Do you sometimes comfort yourself with small, seemingly meaningless rationalizations? Things like, “Yes, I own a tee vee, but I don’t watch it very much – PBS mostly,” or “I’m not a vegetarian, but I try to eat healthy food.” Those statements are more about where we want to be than where we are. I’m that way, too.
There’s a reason to set those kind of goals and I was reminded of it last month as I was reading in Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly that chickens, eggs and catfish from hundreds of producers are contaminated with dioxin. Now, dioxin is one of the most toxic poisons known to science. It is the unwanted byproduct of various industrial processes such as pesticide manufacture, pulp and papermaking and incineration.
How could dioxin have gotten into chickens, eggs and catfish? It seems chicken and catfish feed contains Bentonite to keep it from clumping. Bentonite is familiar to most of us as kitty litter. Already I’m learning more about factory farming than I ever wanted to know. The Bentonite in question is from an open-pit mine in Mississippi. Open-pit kitty litter mines – who would have thought such things exist? Because of its capacity to absorb, Bentonite pits are favorite places for the legal and illegal dumping of hazardous waste.
How long has this been going on? The Environmental Protection Agency started picking up high levels of dioxin in chicken in September 1996, so this has been happening for almost a year. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration banned the sale of chicken, eggs and catfish that contains more dioxin than one part per trillion. The FDA takes great pains to note that the one-part-per-trillion standard is temporary and applies only to chicken, eggs and catfish. That must be a relief to the cattleman’s association, because a 1994 survey of ground beef in New York state supermarkets found 1.5 parts per trillion in the beef.
This dioxin contamination has led to the temporary shutdown of several factory farms for chickens in Arkansas. This in turn caused Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to promptly slay the messenger by accusing the EPA and the FDA of trying to wreck the Arkansas economy. Another Arkansas governor putting people first.
If a horror writer invented a terrible poison, it would look like dioxin. Once created, it is nearly impossible to destroy, once in the environment, it seeks out mammals at the top of the food chain, like humans. Once in our bodies, it attacks our immune system, our reproductive systems and gives us cancer. We pass it to our children.
So instead of preventing dioxin production in the first place, we dump it in kitty litter mines at midnight, and because our industrial food system puts kitty litter in chicken feed, we wind up with dioxin on our breakfast plates. In the middle of all this insanity, our alleged leaders do not seek out the midnight dumpers, they attack the people trying to protect us from dioxin in our eggs, if not in our hamburgers.
So the next time you’re shooting the breeze and say you’re making every effort to eat healthy, take an extra minute to think about it, because now more than ever, we are what we eat.
Playing Chicken
Do you sometimes comfort yourself with small, seemingly meaningless rationalizations? Things like, “Yes, I own a tee vee, but I don’t watch it very much – PBS mostly,” or “I’m not a vegetarian, but I try to eat healthy food.” Those statements are more about where we want to be than where we are. I’m that way, too.
There’s a reason to set those kind of goals and I was reminded of it last month as I was reading in Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly that chickens, eggs and catfish from hundreds of producers are contaminated with dioxin. Now, dioxin is one of the most toxic poisons known to science. It is the unwanted byproduct of various industrial processes such as pesticide manufacture, pulp and papermaking and incineration.
How could dioxin have gotten into chickens, eggs and catfish? It seems chicken and catfish feed contains Bentonite to keep it from clumping. Bentonite is familiar to most of us as kitty litter. Already I’m learning more about factory farming than I ever wanted to know. The Bentonite in question is from an open-pit mine in Mississippi. Open-pit kitty litter mines – who would have thought such things exist? Because of its capacity to absorb, Bentonite pits are favorite places for the legal and illegal dumping of hazardous waste.
How long has this been going on? The Environmental Protection Agency started picking up high levels of dioxin in chicken in September 1996, so this has been happening for almost a year. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration banned the sale of chicken, eggs and catfish that contains more dioxin than one part per trillion. The FDA takes great pains to note that the one-part-per-trillion standard is temporary and applies only to chicken, eggs and catfish. That must be a relief to the cattleman’s association, because a 1994 survey of ground beef in New York state supermarkets found 1.5 parts per trillion in the beef.
This dioxin contamination has led to the temporary shutdown of several factory farms for chickens in Arkansas. This in turn caused Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to promptly slay the messenger by accusing the EPA and the FDA of trying to wreck the Arkansas economy. Another Arkansas governor putting people first.
If a horror writer invented a terrible poison, it would look like dioxin. Once created, it is nearly impossible to destroy, once in the environment, it seeks out mammals at the top of the food chain, like humans. Once in our bodies, it attacks our immune system, our reproductive systems and gives us cancer. We pass it to our children.
So instead of preventing dioxin production in the first place, we dump it in kitty litter mines at midnight, and because our industrial food system puts kitty litter in chicken feed, we wind up with dioxin on our breakfast plates. In the middle of all this insanity, our alleged leaders do not seek out the midnight dumpers, they attack the people trying to protect us from dioxin in our eggs, if not in our hamburgers.
So the next time you’re shooting the breeze and say you’re making every effort to eat healthy, take an extra minute to think about it, because now more than ever, we are what we eat.