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Life Cycle: Greening the Other White Meat

Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post Here’s a peek at pork.

It’s lunchtime, baby. Panda Garden. Porky goodness. Mooshu style.

The β€œother white meat” in your takeout container falls behind beef and chicken in American consumption, but we do pig out on pigβ€”on average, each of us consumes 51 pounds of Wilbur annually. That translates to big impact on our water and air.

Due to the high variety of bacteria, worms and other undesirables in pig flesh, and because of the quick-spread disease potential of crowded pig farms, heavy doses of antibiotics are administered routinely. Those same drugs end up in your body via waste streaming into our water supply, and via that Mooshu pork to go. Other side dishes you might not have ordered include growth hormones to encourage meat-heavy livestock and vaccines injected to avoid profit-damaging disease.

For the low-down on sustainable porcine cuisine, head over to The Huffington Post.

Thanks to the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Lacey Johnston for research assistance.

Image source: jere-me at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

2 comments
  1. Jeff McIntire-Strasburg

    Pork tends to be my downfall when it comes to meat: I could easily give up beef and poultry, but put a Southern-style BBQ sandwich in front of me (yep, the kind with the coleslaw in the sandwich), and I’m reduced to a salivating shell of myself. Check your farmer’s markets for sustainably-raised pork… it’s one of the few outlets I’ve found for it.

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