Sarah J. Blige

Yummy Canadian hormone meat sold in China

Can I get an order of hormone-packed decomposing flesh with a side of poop and extra puss?

Mmmmm. Pork intestines, beef liver and the first stomach of beef, all jacked up on hormones. Sounds delish. But who doesn’t like hormones, right? (The alcohol is for afterward, to make you forget what junk you’ve just shoved into your face hole.)

This delightful, unintentionally truthful packaging is kinda funny, but the sad thing is that it’s accurate.

Most people would probably like to believe that the beef that ends up on their plate was once a happy, healthy cow blissfully grazing green-as-grass pastures and basking in the warm sun until the end of her long, full life when it was time to take her to the slaughterhouse (or “put her out to pasture”), honor her life with a heartfelt sermon and give her an injection of some sort that first renders her unconscious and then stops her breathing, naturally and painlessly.  Others are just fine with believing cattle raised for beef is treated humanely before and during slaughter, and that the slaughterhouses follow strict health regulations and maintain a clean, sanitary environment. Sadly, this is not the case. The meat you eat is likely full of hormones, steroids, feces, urine and other nasties. The majority of cows raised for slaughter are kept in terrible conditions and lead very unhealthy, miserable, short lives.

A cow with a controlled-release hormone implant

But all prodding, beating, tormenting, branding, shackling, dismembering, scalding, skinning and decapitation aside, the meat industry is still pretty dirty. It is more profitable for factory farmers to have big cows who eat less, so cattle are pumped with growth hormones and steroids to make them bigger and less hungry. According to the Cattlemen’s Beef Association, 90% of all US feedlot cattle are implanted with controlled-release implants, which are reported to increase the treated animals’ growth by 20%, and decrease by 15% its feed consumption for every pound gained. (The implant-treated cows typically gain three pounds each day.) The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association and Beef Information Centre confirms that cows raised by conventional methods can be treated with growth hormones and veterinary products, and even states that cows who have become sick (and there are a lot of them, since animals raised on factory farms are forced to live in tiny stalls full of urine, feces and vomit) and have been treated with antibiotics can still legally be labelled as “organic beef”. And to give you a better gage of the scale of antibiotic use in

Gettin' what's comin' to 'em

factory farms and its effect on meat-eating humans, I’d like to add that half of all antibiotics produced in the United States are used on farm animals, ultimately building up antibiotic resistance in people. And that’s not the worst of it: meat is often tainted with toxic chemicals, pesticide residues and industrial pollutants.  (If you’d like to find out more about the scary stuff that ends up in your burger, check out David Steinman’s book, Diet For a Poisoned Planet.)

You still don’t care, because “meat just tastes so good!”? Well what if I told you that consumption of hormone-infused and toxic chemical-laced meat can cause developmental problems, issues with the reproductive system, early onset of puberty and a big, fat ass?

I’m with Paul McCartney in the belief that everyone would be vegetarian if slaughterhouses had glass walls, and I also think people would stop eating meat if it was accurately labelled with all of the gross extras it contained.

The trailer below is for the 2006 film Fast Food Nation, which is loosely based on Eric Schlosser’s book of the same title.