Victims or revolutionaries?

On any chicken farm of any mass producer of chicken (Tyson, Perdue, etc.), the chickens are all crammed into a dark building. There is no sunlight and no room to move around. They are so jacked up on hormones that their bones and internal organs can't keep up with the weight - they can only take a few steps before they have to plop back down to rest. Many of them die each day. This is the chicken, and these are the eggs, we eat. Regardless of whether or not you're into animal rights, do you think this is healthy for you, the consumer?

If you think that's bad, go to a cattle farm. The cattle are penned into a small space where they are fed corn - not what their stomachs are meant to digest - and stand in their own manure day after day. If one of them is diseased, the rest of them are going to get sick as well, since they are always knee-deep in each other's excretions. They enter the slaughter house caked with manure, and they are not cleaned off before being turned into hamburgers. One hamburger can contain the meat and fecal matter of hundreds of different cows, increasing the chance for contamination. People all over the country have died from the meat of a single diseased cow. The mother of one three-year-old who died from food poisoning after eating a hamburger has spent six years fighting for a law to be passed (Kevin's Law) that would increase meat companies' accountability for safety. Rather than spend millions of dollars on improving their safety standards to prevent unnecessary deaths, these companies choose to spend millions of dollars in legal fees, fighting for their right to increase efficiency and profit at the cost of human life.

These are just a handful of the problems with today's food industry. I haven't mentioned the effects on local farmers, factory workers, or the general health of the nation. I've touched only on the topic of animal products and not crops. That would get us into the subject of genetically modified foods, harmful chemicals, and other corrupt business practices. This post has everything to do with my last one - stewardship of our bodies, our society, and our planet. It is not just a battle for environmental activists - it is even more so a responsibility for Christians. I just want to get across the point that many of us are living as victims of the food industry, when really we have so much more leverage than we think. "When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we're voting" - for local or mass-produced, organic or chemical-laden.... (Food, Inc.).

If you want to know more about what is wrong or what you can do to fix it, visit this site: http://www.takepart.com/foodinc