Eric Schlosser in The Guardian:
Twenty-five years ago, my book Fast Food Nation outlined the dangers of a food system controlled by a handful of multinational corporations. As the book argues, the real price of cheap food doesn’t appear on the menu. The industrialisation of livestock, the transformation of sentient creatures into commodities, and the absence of government oversight have created new vectors for dangerous pathogens. Some American mega-dairies may have as many as 100,000 cows – and the enormous number of cows living in a single barn, the milking of numerous cows with the same equipment, the failure to impose quarantines and the interstate shipment of cows from one mega-dairy to another, enabled H5N1 to spread throughout the US.
During the past 30 years, the dairy industry in the UK has become far more dependent on large-scale production and grown remarkably centralised as well. In 1980, there were 46,000 dairy farms in the UK. Now there are just over 7,000. Just four companies now process about 75% of the UK’s milk.
More here.
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