Matt Richtel’s article “Tainted Pork, Ill Consumers and an Investigation Thwarted” in today’s New York Times is a must-read for anybody who eats pork. It starts:
It was 7 a.m. on Independence Day when a doctor told Rose and Roger Porter Jr. that their daughter could die within hours.
and it won’t let you go after that. Richtel describes an intensive hunt by the Washington Dept. of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and others for the cause of the tainted pork that nearly killed 10-year-old Mikayla Porter, and the thwarting of this detective hunt by the corporate owners of industrial pig farms in Montana who refuse to give access to food safety investigators.
When you combine this with James Hamblin's recent "The Fundamental Link Between Body Weight and the Immune System" in the Atlantic, you might want to think twice before eating that next piece of cheap meat or sausage that comes from a factory farm in Montana or whatever. Not only might that stuff make you fat, it might kill you. Since the factory farms’ corporate owners are more worried about bad publicity than about public health, are you sure that their stuff is good for you?