Eye Opener: CSIP

 For this weeks eye opener I took a Tour of Food Supply in the United States.  The tour consisted of looking at a fertilizer factory, a factory farm, a supermarket, a hospital, a restaurant, a slaughter house, a feed lot, pesticides, feed grains, irrigation, a manure lagoon, a river, and animal feed.  When you click on each topic you are then shown facts about that particular place or topic.  Below are a few facts taken from the tour that I found very interesting:

"The energy used to manufacture the 22 billion pounds of fertilizer used to produce feed for livestock, could provide one year's worth of power for about 1,000,000 Americans."

"Contaminated food causes about 5,000 deaths each year.  About 1,000 of those death are from food-borne illnesses linked to meat, poultry, dairy, and egg products."

"Annual medical costs for food-borne illnesses and deaths from pathogens in meat products in the U.S. is over 7 billion dollars."

"In 2002 about 140 million cattle, pigs, and sheep were slaughtered in the U.S., about half an animal for every man, woman, and child.  Another 9 billion chickens and turkeys, which is about 30 birds for every American."

"Manure lagoons on industrial scale hog farms have broken open in storms polluting waterways and killing fish."

These facts are extremely alarming!  I had no idea how much money we were spending on fertilizer or how many people per year were dying from food-borne illnesses before I took this tour.  Not only are we harming ourselves but our environment is suffering too!  An interesting fact that was also stated was that Americans are consuming more meat than they need to be, meaning that if everyone were to cut back we wouldn't need to be producing all of this fertilizer to feed the animals that we end up slaughtering to feed Americans.  I really do think that if everyone started to really learn about what they are eating and how much is too much, we may be able to do something about these crazy statistics!