The sustainable food movement is transforming both public opinion and the food industry. Join us in our mission to educate and advocate for a better solution to the current state of industrial agriculture which is placing human health and the health of our planet in great peril. There is a better way forward!
Dirt The Movie
DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: "When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked." But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action.
Author Anne Lappé speaks candidly about the connection between food and climate in her latest groundbreaking book, Diet for a Hot Planet. “The food system is responsible for as much as one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions are particularly alarming because the food sector is the biggest driver behind methane and nitrous oxide emissions, which have global warming effects many times more powerful than carbon dioxide,” Lappé reports in the book. Find it on Amazon.
Farm Animal Protection Action Alert
Support the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (HR 4733). Tell your representatives you do not want your tax dollars to support outdated, inefficient and cruel practices currently being widely used. The Act The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (HR 4733) would prohibit the government from purchasing any animal products from animals raised in veal crates, gestation crates and battery cages – three systems that deny animals on farms enough room to even stand up, turn around or lie down.
Hy Line, Pioneer in Producing the Egg-laying Machine
Hy Line is a leader in chicken genetics. Their mission is to “to breed the most efficient laying hens that will produce the majority of eggs worldwide to nourish a growing population.” When asked how this race for efficiency effects the welfare of hens, we got no response. Studies show that the intensive egg laying is not at all natural and leads to suffering, disease and premature death. Go to Hy Line’s website to learn more.
Is Meat from Cloned Animals on your plate?
In the US we have no way of knowing the answer. There are no requirements that meat be labeled as being from a cloned animal. Meanwhile the EU moves ahead with a call to ban the sale of meat from cloned animals and the US food industry threatens to sue the EU via the WTO on the basis of unfair trade practices. Will the FDA support the American public’s right to know or the food industry’s aggressive campaign to keep cloned labeling from the public? Read more.
“Highlights of Sustainable Agriculture in the Media and Film” is a video montage that will be presented for the first time at GreenWeek in Chicago on July 17 from 7 to 9pm. Take a sneak preview below.
Enjoy the free food and drink at the block party downstairs also! For complete details on this event and to rsvp, please see http://bit.ly/bMq5GF.
Two days ago, ABC News Niteline (and most of the other major news networks) reported on a groundbreaking investigation. The undercover investigator was hired as a worker at Conklin Dairy Farms in Ohio and recorded footage over the course of four weeks of workers maliciously and repeatedly abusing defenseless baby calves and female cows with pitchforks and crow bars and stomping on them with their boots when they were down, leaving them critically wounded and wailing in pain. Gary Conklin, the owner himself, is even seen forcefully kicking a constrained cow repeatedly in the head and neck, setting an example for his staff. While arrests are being made, animal cruelty laws are almost nonexistent in Ohio and many are calling for nothing short of a shut down of this large operation.
Numerous agricultural watchdog groups are sounding the alarm that this kind of cruelty has become widespread and systemic in the booming factory farm industry that now raises some 10 billion farm animals a year and supplies American consumers with as much as 98% of their meat and dairy products. This high stakes industry is dominated by four giant corporations who pursue profit at any cost and operate almost free of regulation and oversight.
Some may ask: Why focus on animal abuse when there is so much suffering int he human population? The connection between human forms of abuse and animal abuse is undeniable, according to numerous recent studies on the subject. Connecting the dots of abuse is critical to prevention.
Will you help by getting involved to end this pattern of violence― prosecuting offenders, rehabilitating them and ultimately keeping them away from situations that encourage abusive behavior?
Here’s what we can do:
Sign the petition calling for the shut down of Conklin Dairy Farms. Click here.
Contact the prosecuting attorney in the case, Mr Aslaner at 1-937-644-8151
Spread the word, forward this email on.
Avoid purchasing dairy and meat products from large producers like Dean’s, Tyson, Purdue, Smithfield, Nestle, and large supermarkets or fast food chains. If there are no claims on the package, assume they come from factory farms.
Post a comment on the ABC Niteline page, thanking them for bringing this story to our attention and tell them to keep reporting on this issue
Donate to Mercy for Animals., the Chicago-based organization that conducted the investigation and is releasing the news to the press.
Here’s what people are saying about this investigation
“This is probably the most gratuitous, sustained, sadistic animal abuse I have ever seen. The video depicts calculated, deliberate cruelty, based not on momentary rage but on taking pleasure through causing pain to cows and calves who are defenseless,” Dr. Bernard Rollin, distinguished professor of animal science at Colorado State University
“The deplorable conditions uncovered at Conklin Dairy Farms highlight the reality that animal agriculture is incapable of self-regulation and that meaningful federal and state laws must be implemented and strengthened to prevent egregious cruelty to farmed animals” —Mercy for Animals.
Some Additional Media Coverage of this case:
Read Jamie Lee Curtis’ open letter to owner Gary Cocklin and his staff.
Sign our petition to voice your support for greater truth and transparency in food labeling!
The FDA is currently conducting an evaluation of food labeling and seeks public input. The public comment period closes on July 28th.
While consumers are showing increasing concern about the origins of their food, food manufacturers remain clearly out of step with the times, fabricating even more fictional marketing claims than ever before, while withholding the facts most vital to our health and the health of our environment. This has led to widespread confusion in the supermarket.
It's time to send the FDA and food industry leaders a clear message: Just give us the important facts about our food and stop spreading confusion and misinformation with frivolous marketing claims!
Come clean about biotech practices used in our food. Consumers assume that food in their supermarkets has been raised via conventional farming methods that have been in use for hundreds of years. Nanotechnology and genetic engineering are two major ways the biotech industry has transformed agriculture and food. We have the right to OPT OUT of this experiment. But only through proper labeling is this possible!
Come clean about how our meat and dairy products are raised. Consumers expect meat and dairy products to come from animals raised on farms, not on factory production lines! With an estimated 96% of our meat and dairy raised on factory farms that are some of the world's biggest polluters, proper labeling is critical to making safe, environmentally-sound and humane purchases!
Come clean about pesticides and other toxic chemicals in our food. Consumers have the right to choose products that are free from pesticides or other toxic chemicals that make it into our food. The President's Cancer Panel just released a 240-page report that not only finds that the 80,000 chemicals in use have been grossly underestimated and understudied, it questions the very premise of "safe until proven harmful" under which our system operates.
I will submit the petition results to the FDA before the July 28 deadline. Please act now to ensure your voice is counted!
For more detailed information on the FDA study, see http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#documentDetail?R=0900006480ae39f5.
Tasha,
Kim Safdy,
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Robert Grillo, Yes, I support better food labeling
Living greener or more responsibly means many things to many people. Yet while some people move into hybrid cars and governments stumble over renewable energy policies, the biggest impact we can all have immediately on protecting our environment is to reduce our consumption of animal products.
A growing tide of scientific research is sounding the alarm about the impact of animal agriculture on our environment. The current rate of production of animal products is on an unsustainable path and presents one of the greatest environmental threats we face today, as documented in David Kirby’s landmark book Animal Factory. Other highly-influential reports on the subject include: CAFOs Uncovered published by The Union of Concerned Scientists, The CAFO Hothouse published by The Animals and Society Institute, Livestock’s Long Shadow published by the United Nations and Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States to name just a few.
For a great primer on the subject of food choices and their impact on the environment, check out the Eco-Eating video below from Hope Bohanec, Grassroots Campaigns Director for In Defense of Animals.
Hope Bohanec has been active in animal advocacy for over 20 years, organizing successful campaigns with Sonoma People for Animal Rights (SPAR) throughout the 90’s. Hope was the Sonoma County Coordinator for Proposition 2 and soon after that victory created Farm Animal Protection Project (FAPP). Eco-Eating has been presented at conferences and schools on the west coast for the past five years.
Who is Rick Berman? Unless you are a big corporate executive looking to wage a big PR war against some consumer group, you would never have a reason to know him. Yet you’ve probably heard of one or more of Berman’s front organizations, like The Center for Consumer Freedom and HumaneWatch, which essentially target the general public and attack consumer groups like The Humane Society, PETA, The Center for Science in the Public Interest and many other leading environmental, animal welfare and social justice groups.
Long story short, Berman is a veteran political insider and lobbyist in Washington and a notorious public relations consultant to mainly the big players in the tobacco, alcoholic beverages and food industries.
Berman is infamous for creating his own non-profit organizations on behalf of his corporate clients. These pro-big business, corporate-financed front groups pose as ‘objective,’ fact-based information sites that serve the public interest. Yet their primary purpose is to attack the causes that threaten his clients’ bottom line. Here are some of the more notorious front groups to look out for:
The Center for Consumer Freedom: a front group for the-food-and-beverage industry that attacks groups or individuals critical of smoking, fast food or alcohol.
HumaneWatch attacks the Humane Society of the United States specifically, claiming its leadership is corrupt with power and making outrageous claims such as the HSUS is intent on ending animal agriculture, when in fact it has been instrumental in passing legislation to end some of the most appalling forms of farm animal cruelty.
Howmuchfish.com and mercuryfacts.org, two front groups that attempt to undermine the prevailing scientific position on the dangers of mercury in fish.
Sweetscam.com, a front group that claims to have the facts about high fructose corn syrup and attacks the scientific studies linking high fructose corn syrup to obesity.
The groups and individuals they attack are working to protect us from environmental devastation, toxic chemicals in our food supply, and such vices as driving under the influence, smoking, crime, obesity and other chronic diseases.
Rather than fight an honest and transparent fight against their opponents, Berman’s corporate clients cowardly hide behind his front groups and let them do their dirty work.
“There is an enormous disconnect between what we now know of animals’ experiences of their lives, and how we treat them as a whole (most notably as in factory farms and commercial fishing — which consume some 75 billion sentient creatures yearly).” —Jonathan Balcombe
In his newly-released book, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals(Palgrave Macmillan), Balcombe makes the case that animals have a much greater capacity for thinking and feeling than we have long thought possible. As an animal behaviorist and scientist, he has written many scientific papers and lay-articles on animal behavior, humane education, and animal research.
The video clip below is an excerpt from the documentary film Fowl Play, which features Balcombe in this scene discussing the social intelligence of chickens. Most striking is the interplay between a male rooster and a female hen in which the rooster crows to alert the female of a grasshopper he found. He gives her first dibs to claim it and we see her scurry over to take him up on the offer!
Balcombe’s study of animals and the conclusions he draws about their elevated social, emotional, and intellectual capacities compels us to re-examine the way we interact with them. This calls into question the widespread exploitation of animals for factory-scale animal agriculture, entertainment, testing, pet breeding and the many other practices in which animals are abused and mistreated by humans.
And within the animal kingdom there is a great contradiction between how we treat certain animals as companions and others as food, even though animals raised for consumption are of equal or greater intelligence than dogs. Studies have shown pigs to have the greatest intelligence of all farm animals and greater in many cases than dogs.
Yet even within the same species, irrational discrimination is the status quo. Take birds for example. Our admiration for birds is evident in the numerous bird food varieties marketed to us in stores. There are special blends to attract cardinals, finches, songbirds, etc.
Yet when it comes to chickens and turkeys, we subject billions of them a year to a brief, unnatural and miserable life, raising them in dark warehouses and in cages so small they can’t move their whole lives, injecting them with antibiotics and growth hormones and feeding them genetically-engineered feed. All of this only to be slaughtered in little over a month’s time and with little oversight into the methods by which they are slaughtered (as hens are exempt for the Humane Slaughter Laws in this country).
Balcombe brings these paradoxes in our relationship with animals to light with both scientific and anecdotal clarity. In Balcombe’s world, ALL animals are worthy of our admiration, respect, love, and most of all protection. Learn more about him at http://www.jonathanbalcombe.com/.
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