unclean, feeding them mash from beer companies, and tuberculosis was happening. So pasteurization, which was meant for beer, made it so they could continue to raise diseased cows in disgusting conditions and still sell you the milk that they make. Hormones make it so they can make more milk than their bodies are capable of handling, and when they get mastitis and other infections, antibiotics that they load them with help keep the cow going, and you from getting sick...but you know, there's pus in your milk.

Not only that, but when animals are kept in these conditions, without sun, with bad feed, no exercise -- there are next to NO nutrients in their milk, meat, and eggs. With all the soy that they feed cattle, it is now a problem that animal fat goes rancid like soybean oil does.

There is an answer. You are not going to be part of a national food poisoning epidemic if you get eggs from as local of a source as you can -- from chickens that were raised cage-free in pastures. The best option is to get your meat, eggs, and dairy from a farmer who is focused on providing to local people. They don't even mind that you look around the farm and see how they do their job and how the animals are treated.

You can complain that these eggs cost $3.00 as opposed to $1.25, but you are getting a ton more nutrients that you need, rather than eggs that are worth next to nothing. Plus the knowledge that the animals were treated humanely while they lived.