General Wellness

Are we running out of meat? Why is food going to waste?

There have been some news items about how farmers are basically throwing out tons of produce and that our meat supply may start to dwindle. 

Both issues have to do with the pandemic but in different ways.

Both industries are affected by supply chain issues. Basic things like fewer trucks to transport food, fewer restaurants taking orders… But to think that we will run out of food is ridiculous. Did we run out of toilet paper?

First of all, Americans throw out 50% of the produce we buy, the vast majority of this is at the consumer level. Worldwide, this figure is around 33%. Much less but still crazy. For Americans, this translates into over 100 pounds and thousands of dollars annually. In addition, Americans throw out 26% of the meat we buy, 81% of which is again, at the level of the consumer. So if we were so concerned about food waste, we would look no further than our own homes. Food waste is one of the top 10 contributors to climate change.

Part of the problem today with some of these animal processing plants (a nice nickname for slaughterhouses) are Covid outbreaks. However, our government would rather further risk the health of meat workers by forcing companies to stay open. Jobs in the food industry, espetially factory farms and slaughterhouses, are among the most dangerous in America with some of the highest suicide rates. 

Pork facilities report being at risk of losing 700,000 pigs in particular a week. Pre-covid, almost 1 million pigs a year die en route from their farms to the slaughterhouse. In addition, millions die on the farms themselves. Close to 100% of the pigs have pneumonia by the time they reach the slaughterhouses. 115 million die in the US annually to feed our pork apatite.

Even if we do run out of meat and dairy, NO ONE will die of malnutrition. There is plenty to eat. In fact, we’d be better off. During WW2, when the Nazis confiscated the meat and dairy from Northern European countries to feed its soldiers, cardiovascular deaths dropped dramatically. Various chronic diseases reversed. All people ate were the vegetables they grew or could forage for. As soon as the war ended and they started to eat meat again, heart attack and other disease rates started to climb once again. Today, the healthiest and longest lived societies eat little to no animal products boasting life expectancy in the 90s. And that is not just about lifespan, it’s also about healthspan as they live such long lives with virtually no chronic disease or dementia.

If you are REALLY concerned, plant a garden. At the end of WW2, 45% of the produce Americans ate came from their own gardens. Today, it’s a tiny fraction of that. Kansas, the most agricultural state with 90% of its land dedicated to farmland, imports 90% of the food its citizens eat. It’s pretty sad.

We kill, throw out and eat over 90 billion animals annually. The vast majority of them are tortured during their lives. In addition, the meat industry contributes more to global warming than all modes of transportation worldwide combined. They also contribute to heart diseae and drug resistant infections. 

Will we run out of meat? NO.

But if we did, it would not be such a bad thing.

Stay safe and be well. 

AC 😎✌️🌱❤🐖🏃🏻🧘🏻‍♂️🌎😷

BATS – Why are they so full of viruses?

Bats are getting a bad rap. Sure they are the source of many infections but this is only when we mess with mother nature and mix animals up together and eat the ones we were not really meant to eat. Bats can eat as many as 6000 mosquitos a night (1200/hour). In addition, they are great pollinators and help to maintain healthy ecosystems.

Bats are not ”flying rats”. They are actually mammals, and they’re the only ones which are able to fly, which is a very stressful and energy intensive activity. To accomplish that, they have evolved a system to dampen their immune system which is a resource heavy, energy zapping physiologic function. As a consequence, various microbes can use them as a host, or “factory”, allowing them to replicate without killing the host. Because of their dampened immune systems, bats are able to live just fine with these microbes in their bodies.

In addition to many varieties of bacteria and parasites, they carry as many as 60 different viruses which can infect humans. They harbor not only many strains of coronaviruses, including Covid-19, but are also the source of Ebola and Rabies. Just having a bat fly near you can transmit the Rabies virus. Ebola is extremely infectious but also very lethal, wiping out entire villages of a few hundred people and then basically, going dormant itself because of the lack of a live host. With Covid, it is not that lethal (lethal enough), but very infectious, which is the worst combination. It affects a lot of people, most of whom don’t die, so it can spread more and because of that, more people die overall.

The viruses spread so fast in a population of bats because of how they live and in particular, sleep. Hundreds if not thousands, sleep in caves and bathhouses, in very tight, confined spaces. These viruses do not seem to impact on their health at all, just like the staph aureus on our skin or the e.coli in our intestines do not affect humans. In addition, their dampened immune systems allow them to cohabitate with them.

When we keep bats, clustered in cages, on top of other animals as we see in the wet markets in the East, the viruses have a chance to spread to other animals. Overcrowded cages of all kinds of animals, stacked ontop of one another. Animals who were not meant to co-mingle. Pooping and drooling all over each other. It’s a veritable “shit-show”. A brewing cauldron of microbes. Eventually, these microbes spread to humans who handle or eat these poor animals and the floodgates open. These animals are also used for “medicinal” purposes. I’m all for ancient modes of medical care but stop short of consuming bats wings or pangolin scales.

Virtually every infectious epidemic has originated from animals. As mentioned in previous posts, Covid-2, aka SARS-Covid-2, as well as SARS-1 originated in bats, spread to Civet Cats in the case of SARS-1 and Pangolins, in the case of our present pandemic. Just an fyi, in the case of Civet Cats, transmission was not only from eating them but from drinking coffee made from beans fed to the cats and then ”harvested” from their poop. Some brainiac thought they would taste better! MERS came from camels, infected from bats. EBOLA from monkeys as did HIV. Swine flu, well, from pigs…. Which should also highlight the fact that it’s not just the wet markets, but our own system of mass animal agriculture, that are to blame for these zoonotic diseases.

I have an upcoming post about the “meat shortage” in which I’ll rant more about how we care more about making money, and making sure we have our hotdogs rather than protecting the already endangered meat-plant workers. It’s literally one of the most dangerous jobs in America with one of the highest suicide rates. Not only is there no shortage of meat, even if there were, we’d all be better off!

I have to get to work but just one more comment. After opening things up a bit, California is already pulling back, closing all the beaches essentially because people just can’t help themselves. Rather than slowly starting up, everyone rushes out the door like crazy people, breaking the rules of basic social distancing and as a result, everyone suffers. And just in case you were wondering, Sweden, which has essentially no real social distancing (I don’t consider being an arm’s-length away distancing) has 10x the death rate of their immediate neighbors Norway and Finland, where more strict isolation practices are followed. The vast majority of deaths are in nursing homes where the most vulnerable live. Way to go!

PLEASE stay safe and be well.

AC 😎✌️🌱❤🐖🏃🏻🧘🏻‍♂️🌎 😷