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Limiting livestock antibiotics won’t help food quality

The new world of social networking, Twitter, Facebook, and cell phone texting have created a language all their own. Most people under 25 years of age can converse effortlessly in this language that looks unintelligible to the rest of us.

Made up of abbreviations and acronyms, words like BTW and TVM speak volumes. As with many things in the youth culture, they eventually migrate up the generations, and now people from 30-50 years old have let “lol” slip into their speech and correspondence.

Lol means laugh out loud or laughing out loud. It often appears in e-mails after someone makes a satirical statement or deliberately says something they don’t believe, to indicate the speaker is joking. For example you might say, “Of course I believe the President created a million new jobs and the recession is over, lol!”
This acronym should also appear after statements that assert that the use of antibiotics in livestock production poses a human health and food safety threat.

Efforts to eliminate the use of antibiotics by livestock producers have reached a fever pitch. There are currently two bills in Congress, weekly editorial pieces by the New York Times, and, now, a new book that is being hyped on CNN and quoted widely in liberal newspapers.

Jonathan Safran Foer is a fiction writer and, although he claims his new book Eating Animals is a non-fiction book, much of what he asserts is pure fiction.

“If the way we raise animals for food isn’t the most important problem in the world right now, it’s arguably the No. 1 cause of global warming.” That’s right, Jonathan, never mind all those power plants or the billions of cars belching CO2; it’s the cows and pigs that are ruining our environment, lol.

The arguments in this book are the same old tired accusations that have been made for decades: modern livestock practices are bad, farmers overmedicate their animals, and this will lead to bacteria that are resistant to drugs. These “super bugs” will then infect humans and kill us all. You would think a fiction writer could come up with something more original.

The fact is that livestock producers use less antibiotics today than ever before. Greg Slipher, livestock specialist with Indiana Farm Bureau, estimates 10 times less than human use of antibiotics. Kent Yeager, public policy director with Indiana Farm Bureau, said the reason producers have been able to cut down on the use of these drugs is the bio-secure confinement facilities most hogs live in today.

Yes, Jonathan, the “factory farms” you decry so loudly are keeping animals safe and healthy. Restricting the use of antibiotics by livestock producers won’t reduce the incidence of antibiotic resistance, won’t result in a safer food supply, but will make it harder for farmers to raise healthy animals that will, in turn, produce healthy food, and might result in food that is less safe for human consumption.

In a CNN op-ed, Foer asked the question, “Why aren’t more people aware of, and angry about, the rates of avoidable food-borne illness?”

The answer is: because there is not a problem. The use of antibiotics is not causing health problems for consumers, and modern agriculture is producing a safer food supply than ever. We have more food recalls today because our safety net is better. This is not a sign of a worsening problem but rather of an improved protection system for our food supply.

While agriculture and the food production system have problems, the use of antibiotics is not one of them and, thus, is not a problem in search of a solution.

So next time you see Jonathan Safran Foer out hawking his book and spouting such drivel as, “When we eat factory-farmed meat, we live on tortured flesh. Increasingly, those sick animals are making us sick,” just lol.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.

11/11/2009