Rural Issue

Food Day: Eat real and reform factory farms

Monday, October 24th is Food Day, a nationwide campaign encouraging Americans to “eat real”. 

Organizers say there will be over two-thousand Food Day events held across the country.

Food Day is sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.   Jeff Cronin is a spokesperson for that group.

“We’re not a vegan organization, but we do want to nudge people in a more vegetarian direction, absolutely,” Cronin says. “But it’s not an anti-meat campaign.  We’ve tried hard to make sure that Food Day is a really inclusive event—designed to attract people and not repel them.”

One of the six Food Day principles is to “protect the environment and animals by reforming factory farms”.

“I think most people who eat beef, pork or poultry can look at the environmental issues associated with big, modern farms—or look at the treatment of hogs, cattle, egg-laying hens—and just think about the ways we can treat the earth and animals with greater care,” Cronin says.

AUDIO: Jeff Cronin (8:25 MP3)

The term “factory farm” is bothersome to a lot of people in the ag community, including Kay Johnson Smith of the Animal Agriculture Alliance.

“No one has really defined the term ‘factory farm’—it is really an activist term used to attack large farms” Johnson Smith says, “and large farms are very, very critical to our ability to feed the public in the U.S., but also to help meet the needs of a growing population worldwide.”

To counteract some of the negative Food Day messages, the Animal Agriculture Alliance has developed a special web site called “Real Farmers Real Food”.

“On this web site, we have provided tours of many, many types of farms, so the public can really see what modern-day farms look like,” Johnson Smith says, “and we’ve also addressed many of the myths that are raised by, not only Food Day, but many other activist campaigns that are targeting the food industry and targeting farmers and ranchers.”

AUDIO: Kay Johnson Smith (9:46 MP3)

The web site—realfarmersrealfood.com—also features a video with Miss America 2011 Teresa Scanlan of Gering, Nebraska.  Scanlan’s message—“Every day is Food Day to America’s farmers and ranchers”.

One of the co-chairs of the Food Day effort is Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who has been criticized by some of his Iowa farmer constituents for his involvement in the campaign.

  • Note; Those protest across America people,the ones the democrats have openly backed, there was one of those liberal democrats on the news saying that farmers need to give away the food (aka vegetables to the rest of us) to “them” the protesters, instead of using it for compost ***** those idiots don’t realize the vegetables that get put back into the soil were the rotten ones, If you did give them the rotten vegtables then they would go to step 2 and complain you gave them rotten vegtables. Then they would go to step 3 and demand you give them fresh vegtables for free.******These are the people that support the democrats because the democrats cater to them. How many people cringe everytime a democrat says they have an idea for a agriculture whether it be for crops or livestock?

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