The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

TASTE THE TRUTH

By Fats O’Leary

I Want My Fresh Young (and natural) Meat!

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So, I don’t want my kid to grow tits before she’s eight years old. I don’t know, call me old-fashioned, but I’d really like it if the usual junior-high-school-grab-the-titties-and-run rite of passage didn’t start for her until junior high school.

Did you know that a rush to speed food production and increase profit has resulted in livestock being administered antibiotics and growth-promoting hormones in ways some scientists have linked to early puberty and cancer?

I’ve lifted the following paragraphs directly from some NON-dirtyfilthyhippie sources:

From ABC News, Feb 7 : “ According to research first published in the medical journal Pediatrics in April of 1997, the age of the onset of puberty is getting earlier for girls, with the average age of either breasts or pubic hair showing up as 9.7 years for Caucasians and 8.1 years for African-Americans.

"Before this study of 17,000 girls — evaluated by their pediatricians during routine examinations — the norm for puberty onset was considered to be 11 years old, or one year later for white girls and two years later for African-Americans.

"In a study of 6- to 11-year-old girls, those who matured earlier were more depressed, aggressive, socially withdrawn and had more sleep problems than those who hadn’t. Another study of 1,700 high school girls revealed that earlier menstruation was linked to drinking smoking, substance abuse, lower self-esteem and suicide attempts.”

[Great. She has so much to look forward to.]

“This is a serious public health issue,” [Marcia E. Herman-Giddens, an adjunct professor in public health at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health] says. “We don’t know about the sexual urges of 7- and 8-year-old girls and how they might affect their mental health.”

[Jesus Christ. “Sexual urges?”]

From the Canadian Health Coalition: “Consumption of hormone-treated beef may cause girls to reach puberty earlier, thus making them more susceptible to breast and other cancers. According to Carlos Sonnenschein, from Tufts University School of Medicine (Boston, MA), "Early onset of puberty with its raging hormones translates into higher risk of breast cancer" and it is "very likely" that hormone residues in North American beef is a contributing factor in the early onset of puberty among girls observed in recent decades.”

From the Sprecher Institute for Comparative Cancer Research at Cornell University: “As early as the 1930s, it was realized that cows injected with material drawn from bovine (cow) pituitary glands (hormone secreting organ) produced more milk. Later, the bovine growth hormone (bGH) from the pituitary glands was found to be responsible for this effect. However, at that time, technology did not exist to harvest enough of this material for large-scale use in animals In the 1980s, it became possible to produce large quantities of pure bGH by using recombinant DNA technology. In 1993, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH), also known as bovine somatotropin (rbST) for use in dairy cattle. Recent estimates by the manufacturer of this hormone indicate that 30% of the cows in the United States (US) may be treated with rbGH"

[“Recombinant DNA technology?”Yuck.]

"The female sex hormone estrogen was also shown to affect growth rates in cattle and poultry in the 1930s. Once the chemistry of estrogen was understood, it became possible to make the hormone synthetically in large amounts. Synthetic estrogens started being used to increase the size of cattle and chickens in the early 1950s. DES was one of the first synthetic estrogens made and used commercially in the US to fatten chickens. DES was also used as a drug in human medicine. DES was found to cause cancer and its use in food production was phased out in the late 1970s."

[So this stuff was in use for TWENTY YEARS before someone figured out it wasn’t a good idea? Fantastic.]

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a dirtyfilthyhippie, just a parent concerned about grade-school date rape and cancer. It seems to me that getting a hold of some natural meats and milks might possibly eliminate at least one of the many million miseries sure to befall my kid before she gets to be my age. To be sure, we’re talking about spending a few bucks extra here, but if enough people start demanding the stuff, the price goes down, and believe me, therapy and cancer treatment can get real expensive.

So, in the spirit of dirtyfilthyhippies everywhere, I propose we start a little action: Get the stores here in Buffalo to start carrying fresh, unfrozen (because unfrozen sure as shit tastes better) natural meats. Wegman’s has a tiny little section of inconsistent “Foods You Can Feel Good About”(whatever the hell that means) in their meat section, and Feel-Rite is opening a brand spanking new natural foods mega store on Delaware this fall (but they’re closing their Elmwood Avenue Store). Call them and tell them that you want YOUR fresh, young, natural meat.

Oh, and by the way, Jerry’s dead, and Phish sucks. Get a job.

Feel-Rite Fresh Market & Natural Food Shoppes: 834-3385

Wegmans: 877-0500

Fats can be reached at fatsoleary@yahoo.com

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