In our modern world of medicine cabinets and pharmaceuticals, our food is not omitted from the pill-bottle dependency. Which means, the meat we eat is infused with chemical stimulations such as antibiotics.
In this Associated Press report on antibiotics in pigs, sent to me from my purveyor of hormone-free, farm-raised, close-to-home pork and poultry, farmers talk about the effect of raising pigs on antibiotics – including human resistance to medical treatment, which killed over 65,000 people in 2008.
According to the research, 70% of antibiotics in the United States is used on farm animals, 13% of those healthy animals.
We're talking dollar$, not sense.
I wonder -how much money is the pharmaceutical industry making, first providing antibiotics for our food, then alternative antibiotics for us when we get sick and can no longer be treated by antibiotics we now have resistance to from eating on a regular basis?
Besides that – How many of us are being treated with antibiotics without even knowing? What is the effect of injesting antibiotic infused meat for people with deadly allergies to things like penicillin? What other "biotics" are we killing in our race to exterminate all "bio" from our food system?
And most importantly – How it is possible we as a society and meat consumers specifically are provided with such product without labelling? I think it is an atrocity that products be labelled "hormone-free" "antibiotic free" instead of a list on each package of food of exactly what it is I am buying. I want the package to say, "This pork chop is generously packed with doses of antibiotics. Eat at your own risk."