The Secret Life of Poultry Products

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Secret-Life-of-Poultry-by-Karen-Davis-Chickens_Illness_Investigation_Poultry-Processing-140724-532.html



Chickens in a shipping container.

The Secret Life of Poultry Products
By Karen Davis
General News 7/24/2014 at 12:47:45

Recent investigations of poultry production plants in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. have revealed a world of suffering and filth so dirty and deep that no dystopian fantasy can compare with how a package of slaughtered birds ends up in a store. To view these investigations, see Pilgrim's Shame: Chickens Buried Alive , Secret Video Shows Baby Turkeys Ground Up Alive by Butterball and Revealed: the dirty secret of the UK's poultry industry.
Reports on the extent to which poultry products are covered with Salmonella, Campylobacter, and E. coli bacteria show the power of invisible sources of contamination to cause great suffering in consumers and handlers of poultry products, including a range of nervous system and joint diseases, even death, after the invisible causes of infection have seemingly vanished.

Once upon a time, disease-causing microbes were just a theory. They were invisible, yet they existed and were finally proven facts. But there is an additional invisibility of suffering linking people to the overall pathogenicity of commercial poultry production.

The suffering of chickens and turkeys in recent exposures of the hatcheries and slaughterhouses from which they emerge to be eaten, and the sacrifice of sensitive feelings in the human beings who work in these places, cannot be observed without a profound sickness of spirit in the pit of oneself. This sickness can linger and spread through life as insidiously as any commonly identified source of chronic unwellness. Like the bacterial causes of foodborne illness, the causes of this emotional illness, however invisible, are real.

If commiseration with animals raised for food is still largely taboo in conventional society, I think most people are aware, deep down, that a piece of animal flesh incorporates a terrible story. Often they will say, "Please don't tell me about it; I don't want to know," meaning they don't want to hear what they already know. But let us not be silent. More than a few people believe that when we eat the flesh and eggs of creatures who have been treated with complete cruelty, we assimilate something of their experience and carry it forward into our own lives. In Diet for a New America, published in 1987, and as timely now as it was then, John Robbins asks us to consider the consequences of eating the results of the misery he describes in birds raised and slaughtered for food.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. "The Jungle", now poultry-based. nt

[kellywestlund]

2. This article highlights the growing need to source our food locally and invest in local agriculture

Every year billions of dollars are spent importing food that could be grown locally, especially where I live in Wisconsin. By investing in local agriculture we create jobs in farming, distribution and processing, and can better understand the trip our food takes from farm to home.