Displaying items by tag: health
Are the bats trying to tell us something?
I read an article about bats in the most recent University of Vermont alumnae magazine today. It made me want to cry.
Bats are dying due to a little-understood disorder called "White nose syndrome." The disorder causes the bats to wake frequently throughout their winter hibernation, and since they are hungry when they wake, they fly off in search of insects - their primary source of food. The problem is that in the winter, there are no insects, so the bats expend valuable energy in futile searches before returning to their winter slumbers. By the time they wake in the spring, the bats are so emaciated, that they are susceptible to other illnesses that healthy bats can easily fight off. So, the bats die from a variety of things, so it has been hard to pin-point the exact cause of the syndrome.
Another Reason to Buy Local Food?
As if we needed another reason to purchase our food from local sources, along comes the Great American Egg Recall of 2010!
Billions of eggs potentially tainted with Salmonella bacteria, and thousands of people sick as a result.
The photos of the factory egg "farms" are too awful for me to include here -- chickens packed in cages, stacked on top of one another in conditions that should be criminal. And why? Because Americans want cheap eggs. Lots of cheap eggs. At the rate of 150 (or more) eggs per person, per year, that adds up to nearly 50 billions eggs a year - and that's just the ones folks buy in cartons -- add in all the eggs that are used as an ingredient in the foods we buy, and we are looking at closer to 75 billion eggs consumed each year in the US!
At a price of about $1.00 per dozen, we are talking about at least $4 billion in egg sales each year.
There is an alternative, you know. Yep, more folks could buy their eggs from local farmers.
What are You waiting for?
We each need to do something - now.
That was the message from Dr. Kathleen Dean Moore at last night's Moral Ground discussion at MCC. If you would like to leave a world to future generations as rich in possibilities as the world we were born into, then you need to take action.
