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The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. When you feed cows corn (too acidic for cows) and ground up remains of oth
by JDDunn9 14y ago
The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. When you feed cows corn (too acidic for cows) and ground up remains of other cows (cannibalism is unhealthy), keep them in small pens, living in their own manure, that is a hotbed for bacteria. That's why they have to give the meat an ammonia bath in the meat processing plants.
The alternative is to grass feed cows, then they don't get sick very often. Of course that takes longer and requires ~1 acre of land per head of cattle, and people don't want to pay ~1.5-2x as much for meat. So we are stuck with the superbugs.
- lignuist 14y ago> The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. Shouldn't we then just stop "mass production"?
- pyre 14y agoYea. How about going back to the idea that we should eat more other stuff, and less meat instead of the "I want all the meat on my plate right now for pennies on the pound" ideal that people seem to currently have.
- ajb 14y agoOveruse of antibiotics for farms was banned in the EU without drastic changes in the price of meat. In fact, even opponents at the time only claimed there would be a 10% increase: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/234566.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/234566.stm
- whyenot 14y agoBased on the recent horsemeat scandal, it appears there are a lot of "cheaters" when it comes to the EU meat supply. How is the ban enforced?
- icegreentea 14y agoThat 10% may not be accurate. In any case, the EU actually only banned the use of antibiotics as growth promoters, but not as 'preventative medicine'. Furthermore, the level of reporting on actual EU antibiotic use is somewhat spotty - especially given the multinational nature of it all. At best, the ban on growth promotion resulted in an ~10% decrease in antibiotic use. The massive scale on which preventative antibiotic use is applied likely minimized any negative impacts the removal of growth promotion had on actual growth rates. http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2011/a/antibiotics_in_animal_farming.pdf http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2011/a/ant...
- lutusp 14y ago> The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. This is a classic misuse of the word "need". Antibiotics increase growth rates, but is optional. Without antibiotics, the growth rate is reduced, but the drawbacks of antibiotics, some known, some unknown, are not present.
- TheRubyist 14y agoThis is pretty outdated http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/swine/swineday/sday96/psd10-96.htm http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/swine/swineday/sday96/psd10-96.ht... but it indicates but antibiotics are not directly involved in that process. If antibiotics are not directly correlated here, Im wondering if they already tried to measure "sweet spot" of such treatment use (they are able to get the best effect of antibiotics paying as low as possible for them). I'm also wondering about those numbers, they are clearly stable in 3 years row (using data from last 6 years) there might be some methodology that is applied between food companies, like mean 3 years average ?