Green Options

The Pew report recommends a new regulatory framework that treats animal farming no differently than other industries (that cause pollution and potential health risks). It also recommends phasing out any confinement system that restricts “natural movement and normal behavior” (such as calf-to-adult confined feeding stalls) and a ban on antibiotics not intended for disease eradication (i.e., growth modification, such as with veal calves).

I’m sitting in my backyard, surrounded by chickens and children. A couple of dogs periodically pester both species of livestock. (Yes, I did just call my child flock “livestock.”) I’m waiting on the first egg of the day, a pink speckled one from my oldest Americana hen.

This backyard chicken experiment is new to my family, only a 6-month-old endeavor. We wanted our children to know where food comes from. We wanted to know that the eggs we ate were from happy chickens.

But as the number of small chicken “farmers” pop up in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike, our collective grand experiment may be in peril.

Eco-activists often insist that vegetarianism is the only truly earth-friendly diet for humans.  On the other hand, there are many people, honestly trying to live as green as possible, who are not yet ready to take that step completely.  Others of us find that we are just not healthy without some animal protein in our diet, and that there is some logic to the argument than humans are biologically omnivorous.

If you are a meat-eater, whatever your personal reasons may be, the problem still remains — the beef industry is a nightmare.  From enormous factory farms raising animals in horrific conditions, to growth hormones interfering with our bodies, to mad cow disease resulting from herbivores being fed ground-up brains of their kin, to the ecological devastation…  We simply cannot allow ourselves to support this industry by buying its products.

So what is the conscientious carnivore to do?

Research from the University of Gothenburg has revealed that 31% of antibiotics sold in Sweden contain drugs manufactured near Hyderabad, India, where porous wastewater treatment has led to widespread contamination.

The questionable water treatment facilities were found to release levels of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin which were 5 times higher than the daily consumption of the entire country of Sweden. At levels that high, there is an increased risk of breeding “super germs”, drug-resistant bacteria which have evolved an immunity to antibiotics.

Researchers have discovered that the huge pharmaceutical industry in India has led to severely contaminated wastewater downstream from drug factories. How severe? The water contains 150 times the highest levels of contamination found in the United States.