gertvegan
Aug 29th, 2004, 04:57 PM
Warning Labels on Meat? The Herald, March 30 2004
Come clean on killer meat says MICHAEL MANSFIELD QC - The Big Idea: Warning labels on meat
How should drug pedlars be treated? Currently they are quoted on the stock exchange, legitimised by having worthies on their board of directors and are allowed to sell their products on every high street. All the recreational drugs lumped together manage to kill around 600 people a year in the UK, but tobacco terminates at least 120,000 lives and destroys the health of thousands more. Despite that carnage, it took 50 years simply to get a warning label stuck on packets of cigarettes. Why did it take so long? Read On.
Corruption of science, huge financial power, generous political lobbying and tame journalists – all the techniques subsequently mastered and applied by the meat industry, which kills probably even more people than the tobacco companies. If it is necessary to have a government health warning on tobacco, then it is equally necessary to slap a similarly strong-worded caution on all meat products – and dairy for that matter. And it should contain several warnings.
The latest anti-smoking proposal is to include, with the verbal warnings, pictures of diseased lungs or cancerous tongues. For meat it should be the terrified lamb having its throat cut or the diseased and dejected animals in the squalor and filth of an intensive pig farm. And if a "scratch and sniff" panel could be incorporated, so much the better.
The past 20 years have seen a swelling avalanche of science identifying meat and animal products as the major cause of modern degenerative diseases – the so-called diseases of affluence. Heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, some cancers, bone diseases such as osteoporosis and a string of other ailments are all caused or made worse by animal products.
In 1990, the World Health Organisation issued a report that should have caused a storming of the Meat and Livestock Commission and a revolution in agriculture. Instead, it aroused as much press interest as Iain Duncan Smith's speaking tour. It said: "Diets associated with increases in chronic diseases are those rich in sugar, meat and other animal products, saturated (animal) fat and dietary cholesterol. If such trends continue, the end of this century will see cardiovascular disease and cancer established as major health problems in every country in the world." It went on to say: "The objectives in this report can be expected to meet with considerable opposition."
If you believe that governments would never bend the knee to lobbying and place commercial interests above those of human survival, remember BSE. "Beef is perfectly safe to eat," they said – and set up a committee to investigate it which included no experts in that particular field. That's always a good starting point to avoid discovering the truth. So, the first warning on all meat products should be: "Meat can increase your risk of cancer, heart and other degenerative diseases and reduce your life expectancy."
Most animals killed for meat – pigs, chickens, turkeys and ducks – are reared in obscene, overcrowded concentration camps which mostly condemn them to spend their lives on filthy concrete or faeces-soaked litter (and there are plenty of problems with the so-called free-range animals as well). They are unable to fulfil most of their powerfully-ingrained natural instincts. The result, in the case of pigs, can be mental collapse. No-one is certain with poultry because they are not deemed important enough to investigate. Just as the Nazis turned irony into a sick joke with the words Arbeit Mach Frei above the gates of Auschwitz, and the Americans did with the words "Honour bound to defend freedom" over the gates of Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta, so the meat industry plays a similar game with its constant claims of "the best animal welfare standards in the world". It's a lie – they know it's a lie, we know and the animals know. The second warning should therefore say: "This product comes from animals which have been physically and mentally tortured."
So good are the welfare standards in these disease-ridden dens that antibiotics and a barrage of other drugs are regularly administered – often on a daily basis – to keep death from disease under some kind of control. And just for good measure, they administer even more antibiotics to make the animals grow unnaturally fast.
The outcome was entirely predictable and the world is now faced with deadly antibiotic-resistant strains of e-coli, salmonella and campylobacter.
So the third warning should be: "This product may kill you and your children with diseases for which we are rapidly running out of antidotes."
Meat constitutes the largest industry on earth but despite its wealth, receives massive subsidies to assist, among other things, its pillaging of the developing world. Despite Britain – and most other European countries – devoting most of its lands to grazing animals and growing their feed, it is not enough. Ninety per cent of all protein supplements are imported from the developing world at rock-bottom prices – often the same countries suffering from starvation. An area of prime agricultural land the size of Britain, France, Italy and New Zealand is used to grow high-quality food to feed to Europe's farmed animals in an exercise of wanton vandalism.
It takes an average of 10kg of vegetable protein to produce just 1kg of meat in an insanely wasteful production line of misery. The West's addiction to dead animals is not just destroying its health but it is causing starvation, insecurity and death among the poorest people in the world. The fourth warning should be: "Buying this product will contribute to the death of 12 million children each year from starvation-linked diseases."
And there is a fifth caution. Despite warnings of impending environmental disaster from every knowledgeable source, the industry/military/ agricultural power brokers are deaf to all reason. They have to keep growing or collapse and this growth is quite literally destroying the globe. We all know it and do very little about it. Diet is the easiest way to have an immediate impact as livestock production and the growing of fodder to feed them is at the heart of every environmental problem – spreading deserts, deforestation, soil erosion, global warming, acid rain, the overuse of water and water pollution. So the fifth warning should read: "If you want to contribute to destroying your children's future – enjoy."
Just as the tobacco industry is still trying to present its products as somehow acceptable and the evidence against it as imperfect, so the meat industry is pushing meat through every avenue it can – and it has some powerful allies. A couple of months ago, the Who issued a report calling on governments worldwide to promote healthy eating by encouraging people to increase the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables they eat. George Bush's administration responded by saying that this was poor science and there was no such thing as good and bad foods – just personal responsibility.
Enough said. You know that if Mr Bush is opposed to something, it's probably right.
Come clean on killer meat says MICHAEL MANSFIELD QC - The Big Idea: Warning labels on meat
How should drug pedlars be treated? Currently they are quoted on the stock exchange, legitimised by having worthies on their board of directors and are allowed to sell their products on every high street. All the recreational drugs lumped together manage to kill around 600 people a year in the UK, but tobacco terminates at least 120,000 lives and destroys the health of thousands more. Despite that carnage, it took 50 years simply to get a warning label stuck on packets of cigarettes. Why did it take so long? Read On.
Corruption of science, huge financial power, generous political lobbying and tame journalists – all the techniques subsequently mastered and applied by the meat industry, which kills probably even more people than the tobacco companies. If it is necessary to have a government health warning on tobacco, then it is equally necessary to slap a similarly strong-worded caution on all meat products – and dairy for that matter. And it should contain several warnings.
The latest anti-smoking proposal is to include, with the verbal warnings, pictures of diseased lungs or cancerous tongues. For meat it should be the terrified lamb having its throat cut or the diseased and dejected animals in the squalor and filth of an intensive pig farm. And if a "scratch and sniff" panel could be incorporated, so much the better.
The past 20 years have seen a swelling avalanche of science identifying meat and animal products as the major cause of modern degenerative diseases – the so-called diseases of affluence. Heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, some cancers, bone diseases such as osteoporosis and a string of other ailments are all caused or made worse by animal products.
In 1990, the World Health Organisation issued a report that should have caused a storming of the Meat and Livestock Commission and a revolution in agriculture. Instead, it aroused as much press interest as Iain Duncan Smith's speaking tour. It said: "Diets associated with increases in chronic diseases are those rich in sugar, meat and other animal products, saturated (animal) fat and dietary cholesterol. If such trends continue, the end of this century will see cardiovascular disease and cancer established as major health problems in every country in the world." It went on to say: "The objectives in this report can be expected to meet with considerable opposition."
If you believe that governments would never bend the knee to lobbying and place commercial interests above those of human survival, remember BSE. "Beef is perfectly safe to eat," they said – and set up a committee to investigate it which included no experts in that particular field. That's always a good starting point to avoid discovering the truth. So, the first warning on all meat products should be: "Meat can increase your risk of cancer, heart and other degenerative diseases and reduce your life expectancy."
Most animals killed for meat – pigs, chickens, turkeys and ducks – are reared in obscene, overcrowded concentration camps which mostly condemn them to spend their lives on filthy concrete or faeces-soaked litter (and there are plenty of problems with the so-called free-range animals as well). They are unable to fulfil most of their powerfully-ingrained natural instincts. The result, in the case of pigs, can be mental collapse. No-one is certain with poultry because they are not deemed important enough to investigate. Just as the Nazis turned irony into a sick joke with the words Arbeit Mach Frei above the gates of Auschwitz, and the Americans did with the words "Honour bound to defend freedom" over the gates of Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta, so the meat industry plays a similar game with its constant claims of "the best animal welfare standards in the world". It's a lie – they know it's a lie, we know and the animals know. The second warning should therefore say: "This product comes from animals which have been physically and mentally tortured."
So good are the welfare standards in these disease-ridden dens that antibiotics and a barrage of other drugs are regularly administered – often on a daily basis – to keep death from disease under some kind of control. And just for good measure, they administer even more antibiotics to make the animals grow unnaturally fast.
The outcome was entirely predictable and the world is now faced with deadly antibiotic-resistant strains of e-coli, salmonella and campylobacter.
So the third warning should be: "This product may kill you and your children with diseases for which we are rapidly running out of antidotes."
Meat constitutes the largest industry on earth but despite its wealth, receives massive subsidies to assist, among other things, its pillaging of the developing world. Despite Britain – and most other European countries – devoting most of its lands to grazing animals and growing their feed, it is not enough. Ninety per cent of all protein supplements are imported from the developing world at rock-bottom prices – often the same countries suffering from starvation. An area of prime agricultural land the size of Britain, France, Italy and New Zealand is used to grow high-quality food to feed to Europe's farmed animals in an exercise of wanton vandalism.
It takes an average of 10kg of vegetable protein to produce just 1kg of meat in an insanely wasteful production line of misery. The West's addiction to dead animals is not just destroying its health but it is causing starvation, insecurity and death among the poorest people in the world. The fourth warning should be: "Buying this product will contribute to the death of 12 million children each year from starvation-linked diseases."
And there is a fifth caution. Despite warnings of impending environmental disaster from every knowledgeable source, the industry/military/ agricultural power brokers are deaf to all reason. They have to keep growing or collapse and this growth is quite literally destroying the globe. We all know it and do very little about it. Diet is the easiest way to have an immediate impact as livestock production and the growing of fodder to feed them is at the heart of every environmental problem – spreading deserts, deforestation, soil erosion, global warming, acid rain, the overuse of water and water pollution. So the fifth warning should read: "If you want to contribute to destroying your children's future – enjoy."
Just as the tobacco industry is still trying to present its products as somehow acceptable and the evidence against it as imperfect, so the meat industry is pushing meat through every avenue it can – and it has some powerful allies. A couple of months ago, the Who issued a report calling on governments worldwide to promote healthy eating by encouraging people to increase the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables they eat. George Bush's administration responded by saying that this was poor science and there was no such thing as good and bad foods – just personal responsibility.
Enough said. You know that if Mr Bush is opposed to something, it's probably right.