The Disgusting Truth About Your Thanksgiving Turkey! Drugged-up Turkey The overuse of antibiotics in crowded, manure-ridden industrial farming warehouses is creating hard-to-kill superbugs that can harm—or kill—humans. Chew on this turkey statistic: The most recently released retail meat sampling arm of the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System found that a strain of Salmonella in one sample of ground turkey was resistant to every single antibiotic tested. The chances of successfully treating an infection with that bug are extremely poor, explains Keeve Nachman, PhD, assistant scientist and director of the Farming for the Future at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Another gross-out factor? The arsenic-based drug nitarsone is still approved for use in turkeys. More than 248 million turkeys were grown and slaughtered in the United States in 2011, with most coming from industrialized concentrated animal-feeding operations, or CAFOs. This factory-farming system creates a whopping 4.8 billion pounds of manure a year and relies on intensely crossbred birds that could never survive in nature. In fact, they grow so fast that many die of heart failure or suffer bone fractures before slaughter. They arent even able to reproduce naturally. Not a good life. Factory turkeys are all hybrid dead-end birds and will die if not processed, says sustainable farmer Frank Reese, owner of Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch. The hybrid obese turkey suffers greatly because of its inability to support its weight on its undersized skeletal system. Turkeys are hard to cook. They can dry out and taste not so great. The food industrys fix? Inject them full of saltwater or a solution containing potassium or phosphate food additives so they become nearly impossible to overcook. However, those solutions can pose problems to people who need to cut back on sodium—some enhanced meats, as theyre called, contain as much salt as an order of fast-food french fries. And doctors are beginning to think that all the phosphates added to processed foods are resulting in increased rates of heart disease and chronic kidney disease. About 30 percent of poultry products on store shelves are enhanced, according to the USDA. Enjoy!
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 16:00:53 +0000
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