Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat
By Philip Lymbery with Isobel Oakeshott
Bloomsbury Press (2014)
Book Review
Farmageddon is about the false economy of industrial meat production. While the corporations that promote factory farming applaud themselves for producing “cheap meat” for poor people, when societal costs are counted, industrially produced meat costs society approximately 25 times the sticker price. So as not to infringe on corporate profits, the excess costs (for environmental clean-up and a myriad of health problems) are transferred to the taxpayer.
Lymbery, a long time organic farming proponent, provides an extremely thorough and compelling expose of the numerous drawbacks of raising livestock in concrete warehouses. The side effects of living adjacent to a factory farm include air and water pollution by toxic herbicides and pesticides, nitrates, pathogenic bacteria and arsenic; loss of songbirds, bees and other insect species; reduced life expectancy,* increased exposure to disease carrying mosquitoes, loss of earthworms (due to fertilizer-related soil acidification), increased incidence (by threefold) of childhood asthma; increased antibiotic resistance (due to routine feeding of antibiotics to factory farmed cows, pigs and chickens); reduced sperm counts and increased breast cancer and renal tumors related to Roundup, the herbicide used with GMO crops.
Lymbery also includes a section on industrially farmed fish and they risks they pose to the health of wild fish populations.
His final chapter includes a variety of policy recommendations that could facilitate a move away from industrial farming to safer, less environmentally destructive traditional farming.
*Individuals who live adjacent to intensive dairy farms have a ten year decrease in life expectancy.
The Most Revolutionary Act 
Good heavens! That is scary news indeed! We are what we eat and with health care costs soaring, is it any wonder we are doing so poorly when this is what we are exposed to? Why people are not raising a hue and cry over this is beyond me because people are literally howling in throes of agony on their death bed when these diseases finally claim them. It is a complete and utter mystery to me why we are not literally up in arms over this more than we are.
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I’m not sure, Shelby. I think it all boils down to where people get their information. I think the majority of Americans still rely on TV and mainstream newspapers for their news and the corporate media has no wish to impart any kind of information that will affect the profits of their advertisers. Even people who have limited Internet access though their Smarthphones only see what the corporate purveyors of fake materialist culture want them to see. Thanks for commenting.
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