Tuesday, July 16, 2013

I think this may count as a minor miracle, the FDA has admitted that there is poison in the chicken meat you are buying at the store. Arsenic, to be specific. The same chemical that the FDA has been warning us is carcinogenic. Apparently consuming arsenic makes the birds grow fatter faster and "improves" the color of the meat. The arsenic based drug is called Roxarsone, and is manufactured by Pfizer. Researchers have found residues of the drug in chicken they purchased from various stores. Even worse, USDA certified organic and antibiotic free chicken contained trace amounts of the drug as well, although conventionally raised chicken had four times the amount found in the organic chicken. The FDA is currently being sued by the Food and Water Watch for ignoring a Freedom of Information Act. FYI, the FDA is the same group telling us that consuming raw milk is "playing Russian roulette" with your health. John Sheenan, director of the FDA's Division of Dairy and Egg Safety, says this: "We see a number of cases of foodborne illness every year related to the consumption of raw milk." What he conveniently doesn't mention is the number of cases of foodborne illness caused by pasteurized milk. As a matter of fact, in 1985 the largest salmonella outbreak in US history came from pasteurized milk. But what do we, the uneducated public, know about such complicated matters as food safety? We really ought to leave it to our kind (and always honest) government officials.