If the neatly wrapped packages of steaks and chicken breasts or the glossy milk cartons found in grocery stores had full-disclosure ingredient labels, they’d look something like this:
- Corn and soybeans grown in vast monocultures in the U.S. Midwest or in areas of Brazil that were once covered with biologically diverse tropical forests;
- Antimicrobial drugs to prevent the diseases that can result when thousands of animals are crowded together and encouraged to gain excess weight;
- Hormones to boost growth rates;
- Fillers, including sawdust, newspapers, cardboard, and food-processing byproducts, such as almond hulls;
- Ground-up bits of other livestock (chickens are often fed chickens and, despite bans on feeding meat and bone meal to cattle to prevent mad cow disease, cows and steers are still fed blood meal and other ruminant byproducts);
- Cancer-causing agents, including dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs);
- Restaurant food waste;
- Dried and undried animal manure;
- Food contaminated with rodent droppings;
...and a range of other equally unappetizing ingredients.
Danielle Nierenberg
No comments:
Post a Comment