PEA_ST2600 Writing Prompts for Discussion Forum Week n 4

PEA_ST2600
Writing Prompts for Discussion Forum
Week n 4

Writing Prompts:

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(1) Please comment on the talk by Chris Deutsch (mp3 interview).
(2) How does Pollan differentiate between cows CORN-FED and cows GRASS-FED?
(3) Let’s talk about antibiotic use in the diet of beef and dairy animals.
(4) What is the ‘hormone implant’ and why was it banned in the European Union?

(5) Your comment:
Yet the factory metaphor obscures as much as it reveals about the creature that stood before me. For this steer was not a machine in a factory but an animal in a web of relationships that link him to certain other animals, plants and microbes, as well as to the earth. And one of those other animals is us. The unnaturally rich diet of corn that has compromised No. 534’s health is fattening his flesh in a way that in turn may compromise the health of the humans who will eat him. The antibiotics he’s consuming with his corn were at that very moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the environment they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect us and resist the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and whatever happens to it also happens to us.

(6) Your comment:
I thought about the deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I were standing in. We don’t know much about the hormones in it — where they will end up or what they might do once they get there — but we do know something about the bacteria. One particularly lethal bug most probably resided in the manure beneath my feet. Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980’s) that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.

(7) Your comment:
And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.