The Insignificant Perspective

by Albert A. Midoux

I will try to present to you, the consuming public, a perspective seldom acknowledged, “The State of the Union.” I am a retired food safety inspector for the United States Department of Agriculture. I have served in the military in the Korean Police Action. I have voted in every major political campaign that I can recall. I have, however, been an insignificant contributor financially to any political endeavor. Therein lies the insignificance of my perspective.

I reside in McDonald County, Missouri, located in the southwest corner of the state. My wife and I own 100 acres of pasture land and timber. We no longer have livestock and the wildlife remaining here is copperheads and ticks. Deer that have seemed resilient to any adversity are still here — for now. There are serious problems festering between the lines of this paragraph.

I see two problems which are the basis for a great many — the roots, one should assume, of disaster on the horizon. One is the growing apathy of our citizens and the ever increasing greed of our legislators and bureaucrats, from the county level to the national level. In the state of Missouri, we are losing our water to industrial plunder. What they do not use to add weight to consumer products they render unfit for use by polluting it. With no limits on water usage, waste is rampant and water tables are dropping rapidly. Our wells and our streams are contaminated. Our lakes, created on these streams, have become huge septic tanks for an unregulated and out of control animal manufacturing industry generally called CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations).

Property is devalued and health is at risk from air so putrid at times that people have left their homes until the odors of liquefied and untreated chicken or hog manure have subsided enough that they can return to their homes. When dead hens and rotting eggs are included in the mixture it could be some time before the next cookout. One laying hen complex, located nearby, houses approximately one million hens and produces nearly 275,000 gallons of this vile mixture per week. Millions of flies and crawly things are produced also.

These huge animal factories have no fear of Missouri or federal law relating to feeding of food animals. Medications are widely used to control a multitude of diseases brought on by close confinement and filthy living conditions. Growth hormones are used extensively, including arsenic of lead and other heavy metals. The latest pharmaceutical technology will find its way into the arsenal of both survival and growth enhancement. This makes sense, for without the medication they would die, and dying definitely hinders growth. Such practice has been successful in creating drug resistant strains of bacteria in our food and water supplies.

Our air is toxic with disease causing bacteria such as histoplasmosis. Most, if not all, streams in this area are hypereutrophic, including seven lakes in the state of Oklahoma. For recreational waters, this means that such waters could be dangerous to your longevity. This is not just a local problem. The Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay, with an area the size of New Jersey, is considered a dead zone that cannot support aquatic life. A similar situation exists in the Gulf of Mexico and involves 7,000 square miles of once productive waters.

Such examples of the degradation of our natural resources through the land application of unregulated and untreated animal waste by the millions of tons on our nation’s watersheds should be a wake-up call.

Corporate agriculture’s most profitable alias, “family farms,” has blessed them with immunity from laws which would apply to other types of industry. Laws which would protect the environment and our food supply are bent or totally ignored in favor of industry and/or the economy. This alias is used to acquire state and federal loans, grants and subsidies. As usual the cost is passed on to yours truly.

This is all made possible with the cooperation of bureaucrats who are attached to the nipples of industry and are as hard to dislodge as ticks on the rump of a rhino. Several bills have been introduced in the Missouri House that would shield CAFOs from well-deserved criticism. House Bill HB 1333 would have “created environmental self audit privilege” to CAFOs; another, HB 923, would have related to “defamation of agricultural producers, with penalty provisions. For the last four years, bills have been introduced that would install an immunity shield to all animal factories, free from scrutiny, free from criticism, and free to continue to violate environmental law, including laws governing the “humane treatment of animals.” Humane treatment is not an obvious priority of CAFO operations.

There is no doubt in my mind that such legislation was initiated by the industry and carried out by faithful political pawns. This legislation is immoral, unethical, and illegal but no doubt very profitable to those bureaucrats in the service of industry should these bills or similar ones become law — laws which are solely designed to give free reign to their industrial benefactors and silence both public and media protest of their transgressions. Isn’t this a blatant attack on our first amendment by those entrusted to safeguard the constitution of the United States? And isn’t this called treason? I understand that 17 states already have such laws.

During the time that I served in the military, I believed that forces outside our national boundaries were the greatest threat to our way of life and our constitution. History will show that forces within our nation can be equally dangerous to the freedom of its people and the nation itself. When we speak of chemical and biological terrorism, we assume that such attacks would come from abroad. We should recognize that we face, in a more subtle way, chemical and biological warfare on a daily basis on our own turf.

We have heavy metals and pathogens in our food supplies; salmonella has become a common ingredient in our meat counters; and housewives are warned to cook meat and poultry products very well done to reduce the danger of food poisoning — cremation! It’s perhaps the path to potable potty.

Pathogens are primarily the result of the spillage of intestinal and stomach contents in the evisceration phase of slaughter. This is the result of ridiculous processing speeds and mechanical evisceration. Allowing spilled fecal material and digestive tract contents to be washed from exposed flesh is not compatible to food safety. This is done with the blessings of a very economically friendly USDA meat and poultry inspection service.

Our forest reserves are being depleted and our wetlands are vanishing, jeopardizing our aquifers already under siege. A gallon of bottled water for drinking and cooking now cost about the same as a gallon of gasoline, depending on the brand name on the container of water. The world population now stands at 6,000,000,000 and climbing steadily while our natural resources are declining rapidly and valuable crop producing farmland is being covered with asphalt and concrete. Parking lots, shopping malls, and freeways, and, of course, urban sprawl don’t contribute much to food production. Our Department of Agriculture tells us that hybrid and genetically altered grains, such as corn, which can now produce it’s own pesticide to kill the ‘corn borer,’ will compensate for the loss of choice crop land.

Gene altered crops produce large yields when used with highly efficient herbicides. Do we as consumers have a choice in the development of Frankenstein foods? No. Were the altered foods labeled as such? No. Were dairy cattle treated with hormones to make them run faster or give more milk? No. Was the milk labeled as “milk from treated cows? No, no, no. It would have been unfair to those with the un-natural milk. Do you suppose one could become infected with trichinosis (a parasitic nematode worm) which can infect swine, by eating an under cooked tomato? I refer to tomatoes genetically altered with pig genes or perhaps chicken pox from a potato with a chicken gene inserted.

We are eating genetically altered food products daily — unlabeled, unannounced, and, for the long term, un-researched. Please forgive those of us who lack faith in our regulatory agencies touting a voluntary mentality on everything from labeling to the inspection and safety of our food supplies. Self-regulation and self audit are not in the best interest of the consumer or the environment. This is industrial butt hugging at it’s political best.

While reading the selective opinions derived from selected scientific experts on the benefits and safety of genetically altered foods, I am deeply concerned of monetarily altered “opinions.” For our officials to suggest that the refusal to “eat this stuff” could or should be illegal is the most asinine suggestion I have heard in a while. Frankenstein foods will not prevent famine in third world countries, and could create even more famine with the genetic disruption of the natural order of flora and fauna.

The perspective of the average citizen is indeed insignificant to our elected officials in all but a few cases. To those officials with foresight to recognize and the courage to confront, the exploitation of our remaining natural resources and the trust of our nations consumers, we applaud your efforts and sincerely thank you.