Food labels seen in specialty grocery stores will sometimes appeal to the modern shopper by proclaiming that their products were made from animals that didn’t consume antibiotics or other chemicals when they were being raised.
Now, the FDA is responding to the widespread concern that overexposure to antibiotics may cause sickness and make us more vulnerable to diseases by issuing an advisory promoting a reduction in the use of these drugs in food given to meat animals.
Though compliance with this measure, like many made by the FDA, is voluntary, it represents a focus on not just making practices safer for animals but on changing the entire food production process in general.
It acknowledges what activists and wary consumers have said for some time, which is that the antibiotics that are put into use paper over the larger problems with the dingy conditions that we keep farm animals in.
CNN recently quoted information released by the agency earlier this month that shows the effect that antibiotics have had in more than 80 percent of ground turkey. That same article also quotes the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming’s Dr. Gail Hansen on the danger inherent in this practice.
“We feed antibiotics to sick animals, which is completely appropriate, but we also put antibiotics in their feed and in their water to help them grow faster and to compensate for unhygienic conditions,” Hansen said.
Like many of these initiatives, we will simply have to wait to see how this is put into practice. Meanwhile, companies need to secure the color label printer that will be right for them and help them advertise the benefits of their approach to food production.
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