Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [72]
ANTIBIOTICS
Livestock consume nearly half of the 25 million pounds of antibiotics produced in this country every year, an output that has shot up 400 percent in the last 20 years. Livestock eat most of these antibiotics in their feed, which contains low-level doses to enhance growth and prevent disease. Penicillin and tetracycline are the most common.45
Cancer-causing sulfa residues from antibiotics are still occasionally found in pork above the levels now considered safe, according to my former husband, pathologist Marc Lappé, author of Germs That Will Not Die: The New Threat of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (Doubleday/Anchor Press, 1981). In addition, the carcinogenic growth hormone DES has been discovered in some cattle, even after its banning several years ago.
Marc and other scientists fear that such widespread use of antibiotics in animals could lead to the evolution of bacteria resistant to common antibiotics. “The drugs are used in livestock production in total disregard of the possibility that they could create resisistant bacteria which might directly or indirectly cause disease in humans, or even human epidemics,” Marc warns.
The Food and Drug Administration is now considering banning the use of penicillin and certain types of tetracycline in animal feed.
The antibiotic explosion is just one more aspect of the destructive production imperative. Since poultry producers can get as much as 12 percent more weight gain from the same amount of feed when antibiotics are used, they feel they have no economic choice. Antibiotics also reduce disease and death, problems greatly exacerbated by the large-scale, high-density livestock production our economy encourages.
PESTICIDES
Pesticide use doubled from 1966 to 1976, reaching about 600 million pounds of active ingredients. When livestock eat tremendous volumes of treated grass and grain, pesticide residues concentrate in their tissues. Not surprisingly, a Food and Drug Administration study of our diet found the most (22 percent) pesticide detections in meat, fish, and poultry. (Virtually all the detections of DDT were in this group.) Oils and fats were next, with 18 percent of all detections.46
Studies of human breast milk offer strong evidence linking animal fat in the diet with heightened concentrations of pesticides. Stephanie Harris, formerly with the Environmental Defense Fund, told me that her study, using matched controls, found a significant correlation between pesticide levels in breast milk and the diet of the mother. “The more animal fats in the diet, the more pesticides we found in the mother’s milk,” Stephanie told me. “To reduce our intake of pesticides,” she suggests, “means not only cutting back on our meat intake but also on full-fat dairy foods—butter, whole milk and fatty cheeses.”47
Our national intake of DDT is going down. But you might be surprised that there is any DDT in our food at all, since it was banned for use here in 1972. Unfortunately, the life span of organochlorine pesticides already introduced into the environment ranges from 7 years to over 40 years. And while the amount of DDT in our food may be going down, our intake of other pesticides, like malathion, toxaphene, and captan, is going up.48
THE RISKS
No one knows. Our intake of pesticides does not exceed what the government calls safe “tolerance” levels. But these toxicity standards are established on the basis of short-term toxicity tests on small animals. They tell us little about the long-term risks to humans.
Moreover, when officials of the Environmental Protection Agency checked up on Industrial Biotest Laboratories, the mammoth lab which conducted most of the studies establishing the “safe” levels for pesticides consumed by Americans, it found that more than 75 percent of the tests audited were invalid. They involved faulty test procedures or downright falsification of data.49
We may not know for 10 to 20 years (or we may never know) the true health risks of pesticides in our food. In the meantime,