The State of Your Bacon
“We have a chance to choose better food three times a day (or more often, if we’re particularly hungry),” Bryan Walsh writes in Time magazine’s Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food
In this shocking, but not surprising article Walsh goes on to explain the “state of your bacon”. The opening paragraph describing bluntly how a pig is raised in a normal factory farm, where the majority of meat comes from and why.
“What we eat – how it’s raised and how it gets to us—has consequences that can’t be ignored any longer.”
Government subsidies and uninformed consumers are to blame, he explains, but it’s not hopeless. There are good farms out there, with good sustainable practices that think about the health of the animals, consumers and the earth. But he reminds us that it’s us, as we wheel our grocery cart down the aisle, that we are choosing the state of our bacon.
“Unless American’s radically rethink the way they grown and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs – and bland taste. Sustainable food has an elitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants – and as every farmer knows, if you don’t take care of your land, it can’t take care of you.”
What’s the state of your bacon?
