As the article says, the routine use of hormones and antibiotics for livestock has been banned for almost a decade in Europe.
What scares me is that with the new trade deal currently being hammered out between the EU and the US, there is a lot of pressure to "harmonize" the regulations, meaning the US will demand their chlorine-rinsed chicken, and hormone/antibiotics filled beef be allowed in the european markets.
Use of anti-biotics for livestock has not been banned in Europe, where exactly do you get this info from?
The article talks about the Dutch stopping the use of anti-biotics as preventive measures, a practice where you feed animals antibiotics so that they cannot get sick in the first place. Once the animal is sick, they can still be treated with AB.
And to clear something up:
Organic-labeled beef in the US is AB free, you can only label beef organic if no antibiotics were used full stop.
Germany? Organic beef is allowed to have been treated with AB.
The world of food and animal safety is not as black and white as you might think. The FDA has instilled some pretty harsh rules that have not been adopted in the EU.
Same goes with cars btw, the rules on Diesel emissions are ways stricter in the US, etc. Different safety standards as well.
There is a possibility that some authority in the US will (be lobbied to) require hormones/chlorine-rinsing/antibiotics in order for the food to be deemed safe for American consumers, yes. So sadly, there needs to be some "harmonization" meaning turning the clock back a couple of decades in Europe.
I am currently poor (for an American). I do not really buy cheap food. Good quality food is my single biggest expense. It keeps me out of the ER (where I am supposed to practically live, given my medical condition). I do this even though I routinely run short on funds at the end of the month and this sometimes means fasting for a day or so or simply being short-rationed the last week. Going hungry part of the time harms my health less than eating crap all of the time.
People are people first and foremost and their current economic/social class is not the only determiner of their lifestyle choices.
Eating well is far cheaper than the medical bills I am supposed to have. My health problems are the root cause of my poverty. Resolving my health problems is my only hope of escaping poverty. Your snark is not appreciated.
Your healthcare system (which allows a tie betwen health and poverty) is the root problem of your poverty. Your statement about health problems leading to poverty means a guess of your home country would be "Third world country, or the US". How screwed up is that?
In my case, that is an inaccurate assumption. My father was career military and so was my ex husband, thus most of my medical care has been free or damn cheap. I was married to my ex long enough while he was in the military that I still qualify for free medical treatment on the federal dime. My poverty is rooted in a) being unable to work a normal job and b) using alternative treatments to effectively treat what conventional medicine does not currently know how to effectively treat.
I was trying to avoid addressing what is a complex situation that has a history of getting me in social hot water. I do understand why, based on my earlier comment, you would draw this conclusion but that isn't really the case for me personally.
Granted, I think America should go to government paid healthcare for all citizens. I think the current system sucks tremendously.
My health is improving. Thanks for your well wishes.
You don't have to shop at Whole Foods to eat well. Neighborhood gardens, local collectives and independently gardening are growing in popularity for that reason probably. Also, it's nice to know where your food comes from.
Organic produce is priced just like any other good. What is the highest price I can charge that most (or enough) people will pay?
This refers to the practice of dipping freshly butchered chickens in chlorine to kill salmonella bacteria. In Europe they vaccinate the chickens instead.
In a few countries (e.g. Sweden) there is neither vaccination nor any antibacterial treatment of the meat. And salmonella is nearly a non-issue. Climate may be a factor, but probably not the only factor.
imho if we allow "cheap" treatments such as vaccination or preventive antibiotics, that also means we allow a cheaper way of keeping your animals healthy (cheaper than rigorous routines for hygiene/disease control/animal separation). if it's allowed to do so, it's a competitive edge, so it becomes standard practice.
Wow, my most downvoted comment yet, and for pointing out that cows have hormones in them.
I guess the downvoters believe that the artificial variety are magically different from the natural sort, despite being chemically and biologically indistinguishable.
Please read my comment and point out where I typed "antibiotics" or any other term commonly understood to mean that class of drugs.
I'm slightly dyslexic, and my brain must be scrambling the word, because when I read through it again, I don't see it.
> The down voters believe your characterisation of them as utterly stupid
Then they've proved me right. The correct way to show me wrong is to actually compose a salient rebuttal, which would by its nature show me to be a fool. Hell, I might even end up so shamed I'd apologize. The only conclusion possible though is that they knew they could not do this and did not make the attempt like the cowards that they are.
> and adds nothing to the thread.
How can it not add to the thread? Well, unless you want the thread to be an echo chamber and demand conformity of opinion.
Please read my comment and point out where I said that you typed "antibiotics" or any other term commonly understood to mean that class of drugs.
Or don't, because I didn't and you didn't and that's irrelevant.
The original post implies that American beef has added hormones and antibiotics compared to European beef, and the person posting considers that to be worse quality. A common concern is the addition of growth hormones and growth promoting antibiotics and the effect that might have in the food chain and the people eating it and so on.
Your statement that cows are animals with hormones doesn't touch on any of that, and your implication that people are only downvoting you because they think cows do not have hormones and refusing to prove you wrong because they're cowards is ridiculous trolling.
I upvoted a different story from this site and somehow found myself reading this (no doubt an oopsy of mousing) and trying to figure out the tie-in to the title I thought I was reading. :-P Having figured out my error, I think this is a far more fascinating piece about one country deciding to drastically reduce its use of antibiotics in meat production.
Excerpts:
There are points of tension. Disease-prevention dosing can be a hedge against sloppy practices: With the drugs no longer available, farmers have to pay close attention to hygiene, diet and stress. Not all are willing to do so.
And:
Oosterlaken also revels in the challenge of farming without the crutch of antibiotics, and proudly shows off the changes he has made on his farm. He is obsessive about biosecurity, requiring visitors to shower and shampoo, change into fresh clothes and underwear that he supplies and then don scrubbed boots color-keyed to different areas.
I think the most shocking point is To this day, when members of Dutch farm families go into hospitals, they are put into isolation rooms until lab tests show they are clear of the germ.
That has got to change peoples mindsets and could easily end up happening in the US.
To me, the most shocking (and also encouraging) point is that before they made this decision: ... farms in the Netherlands were European leaders in antibiotic use.
They seem to have done an about face. This gives me hope that minds can be changed elsewhere.
I think you're arguing wrong.
First: there's not so much lobbying in Northern Europe countries.
Second: you should look at the size of the food and distribution industries, more than the agricultural sector
The power you get for lobbying is not directly proportional to the amount of money you spend on it; if there is less competition, lobbying will be more efficient. That's why I question the claim that the lobbying is more powerful in the USA, compared to that in the Netherlands.
"The agricultural sector in the Netherlands constitutes around 10 per cent of the Dutch economy and employs more than 660.000 people, 50.000 of which are farmers."
Actually, it is not entirely impossible that with the prevalence of MRSA bacteria in the US there will come a point when US visitors to Dutch hospitals will need to be quarantined as a precaution.
The resulting headlines would make a powerful agent for change indeed.
All Americans admitted to Icelandic hospitals are in fact immediately isolated until they can be tested for MRSA. It wouldn't surprise me if they did the same for British patients given the prevalence of MRSA in the UK.
Such precautions remind me of the 'mad cow disease' outbreak some years ago in the UK and Netherlands; not a bad approach, really. You're trying to chuck tens of thousands of animals on as small an area as possible (NL isn't too large after all), just like people that's a huge hygiene and potential disease outbreak risk. It's one way to deal with overpopulation.
Mad cow disease (BSE) was not related to hygiene or how many animals were crammed into how little space. It was caused by mixing their food with the ground-down remains of other cows, especially their brain parts.
What an inspiring story. The dutch seem to be particularly good at quantifying externalities and negotiating change, which may be due to their 'Polder model' of governance.
I just saw a documentary on German tv showimg mich the Same thing for Danish pig farmers so it is not an isolated example. It is a simple issue of incentives.
Even more impressive was that zero anti biotics use in pig farming practiced by a farmer who had his pigs in stables with free range access was only 40% more expensive. Just think about it. We endanger the most important scientific advancement in human health for cheaper bacon.
It is not that simple though. It is rational to not eat meat that contains antibiotics or fruit and vegetables that contain pesticides. But you need the time, money, resources, knowledge and organisation to actually pull it off. I don't know there is some sort of Maslow pyramid for countries, but a lot of countries might just not be ready to face this problem just yet. For instance, China wasn't too bothered about pollution until recently, they were (and still are) busy raising the general standard of living. Similarly, the United States might not be ready to attack this problem just yet because they are busy attacking... other things.
And, when you get down to brass tacks, I would not be at all surprised if it was better tasting bacon too... How are the Europeans able to do this? Is there an opposition view? Surely some farmers couldn't change and went out of business or something, right? It just seems too pragmatic and agreeable, it's almost like it makes sense. Surely near term profits are an issue there as well.
In the US, agriculture is huge money, just beef alone is a $200b+ industry. Then there are all these backwards incentives in the farm bills. Then there is the issue of rehabilitating a farm to take it "organic" (I'm conflating things here, antibiotics and organic farming aren't completely the same but similar) it takes years and capital to go clean, not all farmers have the resources to do it; they and the communities around them have a vested interest in declaring their methods safe and it becomes hyper political...
> Just think about it. We endanger the most important scientific advancement in human health for cheaper bacon.
Because that's what the consumer wants. Apparently. Supermarkets have been competing with each other on prices for ages, a well-known example is chicken fillet. The price has gone down to just E3 per kilo at one point, which caused a bit of a riot because those were the famous 'plofkip' (exploding chicken), or chickens that were forced to grow as large as possible in as little time as possible.
But there's the other side, too; farms like the one described in the opening post can thank their existence over an increase in demand for 'organic' meat, or meat that gets a label indicating it was grown in an animal-friendly fashion without use of antibiotics and growth hormone. Conscious consumers with a decent income will be more inclined to pay a premium for that kind of meat.
I don't think it is fair to say that the consumer wants cheaper beacon, even at the expense of human health. Is that choice made clear at the check out? No. Do most people know this is a choice? I suspect not.
You're right. And the two are hard to compare: cheaper bacon in your hand, immediately, today vs. the more abstract 'human health' (which may or may not affect you, ever).
> Because that's what the consumer wants. Apparently.
People do not make Perfect Decisions based on Perfect Information, and this is a fine example of the wrong conclusions drawn from implicitly assuming they do.
'Organic' does not mean animal-friendly. It generally means without the use of synthetic chemicals (or without the use of any chemicals, depending on what farm you're at).
Either way, sorry for being overly pedantic, but too often when people see organic the automatically assume the animals are being treated better/more ethically than they would be at a regular, non-organic farm.
That's what I get for applying the US lens to Europe. . . .
But, the regulations are very similar. So, where your site states,
"Lots of outdoor space and fresh air"
"Encouragement of normal animal behaviour"
I wonder if that is translated the same as the United States:
"Provide access to the outdoors so that animals can exercise their natural behaviors"
"Support animal health and welfare"
If it is, I really wonder if they're being applied the same, or if yours are as open for interpretation as ours. My experience with US organic farming is dairy and chicken. I work with farmers quite a bit through the extension office of my college employer. The organic farmers in my area practice (in my opinion) very loose organic practices.
For example, access to outdoors was available, but in an enclosed area (run for chickens, small pasture for cattle). This, by no means allowed the animals to "exercise their natural behaviors," and yet was within the legal definition of organic, and allowed them to sell their products to grocery stores and markets as 'certified organic'.
The health and welfare laws mentioned in the second portion apply to all farmers, regardless of organic certification or not.
This is also not true in the US where USDA requirements for organic livestock include a requirement with free access to the outdoors and space for exercise, a ban on growth hormones and antibiotics (which are the only way to keep animals packed in close together), clean dry bedding, clean drinking water, direct sunlight, shade and much more.
I replied to another comment asking questions about how Europe interprets their regulations. But, here's the pertinent parts for the US:
The United States has: "Provide access to the outdoors so that animals can exercise their natural behaviors" "Support animal health and welfare"
My experience with US organic farming is dairy and chicken. I work with farmers quite a bit through the extension office of my college employer. The organic farmers in my area practice (in my opinion) very loose organic practices.
For example, access to outdoors was available, but in an enclosed area (run for chickens, small pasture for cattle). This, by no means allowed the animals to "exercise their natural behaviors," and yet was within the legal definition of organic, and allowed them to sell their products to grocery stores and markets as 'certified organic'.
I don't get it. Do we imagine organic chickens are roaming around town? Have the wide open prairie to explore? Of course its going to be an enclosed area.
Of course it's going to be an enclosed area. But my point is that it's not what most people think it is. To respond, I just pulled the math on the averages from 'certified organic' farms I've worked with over the years, just to spell it out a little more.
Egg Chickens Per Coop: 2.48 Square feet of space per bird. 45 Hens, 2 roosters, 72 square feet, 10 laying boxes, outside run of 45 square feet fenced on three sides and overhead.
Meat Chickens Per Coop: 1.8 Square feet of space per bird. 55 Hens, 70 square feet, outside run of 30 square feet fenced on three sides and overhead.
Dairy Cattle: Access to .3 acres per head in pen, average of 14 acres/45 cattle per pen/parlor. *Every single notation I've made about the dairy organics I've encountered states: "Many do not leave parlor, reason is apparent- feed in the parlor is easier to access and of a higher quality than forage available."
Now, I'm not sure of the space requirements for a chicken, but I can honestly tell you that 30-45 outdoor square feet is not enough to support that number of birds and to honor the spirit of "providing access to the outdoors so that animals can exercise their natural behaviors." It obeys the word - - outdoor access, but definitely not the idea behind it.
Cattle do have space requirements to avoid overcrowding and overgrazing, you can even find that on-line based on your area of the country. Most of my personal experience is with beef cattle, mind you. In my area, you can plan on 4-5 acres of good pasture per 2 adult cattle or 3 juveniles. 1/3 acre, again, honors the word, but not the spirit.
Anyway, we don't need them roaming around, or with the wide open prairies to explore. My point was that the law-abiding definition of organic, and the steps you have to take to get certified organic status aren't really the happy-go-lucky, love every animal, everyone deserves an awesome life kind of regulations most people think they are.
In my experience living here, it's not only the farmers. Dutch doctors typically avoid prescribing general antibiotics (or advising anything stronger than paracetamol) to people.
The article mentions this. There was this twisted situation in Netherlands where doctors avoided antibiotics as much as possible. At the same time farmers were using more antibiotics than necessary. The latter effectively undoes the effort of Dutch doctors to keep resistance to antibiotics low.
My wife's cousin owns a dairy farm in Germany and only uses homeopathic medicines on the cows. When I stifled a chuckle, he indignantly pointed out that not only does it appear to work for his cows, it isn't as if the cows can understand him, nor know that they are being treated.
However much I have my doubts about homeopathy, his cows seemed healthy and weren't being pumped full of antibiotics; hence I saw it as a good thing.
Homeopathy "works" because most illnesses are self-limiting. For example, homeopathics appear to treat the common cold successfully, with the caveat that they take about a week or two to take effect.
This is basically how homeopathy become popular in the first place. It worked better than what was currently available in regular medicine because it didn't work at all.
Yeah, definite cultural difference from, for example, the US. But I'm pretty sure doctors there get money and gifts and whatnot from the pharmaceutical industry to supply large quantities of heavy pain killers.
It's not ideal, but if you look at how chickens are usually farmed, it's in the dark, in wire cages stacked on top of each other this is much better! Battery cages are completely unsanitary, the birds are covered in shit the whole time and can easily get injured, and much more stressful than this.
Yeah, these chickens are healthy, they might even be happy there. They could do a lot worse. If someone really doesn't like the idea of broiler farm chickens, they can pay a little extra for free range chickens. Or pay even more to buy them off a local farmer. Or just switch to something else entirely, there are plenty of alternatives available today.
I ask honestly because my first thought at the picture was that, If anything, it shows that the chickens have bad plumage[0] and are mostly sitting down[1].
For [1] my guess is either the animals pick on each other too much, or they are actually chicks that have grown in size faster than they should.
For [2] it may mean that they have weak bones/muscles (due to bad feeding, inflated growth and no movement) and that they are actually laying in their own filth.
In a potentially related story, BBC News reports a 300% increase in 10 years of younger prople being admitted with Crohn's Disease. Got it at 38 myself and, like others I suspect my exposure to large doses of antiobiotics may have contributed (For adult acne in my case - it's thought antibiotics deplete bacteria in the digestive tract which can lead to IBD following an infection, mine kicked off after food poisoning)
Curious. I have a related disease (Ulcerative Colitis) and I believe that the straw that broke the camel's back for me was also a course of antibiotics. I got ill also about the same age as you.
In retrospect, the initial "change" for me came years beforehand after a case of severe food poisoning. After that I struggled with certain foods; seafood for example made me instantly ill, whereas previous to the food poisoning incident I could handle almost any kind of food without issue.
I have recently seen an improvement in my UC after being prescribed with large doses of Vitamin D. I was suffering badly from exhaustion and fatigue, related to the side effects of UC and the medication I have to take against it. In combination with lots of foods that help with the intestinal flora, such as yogurts and pro-biotics (Yakult) I'm feeling much more healthy.
I don't think that one single thing causes these kinds of illnesses. I think it is a combination of factors that come together in a perfect storm. Genetics, stress, tiredness, diet and then damage to the intestinal flora (processed food / antibiotics) I think are all factors.
It's quite possible IBD is just better diagnosed and patients are more aware of it yes.
Myself I've been on Low Dose Naltrexone, more accurately, a low dose of Naltreone for 4 years and am asymptomatic, though I still have mildly active disease.
The whole topic of OGF/Met-enkephalin is a fascinating one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met-enkephalin
And I agree, yes, there are many factors that contribute to auto-immune disease development both genetic and environmental.
It is about visiting the inner farm, so to speak. You can visit farms all you like, but once you come in close contact with animals, i.e., go into the animal barn, you're supposed to clean. The inner farms never had much visitors, especially in the industrial scale farming. Those who would visit anyway, vets, workers, maybe colleagues or students, will not have a problem with thorough cleaning, I suppose.
Apparently those measures have not had an negative effect on productivity in the Netherlands, so I do not see where you are coming from.
And you are also forgetting that this is done to prevent the spread of life-threatening diseases for which we do not have a working treatment yet and the emergence of new diseases of that kind.
Those are hard problems. Hunger in the first world is not (we already overproduce any kind of food) and even if meat would become scarce we could just use a fraction of the resources which are now used to raise livestock to feed ourselves.
There is no enough meat farmers in the Netherlands, to produce all the meat consumed _daily_ in the Netherlands.
I´ve been living and working there. I'm a meat lover. The Netherlands is the Hell for a person with the same tastes than me (many years of high quality meat and vegetables and cooking practices).
Meat in the Netherlands is of very bad quality and very high price (I will avoid more colloquial expressions of my basic english).
In those countries that dutch people call "monkeys" or "Moroccans" (this is, portugal, spain, italy and greece) the meat is much better in quality and price... but... we don't have the "autosuggestion" of "we are the best" than dutch people have (even with their street reality).
I don't trust news years ago, but I trust my experience.
The pseudo-nazi dutch people (the first place in the world where I did meet black-skin-nazis, gay-nazis, jew-nazis, etc), are very prone to believe, say and sell, that they are the best, this news are very well crafted for their mind, I don't want to live on a country with the meat quality and price of the Netherlands streets. I know the reality there.
I prefer to be a "Moroccan monkey discriminated european" for them, and take meat and tomatoes of the mountains of my not so auto-suggested, auto-inclined, people. And live with the bad reality (and crafted news) of my country.
Enjoy the meal, and sleep on ignorance and discriminatory abundance, and justify yourself your incoherent reality, dear dutch people.
Hi there. As a Dutch person I sympathize with your frustration, but just like the majority of the Dutch do not generalize like you describe I'd appreciate it if you did not generalize either. Because by generalizing like that you are positioning yourself more like the percentage of the Dutch that I'd rather not associate with than the rest of us, effectively making yourself part of the problem, not part of the solution.
That said I fully agree that this society needs to work on a lot of things such as immigration, all kinds of glass ceilings, discrimination (in fact, not on paper) and a ton of other aspects in which we are far from perfect. We used to be a fairly tolerant society and in the last decade or so have thrown away long term progress for some cheap political slogans and finger pointing. A single party is responsible for a lot of this and has successfully driven a wedge into our otherwise tolerant society.
This is a fairly common element historically, whenever there is some degree of trouble it can pay off politically to find a scape-goat. But please continue to see it for what it is: an appeal to the baser nature of those that are not smart enough to see through it and judge the rest of us by our actions rather than by the words of our co-citizens.
Haha, Dutch food can be quite bland if you are not used to it. I'm Dutch myself and my Chinese friends are pretty shocked at my eating habits, they even go so far to claim that I don't know how to live. But I genuinely enjoy some whole wheat bread with hard cheese or a Stamppot.
Luckily there are plenty alternatives as there are restaurants from every imaginable culture or country. Dutch people are still quite open-minded and open to other cultures. Maybe not as much as in the past, which is a shame.
Netherland definitely comes out of a period where food was not judged on taste at all, which led to very tasteless potatoes and tomatoes. But with increasing access to good international food (during the '90s in particular), many started yearning for good food with taste again, and since then there's been a real turnaround with much tastier vegetables, more local produce, and more free range and organic.
It hasn't reached all corners of society yet, but there's definitely change in the Dutch attitude towards food.
Well, it may seem positive, but here in the inferior south, that photos could destroy the day of many (sub)people.
We prefer animals and tomatoes not grow in those conditions shown in the photos (we get them, at the same prices, but grow with space and natural food).
I don't know why the article does not talk about the technologies used to modify vegetables and animals. I don't care if they don't get antibiotics, while they are transgenics, clones, or grow with irradiation and other technologies.
Also sorry and excuses to those offended downvoters, I can probe each word, I said them with care of not let me go, but I could go on, if somebody clarify the disagreement
I would have tried to message you privately, but you don't have contact info.
Maybe you don't notice the nuance of your writing, as English is not your native language, but you are saying that ALL dutch people are racists. This is why you are getting a negative reaction. If you think that is true, you are wrong, and guilty of the sort of group-oriented negative thinking you are upset about. It might help future interactions to say, instead of "x are nazis" (which indicates you think they all are) to, say, "I couldn't stand living there, there were too many people doing [negative racist attitude]"
> Also sorry and excuses to those offended downvoters, I can probe each word, I said them with care of not let me go, but I could go on, if somebody clarify the disagreement
I just did (see above) and I did not even downvote you because I can see where you're coming from but I think you are categorically wrong in the way you are approaching this.
If you ever make it back to NL consider yourself invited, email in profile (assuming our travels overlap).
Every foreigner who has ever seen a Dutch meal on his plate, dared to take a bite, and then seen the bill, knows exactly what you mean. Rants usually follow, though maybe not always with quite so many Nazi references :)
Imagine the shock, when one sinks their teeth into one of those beautiful, perfect looking, huge, shiny, spotless and bright red strawberries, and instead of the expected explosion of sweet, fruity flavor, the mouth fills with the tart, watery and astringent culinary assault familiar to the poor flavor deprived Dutch. How can a fruit so perfect in appearance be so offensive in taste that one would only feed it to a horse as a punishment for kicking a child.
This is not the place. Your post is irrelevant to the topic at hand, is itself guilty of overgeneralization, and contains not just one but a whole series of political statements of the type that originate flamewars. A favourable reading (ignoring the parts that go flagrantly against either the style guide or the community standards) reduces your post to 'nice to read this', which is contentless. Please stop.
You're generalising the Dutch as right-winged neo-nazi extremist racists there, I don't agree. That's just a few political outliers that try to get votes via extreme statements.
It takes a certain mentality to turn frustration into the kind of rant you can read above. Into blaming some abstract common denominator in your environment instead of blaming yourself, (part of) your immediate environment or luck. Into making statements exactly as ridiculously wrong as those he alludes to.
And to top it off, it's completely devoid of factual correctness. It's just repeating the same boring urban legends about Dutch food quality.
I have a Croatian friend in The Netherlands that's a meat lover to the bone. He doesn't complain about the quality of the meat for sale: he simply finds and buys good stuff.
If you want to see some real dangerously bad quality meat for sale, you have to go to one of the countries where those checking and ensuring the quality of the food can be bribed.
Fair enough. I know that there is a lot of bad blood between Moroccan people and the right-wing Dutch. I see this in light of that rather than that the OP was trying to make any sense at all and even though I disagree with everything he wrote I can see that if it were motivated by frustration that that would be a legitimate excuse.
But going on what was written you are absolutely right.
What scares me is that with the new trade deal currently being hammered out between the EU and the US, there is a lot of pressure to "harmonize" the regulations, meaning the US will demand their chlorine-rinsed chicken, and hormone/antibiotics filled beef be allowed in the european markets.