Interesting Info (Part One)

This is the first of three blog entries about interesting (well, at least I think so) facts I learned from Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals...

• "On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime."

• "Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E.coli and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected." (He's talking about factory farm birds here which account for 99% of the chicken Americans consume). 

• According to Scott Bronstein (a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who conducted interviews with over 100 USDA poultry inspectors from 37 plants) "Every week, millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers." Mmmmm.

• Chickens are frequently injected with "broths and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. 

• The original strain of influenza is thought to have originated from migratory birds and the original case of H1N1 can be traced back to a factory farm housing hogs in North Carolina, not Mexico. (Safran Foer goes into a very extensive and convincing correlation between increased factory farming/meat consumption and the rise of flu epidemics. I don't have enough space to go into it here--you have to read his book!). 

The fourth point here made me think of something I never thought of before I became vegetarian. Almost always, we cook meat with some type of sauce or marinade. Or we put ketchup on a burger or mustard on a hot dog. Is there anyone who actually likes to eat meat by itself? Also, we have to be so careful handling raw meat because of possible disease transmission yet pop it in the oven or on the grill and 30 minutes later its "scrumptious." Hmmm.