meehawl

Today’s domesticated turkeys are anatomically manipulated to be so heavy and large breasted … that they are now incapable of breeding naturally. Practically all of the turkeys raised commercially in the United States are the result of artificial insemination … Turkeys and other animals exploited for food are excluded from the Federal Animal Welfare Act … and although a majority of states have laws that prohibit sexual contact with animals … farm animals are excluded from these as well. Breeding toms languish for roughly one year in dark crowded pens and are typically handled twice a week during “milking” sessions to collect their semen. Their legs are secured in a clamp on a bench, and then the bird is held over the lap of a worker who induces the turkey to ejaculate … Roughly twice a week, hens are herded into a room, then one after another, they are held upside down, “cracked open” (as termed by industry representatives) and inseminated in assembly line fashion. As with the males, the females’ legs are clamped into metal forceps during the process as laborers race to inseminate an average of 1,200-1,400 hens within two hours.

Collecting semen from a chicken or turkey is done by stimulating the copulatory organ to protrude by massaging the abdomen and the back over the testes. This is followed quickly by pushing the tail forward with one hand and, at the same time, using the thumb and forefinger of the same hand to “milk” semen from the ducts of this organ. Semen flow response is quicker and easier to stimulate in chickens than in turkeys. The semen may be collected with an aspirator or in a small tube or any cup-like container. In turkeys, the volume averages ~0.35-0.5 mL, with a spermatozoon concentration of 6 to >8 billion/mL. In chickens, volume is 2-3 times that of turkeys, but the concentration is about one-half.

Tags: artificial insemination, bestiality, farming, food, industrial farming, semen, Thanksgiving, turkeys by mike
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Frito-Lay and two other potato chip companies have agreed to reduce the levels of a cancer-causing chemical in their products … Acrylamide is produced when potatoes and other starchy foods are cooked at high temperatures. It is used industrially for treating sewage … California listed the chemical as a cancer-causing substance under Proposition 65 [which] requires companies to post warnings of exposure to substances that cause cancer or birth defects … The settlement requires the potato chip producers to reduce acrylamide to 275 parts per billion in three years, a low enough level to avoid a Prop. 65 warning label. That amounts to a 20 percent reduction for Frito-Lay and an 87 percent reduction for Kettle Chips.

In a nutshell. this long-overdue settlement illustrates the absurdity of imagining that the “free market” can self-police itself. Even though a cheap, efficient additive was confirmed back in 2006 that could reduce the amount of the neurotoxic carcinogen acrylamide in fried potatoes, the large manufacturers not only failed to begin to use this additive in order to reduce deaths and misery caused by the consumption of their products, they actively resisted informing consumers of the known toxic effects of their products (as required by law). Thus, “informed consent” of the consumers was not only frustrated, but actively opposed. Doubtless some hard calculations indicated that money spent legally resisting changing their procedures or informing their consumers could be cost effective versus the known costs of change. The externalities of the health costs incurred by those consumers of the fried potato products who developed cancer and neuropathic disease were moved “off-balance sheet”, and became Somebody Else’s Problem.

Absent ethical self-policing by these fried potato manufacturers, only legal action to enforce compliance with legal regulation has produced any sort of beneficial result. And the scope of this action is constrained: the overwhelming majority of fried potato consumers will spend the rest of their lives ignorant of the fact that these manufacturers conspired to feed them products contaminated with a known poison for several years, and the manufacturers escape with a small fine and continue to pursue business as usual outside the extent of the legal settlement (California). Together, and in the interest of short-term profit maximisation, these manufacturers combined and conspired to flout the law and to fight the State’s legal representatives for years so that they could retain the ability to produce and distribute a toxic product despite the existence of manufacturing processes that could reduce or eliminate the toxin. This is business as usual.

Tags: Acrylamide, asparaginase, business, Business As Usual, cancer, Cape Cod Chips, carcinogens, crisps, food, Frito-Lay, Heinz, Kettle Chips, Maillard Reaction, potato chips, Pringles, Procter & Gamble, regulation by mike
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Many of those fish you can see in such glorious abundance in Spanish markets … come not from European seas but from the coasts of the continents of the poor: Africa, South America and parts of Asia … Since 1979 the EU has negotiated deals on fishing rights with a string of impoverished African countries. Despite the EU’s own studies indicating massive and quite possibly irreversible damage to fish stocks off west Africa, these deals continue to be struck. In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four years’ fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts … among the millions of Africans who depend on fish as their main source of protein, consumption has declined from 9kg per year to 7kg.

Tags: EU, European Union, fishing, food, Senegal by mike
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Acrylamide, when it was found in food in 2002, seemed to be the ultimate confirmation that everything tasty is bad for you. Here was a compound that was a probable carcinogen and possible neurotoxin, lurking in practically every fried or baked good … produced by the Maillard Reaction — the chemical process by which carbohydrates transform, under heat, to golden-brown deliciousness … The answer … lies with a bacterial enzyme called asparaginase, which snips up precursor chemicals called asparagine so that they cannot go on to form acrylamide during baking. All one needs to do is toss a pinch of the stuff into dough while it is being kneaded. This step reduces the amount of acrylamide in foods by up to 80% … without changing the taste.

Tags: Acrylamide, asparaginase, cancer, carcinogens, crisps, food, Maillard Reaction, potato chips by mike
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