public question

Fifty billion. Every year fifty billion birds are made to live and die [in the factory farming system].

It cannot be overstated how revolutionary and relatively new this reality is—the number of factory-farmed birds was zero before Celia Steele’s 1923 experiment. And we’re not just raising chickens differently; we’re eating more chickens: Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago.

“

—	Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer

antiobiotics in chicken = uti in human? »

from NPR’s The Salt

(by Amanda Visell, via kormosendre)

allcreatures:

Chulmleigh, UK: Liberty the last ex-battery hen to be rehoused is fed. The small battery hen cage has been phased out and replaced by more spacious ‘enriched cages’. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

the ag feed

The F.D.A. once routinely conducted its own studies of animal and human drugs, but limited budgets led the agency to eliminate much of its scientific and laboratory capacity over the years. The roxarsone study is a triumph for agency scientists but one unlikely to be repeated very often. The agency asked for $183 million in additional funds for food safety efforts next year, but House Republicans have instead proposed cutting $87 million.

“

—	Arsenic in Chickens: The FDA Takes On Poisonous Poultry by Marion Nestle