Our nation's factory farmed food supply is a public health hazard, responsible for many deaths from bacterial infections, rampant diabetes and poor nutrition, new influenzas, contaminated ground water, etc. There is a growing understanding among the public, thanks to books like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Eating Animals, and movies like Food Inc and King Corn, that factory farming is more than merely cruel to the animals and abusive to and exploitive of the workers, it is reckless and dangerous to our health and costs human lives and hard-earned money. It is unsustainable, and has to be systematically dismantled before it collapses catastrophically, leaving us with not enough food in the food supply to feed the population, and the violence and unrest that always follows behind hunger.
Massachusetts needs to immediately ramp up local food production in order to ensure that we can survive a disruption in the food supply, and so we can we can begin to systematically dismantle factory farm system without causing hunger, before it causes more deaths and diseases.
Let's use the stimulus money that is still unspent to create farms and farming jobs in order to be able to grow enough healthy food for all of us, and to avert the public health disaster that is bound to occur if we don't shut down factory farms. Yes, we'll still need to truck (or train) in most of our food, but the more we can grow ourselves, the more of us survive.
We can all help local farmers by patronizing their farmstands and products. Show your support for local agriculture. Sure you might spend a dollar or two more but isn’t it worth it to get fresher produce and help keep open spaces. When you go to the grocery store notice where products are grown. I’ll spend a little more and buy Cabot cheese because it is produced by New England farmers.
And, more people are doing that, it’s great. But there isn’t enough local farming capacity for even twice as many people to do buy local, let alone ten or twenty times as many. Yes, increased demand is already leading to more supply, farmers markets are growing in number across the state, but the growth is still too slow to really make a difference in factory farms, and it’s still mainly just rich people who have the luxury to eat healthy local food. We need to make a great leap, so that we can survive without factory farmed meat and trucked-in produce, and so that farmers markets become cheaper than Market Basket. That requires an outside stimulus to hurry the process along and subsidize it. It’d create more jobs and be a long term investment.
Silly of me to post such an important suggestion the day before the election.
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p>I suppose I could make another post, but maybe a recent comment will spark a discussion of this idea for use of the Stimulus money.
This is a great topic for our senatorial campaigners to address. I think it is so important to support local sustainable agriculture that is also environmentally friendly to the earth and our health.
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p>Having a food system that is local means that food won’t have to travel as far so farmers will not need to use the same amount of chemicals and preservatives currently used because of the travel distance. It will be fresher and healthier.
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p>Also, it is important for farms to be held to the same scrutiny as our dining establishments. We have public health departments set standards for cleanliness and sanitation within our places of purchase, but not within our places of production. It cannot be any safer for us to eat meat from animals hopped up on hormones and antibiotics while standing in ankle deep (or deeper) feces. We wouldn’t allow that for humans so why would we allow that to be acceptable for our food supply? We are now seeing growing rates of antibiotic resistant infections in our children and this has been linked to the high rates of antibiotics in our food supply.
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p>I’m a vegan by the way.
Not only is it good for your health and kind to animals, and not only does it help vegetable farmers and reduce meat consumption a little bit, but being vegan (as opposed to just eating less meat) and saying that you are vegan contributes to a movement, a voting bloc of consumers that stores and restaurants will notice and accommodate.
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p>Everyone should be vegan. A “to each his own” attitude might be easier socially, but meat-eaters need to be told about the harms factory farms are causing us and told to stop, please.
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p>You watched Food, Inc? Everyone should watch that. It should be shown on PBS every night.