From '63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read' by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell

I can't say I was surprised to read in this report how little attention is being paid to what's going on with our factory farms and feedlots. I've known about this problem since I was governor. The simple fact is, the Food and Drug Administration doesn't have the manpower. They tell you they're conducting these inspections, but nobody is actually out there checking to make sure.

The reality is, the conditions by which our food is being supplied to us are very dangerous. Consider that more than half a billion eggs were recalled last year and a salmonella outbreak in August made about 1,700 people sick. Preventable food-borne illness hits about 76 million Americans every year; 325,000 become hospitalized and 5,000 die from eating tainted food!

Excerpted from 63 Documents
the Government Doesn't Want
You to Read by Jesse Ventura
with Dick Russell, Skyhorse
Publishing It all comes back to the same old thing: this is what happens when corporations, in this case agribusiness, take over. It simply becomes bottom line, money, and profits-- everything else be damned. There is a staph infection that's antibiotic-resistant and widely present in our vast hog and chicken factories.

It's called ST398, and the reason it's a huge problem is because those animals are getting daily doses of antibiotics-- which make them grow faster (more bang for the buck) and keep them alive in the stressful and unsanitary conditions where they're raised.

You'd think that the federal regulators would want to keep tabs on this, but for years the FDA looked the other way and wouldn't even calculate estimates of how much antibiotics the livestock industry is using. Finally, in December 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General released a report-- it turned out to be 29 million pounds of antibiotics in 2009! And that, my friends, is a veritable s***load.