We have no idea where 60% of infected carcasses come from

* Synthesizer Trumpets GO!*

It's the final countdown

That’s right y’all; Liz and my locals only diet is in its last throes and the word ya’ll should be indicative of just how serious things have gotten. This time next week we’ll be 24 hours into our month-long coffee, beer, and popcorn tofu bender, but for now we’re still going strong. Although most of our current thoughts are firmly focused on exactly what next Monday will entail (margaritas, popcorn tofu po-boys smothered in cashew tamari, etc) I think it’s worthwhile to post a bit about our motivations for this whole adventure.

This past summer, I participated in a workshop at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis on modeling Bovine Tuberculosis in the United States. As it turns out, this is a non-trivial problem in part because there are few to no requirements for recording where food is born, raised, shipped, and slaughtered. To illustrate this points, consider the title of this post, a reference to one of the most damning statistics shared during the meeting, “Of all the bovine TB cases identified at slaughter only around 40% can be traced back to a herd of origin.” Let that sink in.

Now you may think that cows and pigs have it bad, and they do, but poultry by far has it worse. There are nearly 300 million laying hens in the US confined to cages so small they can’t even spread their wings, all while their slaughter does not fall under the US Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. These huge factory farms are literally breeding grounds for animal diseases. Fact - The recent swine-origin H1N1 emerged from an industrial hog farm in central Mexico. Let that sink in.

Time to take the wind from the vegetarian sails. Pesticides cause irreparable harm to the environment, fertilizer is generating clouds of death that extend hundreds of miles from the mouth of the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, and bacterial (think e. coli and salmonella) outbreaks are becoming more common every year. Fact - even though industrial dairy farms don’t slaughter their milking cows they can be nearly as inhumane. This is why all milk has to be pasteurized.

Which brings us to our current state of affairs. You don’t have to eat locally for a month to make a difference (in fact even if you did it still wouldn’t make a difference), but you can make a conscious effort to eat only products that are farmed and processed in an environmentally friendly, sustainable, and humane manner. It’s easier than ever to take food assurance into your own hands. Not only will you end up living a healthier life, but I’m sure you’ll be impressed with how wonderful food can taste (we’ve all been missing out).

We also challenge you to consider the environmental impact of your food choices in terms of both production and transportation. As motivation, consider the above map. Each line connects either the farm where our food was produced or where we purchased it to our houses in Austin. Now tomorrow think about what your map will look like. Fact - If you send me location information on the food you eat and where you live I’ll make the map for you and post it to the blog. Contest anyone? Happy responsible eating and sorry if the final countdown is stuck in your head, it’s still is in mine : ) * Synthesizer Trumpets GO!*

"The line of the buildings stood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out of the mass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming away to the end of the world." – Upton Sinclair The Jungle