Food Inc- Sadie

(relocating my comment)
I have been partially vegetarian for most of my life. I lived in England in the middle of the Mad Cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy) outbreak. As a result, we ate very little beef. Shortly after returning to the USA, I ate less and less beef, as well as pork, until I stopped completely. At first it was because I didn't like the taste of beef, but as I grew up, it became an issue of health. I started understanding the affects food can have on your body, especially meat, due to it's origins. Now that I'm older, I have looked at many research stories and documentaries focusing on the unsanitary living conditions cattle, poultry, and other animals are raised in. Some people might argue that it doesn't matter how the animals live, it doesn't affect the food made out of them. I disagree. Chemicals get absorbed, especially when they are being fed their own excrement and ground up dead animals, a recipe for massive bacteria. People wonder how something like BSE can occur, but I think it's quite obvious. If you raise your food in filth, it will become filthy. Couple this with our hypersanitary loe for anti-bacterial products, and you've eliminated immune systems defenses and sicced lethal bacteria on our weakened immune systems. The part in Food Inc. where the poultry farmer is picking up dead chickens really shocked me. In contrast to the farmer who prided himself on a small operation where the animals eat what they would naturally and are killed on a much smaller scale, it really seems like an obvious choice as to which one I would buy when I was eating meat. I hope benevolent farming practices become more popular, and that the existing ones hold their ground (like Stoneyfield Organics). As long as they continue to value impact over income, maybe the food industry can change.