Plastic Food

 

Where I live we are surrounded by fields of grazing sheep and cattle and I doubt if any one of them would willingly swap their lush grass for a diet of human excrement, cement, Fido scraped off a road following an encounter with a truck or pelleted plastic. Of course farmed animals have no choice over what they eat and whatever the farmer dishes up is largely down to economics. Grass is good although what the grass is sprayed with is another matter entirely.

Gibberellic acid sprayed grass grows faster and extends the grazing season and research has shown that cattle raised on grass produce better milk – milk from grass-fed cattle is higher in omega 3 fatty acids, linoleic acid and vaccenic acid. Who’d have thunk that doing things the way nature intended was the best way to raise stock? 

Quality in = quality out. If humans are what we eat then so, too, are animals. Spray their food with herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers and where do you think that lovely cocktail goes? Into whatever eats it, of course. When the initial consumer becomes the food it goes into consumer number two. That said, grass is better than much else that has been and is fed to beasts.

Food safety in the UK has been regulated by the EU. Goodness knows how slack livestock feed regulations will become once Brexit is implemented. From my reading just about anything and everything goes in, or has gone in, to animal food – ground up corpses of other animals, what’s scraped off roads and shovelled out of hen deep litters.

I don’t farm but I do feed my pet cat and goodness knows his pet food sometimes smells so awful even he won’t eat it.

Unlike cats cattle are herbivores – they graze – on grass or seaweed but there are people who try to prove this wrong – I’ve no idea the word for animals who eat plastic or cement – let’s just call them factory farmed. And don’t panic. It was a phase that’s passed – I believe – but in the world of food production never say never.

Experimenting with food for livestock hasn’t stopped. Many will remember when those who are paid to know about animal nutrition thought it swell to make swill out of dead beasts – turn herbivores into carnivores and cannibals. Mad cow disease was the result. It should have been called mad food producer disease. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is a horrible disease. Recently there was an outbreak near where I live but when BSE hit the headlines in the 1990s a Tory government minister, John Gummer, publicly fed his daughter with a beef burger to prove the disease could not spread to humans. BSE variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) was shortly after shown to be able to spread to humans.

There are controls but cattle now are fed on cattle. Pigs are fed mashed up pigs. Hens are fed on rendered hens. And so on. Animal feed contains all sorts: road kill, dead horses, cats and dogs. The name of the pet food you buy might be more literal than you imagine.

Cutting costs, disregarding logic and glib reassurances do not make for a trustworthy food industry. The bottom line will always determine feeding policy for those who think they can get away with it. And hang the consequences.

What on earth were people thinking in the 1960s when experiments were carried out on plastic ‘hay’? Money that’s what. And what about plastic and cement pellets as food?

The US Department of Agriculture tested animal food made from cement dust (high in calcium) and found cattle’s daily weight gain doubled. By comparison experiments feeding animals with sawdust appear innocuous. Hardwood pellets were a fraction more expensive than pelleted sawdust with around 56% the energy value of corn feed. Whether anyone used them – no idea. A company called Farmland Industries produced plastic made into pellets and branded as Ruff-Tabs.

Justifying their behaviour the mad scientists who experiment with trash feed observed –

‘Animals are like people in that they can consume quite a variety of feeds and survive.’

In this country in the 1990s the Environment Agency considered cement kiln dust for animal feed. Cement kilns can be used to incinerate all kinds of material including those containing highly toxic heavy metals – lead, chromium, mercury which are highly carcinogenic. What kind of warped minds could envisage this is suitable material to feed to animals?

Animals crap out the crap they take in. That is wasteful. And occupies a lot of space – specially in farm factories where livestock never experience the great outdoors but spend their entire short lives inside. What to do with the waste? In the States 10% ground polyethylene added to alfalfa and cottonseed animal feed led to animals putting on weight but the cost of polyethylene was the issue not feeding plastic to animals. The aim was to find ways to cut the amount of food each beast would consume in the hope of reducing the amount of manure produced. Manure is not really a problem in a field but in animal meat factories the space taken up by manure presents difficulties for the ‘farmer.’

Ching! Collect the stuff and make it into pellets to feed back to the animals. Economic poetry. Poultry litter, faeces and plastic pellets all bound up together and sold as roughage. Roughage used to be plant-based but Kansas State University experiments feeding plastic pellets to cattle discovered much of the plastic was recoverable after the animals were slaughtered and so could be melted down and recycled into new pellets to feed to other cattle. Capitalism had found the perfect answer to production. Feed, retrieve, reconstitute, feed, retrieve, reconstitute, feed, retrieve… the word cattle meant capital. Synergy.

Animal crackers is not only found in the USA. Here in the UK human and animal waste have been incorporated into feed. This means anything eaten by an animal, including veterinary medicines – anti-biotics and arsenic which is included in many animal medicines passes into the feed. Arsenic is not advised for human consumption.

The UK has banned micro-beads in personal care products – toothpaste, laundry, cleaning products, shampoos and cosmetics. They are a menace to wildlife and the handiwork of yet more mad scientists responsible for dumping 8 million tons of plastic into the oceans annually to top up the 150 million tons they’ve already dumped there. On its own this is bad enough but plastics absorb contaminants in water making them a million times more toxic. Fish swallow these toxins and we swallow the poisoned fish.

Recycled plastic water bottles are ‘washed and dunked in chemicals to get the labels off, then chopped into bits. A flotation pool is used to separate the lid plastic from the bottle plastic. Three different materials come out at the end: lid flakes, bottle flake and labels. The final step is to “extrude” the flakes, or melt them down into pellets. This requires energy to heat the flakes, and can emit harmful chemicals into the air, due to additives in the plastic. The pellets are then sold on to manufacturers who use them as a feedstock. It is possible to do all of this in an environmentally friendly way: treating the wastewater correctly, disposing of chemicals properly and making sure harmful emissions don’t escape. Done right, this uses less energy and resources than virgin material. But if shortcuts are taken, the consequences can be devastating.’ (Financial Times) 

https://www.ft.com/content/360e2524-d71a-11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8

Our polyethylene diet includes fish, honey, table salt, beer and meat and our anti-biotic overload comes from eating animal flesh, consuming dairy products and from our drinking water. I don’t eat meat but I do drink water and my water comes out of the land behind our house where the pee and poop of grazing animals no doubt doused with vet medicines leeches into the rainwater that is piped into my house. That said I should probably be more fearful of the spill-offs from forestry chemicals.

The biggest damage of all is created by farm factories and not our traditional farmers who graze their beasts in grassy parks. Keeping cattle inside and feeding them on a diet that is most definitely not natural creates physical changes and damages their livers leading to high levels of medication compared with animals raised on grass which are far healthier. 

Eating organic food can improve your chances in the lottery of life. Brexit promises fewer controls over animal welfare and the prospect of imports of cheap factory-farmed US food which will not be its organic best produce which restrict the amount of animal drugs, including hormones to promote growth, and which exclude plastic pellets for roughage and feed containing urea or manure. No, this is not the food that will compete with good quality food here but something cheaper and nastier in all sorts of ways, not least the cruel exploitation of the animals soon to be appearing on your plate – or bucket if you eat in those kinds of places. Just watch out for the odd wood splinter in your tongue, a bit of concrete grit between your teeth or a belly-full of plastic garbage. 

https://www.andritz.com/feed-and-biofuel-en

https://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-industry-exposed/shocking-truth-about-dog-food/

https://www.andritz.com/feed-and-biofuel-en/industries/industrial-applications/waste-pelleting-feed-and-biofuel