Press Release for Chew on This published by Houghton Mifflin Company
• A single fast-food hamburger may contain meat from hundreds, even thousands, of different cattle.
• Each can of soda contains more than ten teaspoons of sugar.
• A single animal infected with E. Coli 0157:H7 can contaminate thirty-two thousand pounds of ground beef.
• Chickens in slaughterhouses are sometimes killed by being thrown against walls or stomped on.
• Leftover waste from a cattle slaughterhouse is sometimes added to chicken feed.
• Leftover waste from a chicken slaughterhouse is sometimes added to chicken feed, turning the doomed birds into cannibals.
After reading that first line, I think I’m going to really cut down on my intake of hamburgers. I’ve known about mad cow disease and e.coli, but the odds of picking up a deadly pathogen are greatly increased when a single burger you’re eating may be made up of parts from hundreds to thousands of cows. In the old days, your butcher would make the hamburger locally, and it would often come from one cut of meat. Now you have no idea where that hamburger is coming from when you eat from a fast food location.