12. Food Safety

We Treat Animals as though We Are Not Animals.
Then a virus that's been continuously attacking the artificially immune lungs of our prisoner animal population mutates and attacks us. It's a little like Africa: Out of site and out of mind until Somalian Pirates threaten global commerce.

Last year, I had a conversation with a chicken processor who is part of a business which 'processes' about 350,000 chickens a day. He asked if I felt food was safer now than it was fifty years ago. He intended to spew a bunch of statistics about the safety of the product being sold on the shelves.

I said 'No,' I do not feel food is safer now. I feel our food ecology is slowly breeding super antibiotic resistant super-viruses which threaten human populations everywhere. I said I consider this unchecked, slow-ticking disaster a food safety issue. He knew I was right, but like the business he represents his definition of food safety lives in a narrow paradigm defined by the industry and regulatory bodies which they lobby, not the concerns of the safety of people or animals.