Organic or Non-organic...What's the big difference? Pt. 1 Meat

   Being in the fitness industry Brooke and I are constantly reading or watching information about nutrition and food.  I just finished reading a very informative book called "The Maker's Diet" and  we recently watched two eye opening documentaries, Food Inc, and Food Matters.  The information we learned through these various sources have changed our attitude toward unnaturally produced/raised food forever.
     First off I want to clarify a few things. "Organic" is a term the USDA used to qualify products. Here is what it means:  Organic food is produced by farmers who emphasize the use of renewable resources and the conservation of soil and water to enhance environmental quality for future generations.  Organic meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products come from animals that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.  Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation.  Before a product can be labeled ‘organic,’ a Government-approved certifier inspects the farm where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is following all the rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards.  Companies that handle or process organic food before it gets to your local supermarket or restaurant must be certified, too.    This has actually changed in the past few years and more and more processed foods are being put on the approval list for non-organic ingredients. Check this article out for more on that. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19837522/ So if you trust everything the govt. tells us than by all means go by the label, but labels only include what the FDA or USDA says is necessary, so use your brain.

I am using the term Organic because that's the industry term we all know, but this is an USDA term.  Farmers have to pay a huge sum of money to qualify for this and many smaller farms cannot afford this fee.  Many of these farms are better than organic and are what you would find at a farmers market.
   
So from watching/reading I was shocked and amazed at what our food industry has gotten away with for many years and how little the average American knows about it. This is because these giant food corporations go to great lengths to make sure we don't find out about what is going on and threaten to cut ties with their farmers if they talk. It also helps that many of the decision makers in the FDA are ex employees of these corp. giants and aren't going to rat out their buddies. The fact is that many of the mass production  farms and factories have not been inspected by the FDA once in the past 5 years and when they have inspected they only test a fraction of the meat and facilities.
   There are four main things I found out recently about these our meat industry that is completely shocking to me.

1) "Factory Farm" Cattle is fed  primarily corn, which is not a natural food source for them.  This causes all sorts of health problems and viruses such as E.coli that kills the nutritional value of their meat. The problem is multiplied even more on large "Factory Farms" since they are packed in so tight and literally standing in their own manure all day.  Instead of feeding cattle hay or allowing them to graze the solution is to pump them full of antibiotics to fend off the viruses and disease.

2) Poultry "Grower Houses" is where most chicken comes from unless you buy "free range" chicken. "Free Range" means that the chickens are not kept in a pen all day and allowed to come and go inside and out as they please and only eat natural feed. The above picture is a "Grower House" and this is actually one that allows sunlight. Most of them are now required to be blacked out and the chickens never see the day of light their whole life. They eat feed that is mixed with chicken, so they actually eat their own meat!!! Many of them die from the harsh environments and are eaten by the other chickens. This isn't the farmers decision to raise them this way, it's the corporate company's requirement or they will cut ties. Pretty much all of the poultry you buy in  a grocery store is bought and packaged by one of three corporations,Tyson is the largest. Why do this? Cost, cost, cost. It's much cheaper this way.

3) Chickens are now bio mechanically altered to grow twice as fast as they do naturally.  A normal chicken takes about 12 weeks to grow to adulthood.  Grow Houses have shortened it to 6 weeks. This causes the chickens to grow faster than their organs and muscles can keep up with. It's not uncommon for them to die from organ failure or to have legs that are not strong enough to hold up their body weight. Here's a video of what goes on in Grow Houses....Warning, it's graphic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV6YTn3JYY4&feature=player_embedded#at=94

4)Finally most meat is "cleaned" with AMMONIA before packaging! This is crazy!! Would you clean your food with ammonia before you cook it? NO WAY, it's poison.  Most of these factories are  controlled by a central control center that is computerized and monitors the process. Eventually the goal is for all factories to be run by one central control center.

If you want to see really how far factory farming has grown in the past  decade check out this map and website. http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/ The darker red the color the more density of factory farms in the area.

Facts and Rankings Spotlight

The number of U.S. beef cattle on industrial feedlots grew by 17 percent to 13.5 million between 2002 and 2007.

Commercial confined livestock and poultry operations produce half a billion tons of manure each year, more than three times as much as that produced by the entire U.S. population

Between 1997 and 2007, U.S. factory farms added 5,800 broiler chickens every hour.