Tuesday, December 9, 2014

America's Food

An example of the red raw skin under the chicken
due to its inability to stand and dirty living conditions.
Perdue is a major chicken processing company in Salisbury, Maryland who made $6 billion is sales last year. The article titled Abusing Chickens We Eat by Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times. His argument is that they should be raised humanely, and if they're not then they can not false advertise on the label. They give the chickens hormones to make bigger breasts (white meat) and the weight it too much for their legs so they end up squatting in feces most of the time with burning red under bellies lacking feathers. If humans grew at the same rate that they make the chicken grow, a human would be 660 lbs at 8 weeks old. The best quote is "Torture a single chicken and you risk arrest. Abuse hundreds of thousands of chickens for their entire lives? That's agribusiness." It sums up the hypocriticalness of the laws and shows that things need to change. I believe that the abuse of these animals is wrong and something needs to change.

Dirty conditions

The Jungle is a novel written by Upton Sinclair about the conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in Chicago and many other big cities in the U.S. it depicts working class poverty, the lack of social supports, harsh living conditions, and the workers hopelessness. Contrasted with corruption of people in power. The material was collected by Sinclair posing as a worker in a meat packaging plant. He was there for 7 weeks gathering and researching information. Teddy Roosevelt responded by appointing a commission of experts to investigate the meat packing industry. They soon after issued a report backing up Sinclair's account of the disgusting conditions inside. The living conditions in 1906 America were not good. They lived in dirty tenements and food was often laden in flies. The law passed worked to prevent adulterated or misbranded meat and says that they have to be slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions. 

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