"I
prayed for something red and shiny to get around town in," reads the
caption on a squiggly New Yorker-like cartoon, "and got this raincoat."
That's
how food activists must feel at the end of a mixed year.
They
asked for an end to the intensive farming conditions that cause mad cow disease
and researchers gave them--a prion free cow.
(The
bad news? It's safe to make cows cannibals again. The good news? Ranchers can
save money by "recycling" their dead ones.)
They
asked for an end to egg-laying hens packed in overstuffed cages over
ammonia-reeking pits and researchers at the Dolly the sheep institute gave them
"designer hens" with synthetic substances in their eggs like
interferon b-1a and miR24.
("Hundreds
of birds" will be bred from a single cock once the correct gene is in
place, says lead scientist Dr. Helen Sang who has "modified" over 500
birds so far).
They
asked for pigs that don't, as the Seattle Post Intelligencer Editorial Board
put it, "Spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine,
crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a
septic tank," their tails docked with "no anesthetic," and
researchers gave them a cloned, transgenic omega-3 pig for a trumped up omega-3
shortage.
(People
can "continue to eat their junk food," enthused one pro transgenic
pig scientist. "You won't have to change your diet, but you will be getting
what you need.")
They
asked for an end to slaughterhouses where animals are butchered while still
alive and dragged off "dead piles" to the kill floor and industry
gave them mobile abattoirs. Slaughterhouses that make "house calls,"
eliminating shipping costs and disease transfer. (Good news for Ted Turner: they're licensed for buffalo.)
Not
only do the technology "solutions" perpetuate the problems -- a
preslaughter treatment that neutralizes salmonella in the "fecal
soup" chickens are dipped in; good for the birds' [sic] health, says Feedstuffs -- public monies are funding
the private ventures of food commercializers, patentors and profiteers, say
activists.
(Omega-3
pig development was funded by National Institutes of Health and US National
Cancer Institute monies.)
Still,
awareness is growing.
The
film version of Eric Schlosser's popular Fast Food Nation and deadly E.
coli outbreaks in 2006 brought new awareness to, well, what else might be in
the meat.
Communities
are uniting against the pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations
(CAFOs), also known as factory farms.
And
even Illinois Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama has said,
"Poor treatment of poultry by the food processing industry . . . must not
be tolerated."
Scientists,
too, are speaking out. Autumn Fiester, Ph.D., director of Graduate Studies at
the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics says the omega-3 pig is
"an obvious attempt to drum up a need that justifies the science."
"We
are altering the genome of an animal to enable consumers to continue with their
self-destructive eating habits," Fiester writes in the December 2006 issue
of Nature Biotechnology. "What does this say about us if that is reason
enough to manipulate sentient life?"
A good
question with cloned milk shakes and hamburgers just around the corner.
Martha
Rosenberg is a Staff Cartoonist at the Evanston Roundtable. Her work has
appeared in the Chicago Tribune, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston
Globe, Providence Journal. Arizona Republic, New Orleans Times-Picayune and
other newspapers. She can be reached at: mrosenberg@evmark.org.