vegansaurus!
07/05/2011
Backyard chickens are making children sick. Seriously, kids are being hospitalized. Yay, urban homesteading! Yay, Salmonella! »
The next time of your locavIDIOT friends is all, “OMG I totally want backyard chickens and in related news I am a total idiot!” you can be all, “READ THIS FIRST, IDIOT friend.”
Salmonella isn’t just for factory farms anymore, folks! Thas right:
Infected chicks and ducklings have sickened 71 people—more than half of them younger than 5—in a growing multistate outbreak of salmonella that now involves two different strains of the bacteria.
Eighteen people were hospitalized with “SEVERE DIARRHEA.” In related news, that’s totally the name of my punk band. Also: EW GROSS.
Will backyard chickens make you and your children sick with the shits? And maybe worse? We’ll let this chicken answer for us:
∞ posted at 10:06 by laurahooperb 
05/06/2011
Four dead in Japan thanks to E. coli »
Super shitty news out of Japan: Four people are dead and at least 56 are sick—after eating raw beef at a popular chain barbecue restaurant in Tonami in Toyama Prefecture. Totally fucking awful.
What’s really scary about this (besides EVERYTHING) is that we’re discovering more and more variations of E. coli that are super crazy dangerous. Before there was just O157:H7 to worry about, and now there are at least six more types of E. coli. Shudder. I’m telling you, we’re gonna see more and more horrific stuff like this happening.
In extra-super-disturbing news, many of these E. coli variations aren’t even looked for in labs, so there’s a chance that even the most stringently tested dead cow (that’s like 1 percent anyway) is gonna be teaming with all sorts of delicious E. coli that nobody ever even looked for. Hide your kids, hide your wife. Or you know, stop eating that (literal) shit because it ain’t safe.
∞ posted at 13:01 by laurahooperb
03/11/2011
(Yet another) New drug-resistant E. coli! »
Well, it won’t affect us vegans just yet, but I’m sure it’ll make its way to us somehow. Thanks, meat mouths!
From the Wired article:
Chickens, chicken meat and humans in the Netherlands are carrying identical, highly drug-resistant E. coli—resistance that is apparently moving from poultry raised with antibiotics, to humans, via food.
I’d like to write more about how many levels of gross and fucked this whole thing is, but I’m finna board a plane to Austin! So instead, I leave you with: WE ARE FUCKED THE WORLD IS ON FIRE RUN FOR THE HILLS.
∞ posted at 09:16 by laurahooperb
04/14/2010
» Does your veggie burger contain trace amounts of hexane residue? Do you care?
Today’s health scare story floating around the tubes is about the use of hexane to process isolated soy protein, a common ingredient in non-organic veggie burgers. Even though this is old-ish “news,” it’s one of those zombie stories that keeps resurfacing every six-to-nine months as “THE REAL STORY” about the dangers of soy, which means that vegans are, once again, wrong about everything/lying to ourselves/the real killers because once a field mouse wandered into a tractor harvesting soybeans.
If you’re eating organic soy, this story has nothing to do with you. And if you’re eating unprocessed, unpackaged food that you cook yourself or leave to cooks who care about fresh ingredients, this story still has nothing to do with you. If you’re eating packaged food manufactured by giant corporations, well, you get what you pay for.
But despite all the dire warnings in the Cornucopia report about hexane explosions, there’s a curious lack of any statistics about any actual deaths or disease caused by trace amounts of hexane in non-organic veggie burgers or soy baby formula. Which means that the number, as far as we know, is zero.
To be fair, the report is only calling for an FDA investigation into whether or not hexane residue is dangerous. And go for it; food safety is important. But the real agenda here is to cast soy as dangerous—maybe even explosive!—by innuendo, while glossing over the toxic waste dump of meat and dairy and the raging epidemic of death and disease caused by their overconsumption. But the public always loves a “this thing we thought was good is actually bad!” story, so expect to see this one reposted on your Facebook wall about 12 times by your smug-omnivore distant cousins.
[Correction: The post originally stated that the Cornucopia Institute is funded by the Weston A. Price Foundation, a pro-meat-and-dairy think-tank. While Cornucopia and WAPF share resources, and Cornucopia’s founder has ties to WAPF and to the organic dairy industry, we were unable to verify a financial connection between the two organizations.]
∞ posted at 15:26 by stevesimitzis 
