News Day

I haven't blogged about food in a really long time (as my sister points out to me every time I see her) so I thought I would round up a few stories in the news in the past few weeks that have to do with animal processing.

A few weeks back there was a little 2x2 inch article in the paper about Tyson Foods culling 15,000 hens and burying them because they tested positive for the H7N3 bird flu virus. The original article is here and I guess someone did a follow up because there is a longer article in the Tribune here.

Koreans protest American beef because of our complete lack of any sort of safety net to prevent diseased cows from entering the food supply. A picture of a candelight protest that filled the streets of Seoul really stood out. The most amazing part is it only took one cow with mad cow disease to be discovered in the U.S. before a group of high school students started the protest worried the unsafe meat would be slipped into their cafeteria food. I wish someone had started protesting the crappy quality of food in our schools when I was still around eating it. It's a good quick article and I just found out that Korea has a Blue House rather than a White House! In this article it is reported a man set himself on fire to protest.

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the Mississippi River is to expand to 10,084 square miles, up 20% from 1985. If you are unfamiliar with this dead zone concept it is just as it sounds - a huge zone in the gulf whose oxygen level gets messed up by run-off of nitrogen fertilizers and other pollutants producing huge algea bursts that take all the oxygen and nothing else can survive. Except oil rigs... here is the article.