Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The FDA has decided to allow food producers to radiate lettuce and spinach.
Put on your tinfoil hats when you try to figure this one out.
Irradiated meat has been around for years. In February 2000, the U.S.government began allowing food manufactures to irradiate raw meat and meat products. At that time it was doubtful the public would accept meat that had been zapped. Working toward a decade later I’d be hard pressed to find a shopper that knows their meat has been irradiated.
Huh?
If you happen to pick up a package at your local grocery right now, and you see the words, ‘cold pasteurized’ or ‘electronically pasteurized you are holding an irradiated product.
If you are under the age of 40, and you happen to carry a magnifying lens with you, you may just be able to read the fine print. If you’re over 40 odds are you wouldn’t be able to see it even with a magnifying glass.
In 2007 Consumer Reports found that 71% of consumers didn’t want to buy irradiated products.
Don’t worry though, the food that’s been irradiated hasn’t gone radioactive. You won’t turn yellow and start glowing, but don’t take off your tinfoil hat just yet.
It seems the maximum dose of irradiation on meat is 4.5 kiloGrays. A kiloGray is one unit of irradiation. 4.5 doesn’t seem so bad. Not bad until we find out that is the equivalent of about 7 million chestX-rays. That Million with an ‘M’.
Once we approach the 5 or 6 million chest X-ray mark, what’s another 500,000 plus or minus?
Although our meat isn’t glowing, irradiating items with fat in them causes a peculiar ‘radiolytic byproduct’ specific to irradiation. It changes the fat into 2-ACBs. [2-alkylcyclobutanones] 2-ABCs when put into rats cause tumors to grow in their colons.
There has been a tremendous increase in the U.S. in colon cancers since 1999. We would be led to believe that is due to more people being diagnosed with the disease. Maybe, but what are the odds?
Meanwhile…
How about cleaning up our act? Can we not figure out how to keep fecal matter, animal and human, out of our food supply? Can we really not figure that out?
Really?
Labels: 2-ABC, FDA, Irradiated, USDA
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Starting Friday, U.S. lettuce and spinach go nuclear.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Tyson is America’s second largest producer of chicken. The company routinely uses gentamicin. Gentamicin is an antibiotic used to treat infections in humans. Tyson hide the use of gentamicin from the USDA, or in a politically correct statement by Amanda Eamich USDA spokeswoman, “The use of this particular antibiotic was not disclosed to us.” Therefore the statement on the labels of Tyson Chicken “raised without antibiotics” could not be considered “truthful and accurate.”
Which came first; the chicken or the egg?
A Tyson Spokesman Gary Mickelson defended the labels by saying gentamicin was administered to eggs one day before hatching, therefore Tyson played by label rules when it says, “raised without antibiotics”. Presumably Tyson falls on the pro side of Roe v. Wade, the life of a chicken apparently doesn’t begin until it’s born, or hatched.
Apparently the routine use of gentamicin did nothing to prevent at least one flock of hens from coming down with the bird flu, H7N3. Tyson began destroying 15,000 hens from a flock in Arkansas yesterday or Friday or as soon as the virus was discovered, but not announced.
Blame Canada!
Jon Fitch, director of Arkansas’s Livestock and Poultry Commission said, “The speculation at this point in time was that a large group of Canadian geese made home on a pond very near this facility.” “Our speculation is someone stepped into some of those droppings and carried it into the poultry house.”
Fitch said state officials decided against announcing the infection to the general public because the birds tested positive for exposure to the H7N3 strain of the virus and not the H5N1 that ravaged the Asian poultry and killed 240 people worldwide. What the heck makes someone part of the general public?
Tyson is killing the chickens by carbon-dioxide gas.
Meanwhile, 40 people in Texas and New Mexico have fallen ill from eating one of summer’s most anticipated crops, fresh juicy tomatoes. At least 17 of those have been hospitalized. 30 more people have become sick with the same Salmonella infection in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Illinois and Indiana. No word on a Canadian link so far.
In California cases of a rare form of TB, Mycobacterium bovis, are cropping up said to be caused by eating unpasteurized dairy products. Luckily this form of TB isn’t spread through human to human contact but by eating dairy products coming from infected cattle.
The 65% increase in cases is said to be due to smuggled “bathtub cheese” made in home tubs and backyard troughs. We are to believe the cheese is then smuggled to the U.S. and sold by street vendors. Ag officials seized more than 375 pounds of illegal cheese from an open-air market in San Bernardino last year.
Who wants another helping? Save room for dessert!
Labels: Bird Flu, Cheese, Gentamicin, H7N3, Salmonella, TB, Tomatoes, Tyson Chicken, USDA, illegal cheese
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Poison! Unsavory Chicken, Tomatoes and Cheese won’t be on my summer menu.
Friday, January 18, 2008
It’s safe to eat cloned meat, but it’s apparently not safe to sell the stuff. It’s lovely to find out both of these things, only yesterday, since we been doing both of these things for quite some time.
There is mounting evidence indicating Americans and others, (read trade partners) have already been eating meat from the offspring of clones. There are only a handful of cattle cloning companies and oddly each seems to suffer from the same record keeping defect. Is this perhaps because each of these companies was cloned from a defective host company?
These cattle cloning companies have been unable, that’s unable, to keep track of how many offspring of clones have already entered the food supply. Unleashing these cattle into the food supply and into the bodies of unsuspecting consumers is at the least immoral, at the most criminal charges should be brought against all those ‘unable’ to keep track of their lab experiments.
Allowing the cloned animals to enter the food supply before the completion of the FDA’s safety report, in essence, turned the public into an ongoing lab experiment without their knowledge or consent.
Many meat producers have been using semen from prize-winning cloned bulls for more than a few years already.
Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition released a 968-page ‘final risk analysis’ saying, “meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones are as safe as the food we eat everyday.” This is a cruel statement since we’re already eating it everyday.
Photo: Dolly first cloned mammal, stuffed and on display at the Royal Museum of Scotland. Thanks Wikipedia.
Labels: Clone, Cloned, FDA, USDA
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
USDA Approves the Sale of Food from Clones, but USDA Recomends Against the Sale of Food from Clones! Too Late Suckers!
