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America’s meatheads wise up

Spring brings terrific news for the farm animals of America, a category of beast subjected to increasingly hellish conditions.

Burger King, second only to MickyD's, has announced that it will start buying pork and eggs from suppliers who do not confine their animals to cages.

This is huge. The most carnivorous humans are shocked by American 'industrial' farming. A pig, as smart as a dog, spends its life as a protein-converter immobile in a cage in which even the floor consists of bars because dollars are saved with easier flows of slurry.

Such slurry contaminated the spinach which spread last year's e-coli outbreak. Sorry to spoil your lunch, but this is what the Burger King reform is all about.

The Humane Society hailed an "important trigger", but the milk of human kindness has nothing to do

Upstate Downstate
As Burger King insists its pork must come from uncaged animals, the US realises it’s been poisoning itself

with it. Walt Disney created the Bambi view of nature. But he forgot to mention the link with the cellophane wrap at the butcher.

Americans are realising that they are being poisoned. It is not just hormone-addled, pesticide-poisoned, karma-outraged meat, but all that junk spun from corn-syrup too. It is a farm system which has gone further even than Britain's mad-cow spasm, and which horrifies the French.

Vince in the Woodstock Meat Market scoffed at me when I first asked him for 'grass-raised' beef. Now, he sells nothing else because Woodstockers won't buy anything else, even at double the old price.

What started with the fancy-pants elites of New York's Hudson Valley and health-freaks in Los Angeles is spreading through the market. We will all be better off for leaving pigs to follow their destiny like movie-star Babe, and cows on the grass to jump over the moon.

FIRST POSTED APRIL 10, 2007

News & Comment: News & Politics