Maria Freda's CBI

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/safe/overview.html

The article I selected comes from PBS.org and is about modern meat in the United States. This debate article revolved around the question of our meat being safe to eat and the effect the antibiotics put into it  can have on our bodies. The first paragraph of the article really grabbed my attention and helped me connect to some of the issues raised in My Year of Meats. The article stated, "Meat producers have fed growth-promoting antibiotics to food animals for years. Recently, scientists have raised concerns that, in conjunction with the general overuse of antibiotics in humans, this use of "sub-therapeutic" levels of antibiotics in food animals may lead to serious health risks for people. Banning the use of such drugs, however, would greatly reduce the efficiency of the industry, driving up the cost of meat." 

This debate helped me to relate to the scene in book where Oda goes into Anaphylactic shock after eating the Sooner Schnitzel. During this scene, Oda's entire body went rigid and started to swell and his windpipe closed after eating the meat. Later, when Jane was talking to the doctor, he explained the harm that meat can have on our bodies. He says, "But all these surplus antibiotics are raising people's tolerances, and it wont be long before the stuff doesn't work anymore. There's all sorts of virulent bacteria that are already resistant.... It's like back to the future- we're headed backward in time, toward a pre-antibiotic age." This quote relates back to the article in the respect that the antibiotics given to the animals we eat is having a negative impact on our bodies and we don't even know it. Ranchers and farmers have been giving antibiotics to their animals for decades. These small daily doses of antibiotics would make the animals gain as much a three percent more weight, which increased their profits. On top of this, the meat industry doesn't publicize its use of antibiotics, so accurate information on the amount of antibiotics given to food animals is not easy to find. 

However, the largest problem centers around taking antibiotics that are used to treat human illnesses and administering them to food animals. With the increasing amount of evidence suggesting that sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in food animals can pose health risk to humans, there is a greater push for these drugs to be banned. For example, if a group of animals is treated with a certain antibiotic over time, the bacteria living in those animals will become resistant to that drug. So the problem for humans is that if a person ingests the resistant bacteria from improperly cooked meat and becomes ill, they may not respond to antibiotic treatment. 

Overall, we need to be more aware of what we are putting into our bodies. The effects of antibiotics can alter our bodies and lead to certain defects in the future. For example, on page 117, Mr. Purcell explained, "It was some medicines they was usin' in the chickens that got into the necks that we was eatin'.... An' that medicine, well, if it didn't start to make me sound just like a woman!" This again goes to show the adverse effects these drugs can have on our bodies and we should further research how we can prevent such deformities from happening. As Americans, we are blind to the where our food comes from and are unaware of the side effects it can have. We should care more about the treatment of the food animals we eat as well as what is being put into their bodies. For what the eat, so do we.