wow i didn't know this is where we get cuttlebones from!

[katfinlou]

They also use cuttlefish in the medical industry. Also dentists use it, i believe to stop bleeding.

Seriously? There seems to be no end of uses for this little genius critter!! I thought my dentist just shoved what looked like a tampon into my gummy gap to stop the bleeding when I had my wisdom teeth removed. Maybe I should ask for them back so as I can wise up lol

 

[Moozillion]

Seriously? There seems to be no end of uses for this little genius critter!! I thought my dentist just shoved what looked like a tampon into my gummy gap to stop the bleeding when I had my wisdom teeth removed. Maybe I should ask for them back so as I can wise up lol

That was a WONDERFUL video!!! Thanks so much!

 

[Ryan Kruse]

So you guys like sausage, but don't want to know how it's made?

Sausage is one of those things that I try not to think about while I am eating it

 

[Anyfoot]

Found this for you to read


As far as cuttlefish bone, or cuttlebone, is concerned, it plays a variety of different roles in the eyes of people from different backgrounds. From the perspective of a TCM practitioner, it is better known as Hai Piao Xiao, an effective Chinese herb that is commonly used in the treatments of gastritis and nocturnal emission; from the owners of caged birds, budgies, reptiles, and others, it serves as a good supplement that is rich in calcium; from a dentist, it is a wonderful absorbent that is frequently used to stop bleeding after tooth extraction or nose surgery; from Jewelers, it is an amazing mold-making material thanks to its heat-resisting, easy-carving and casting nature. But be that as it may, cuttlebones are still a strange thing to most people in everyday life. That is to say, few people are aware of its impressive medicinal uses. And this is exactly what this article is all about.

What is cuttlefish bone?
From the point of view of Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the authentic cuttlebone refers to the internal structure from Sepiella maindroni de Rochebrune or Sepia esculenta Hoyle, the species in the family Sepiidae. And it is also commonly known as Sepiae Endoconcha, Endoconcha Sepiae, Os Sepiae seu Sepiellae, Wu Zei Gu, and Sepia esculenta bone. Medicinally it is mainly produced in shallow water of Liaoning, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other coastal provinces.

Bones of Sepiella maindroni de Rochebrune is flat oblong, 9 to 14cm long, 2.5 to 3.5cm wide, about 1.3cm thick, and with thick middle and thin edge. Back side comes with white ridges, slightly reddish sides, and inconspicuous small warts; ventral side is white and with fine wavy horizontal lines from the end to the middle. Horny edge is translucent. Tail is wide flat but with no spicules. It is lightweight, loose, easily broken, and with floured cross section and puff laminated striation. It is slightly fishy in taste and slightly salty in flavor. Bones of Sepia esculenta Hoyle is 13 to 23cm in length, and about 6.5cm in width. Back side has clear warts in slightly layered arrangement; ventral side comes with fine wavy cross-laminated that is accounted for most of the body and longitudinal shallow groove in the middle. Horny edge in the tail becomes wider gradually and tilts to the ventral side. And there is a bone spicule at the end but most of them are broken.

Main chemical compositions are 87.3% to 91.75% calcium carbonate, chitin, and phlegmatic temperament. In addition, it also contains multiple trace elements, including large amounts of calcium, a small amount of sodium, strontium, magnesium, iron, and trace amounts of silicon, aluminum, titanium, manganese, barium, and copper.

Cuttlefish bone benefits
Today cuttlebones are widely used in the treatments of gastric and duodenal ulcer, bleeding and perforation caused by ulcer, asthma, leg ulcers, and bleeding after pulling out a tooth and nasal surgery. So, how to take advantage of the health benefits from cuttlebones? And its pharmacological actions can give some inspirations.

Modern cuttlebone pharmacology
1. It resists peptic ulcer, tumor, and radiation and sets a broken bone;
2. Calcium carbonate contained can neutralize stomach acid, change the pH of the stomach contents, reduce pepsin activity, and promote the healing of ulcers;
3. After chitin contained reacts with organic matter in stomach and gastric juice, it could form a protective layer on the surface of the ulcer and then promote the blood coagulation;
4. Animal experiments showed that cuttlebone could obviously promote bone defect repair;
5. Its extract by edetic acid can inhibit S180 sarcoma and ascites sarcoma;
6. Its water extract by intragastric administration can significantly improve the survival rate of rats received 60Co radiation and serotonin levels in the blood.

Proven cuttlebone herbal remedies
The Chinese Materia Medica believes that cuttlebone is salty in flavor and astringent and warm in properties. And it goes to two meridians of liver and kidney. Chief functions include astringency and hemostasis, arresting spontaneous emission and leukorrhagia, relieving aching pain, astringing dampness to heal sores. Basic cuttlefish bone uses and indications are spitting blood, metrorrhagia and metrostaxis, having blood in the stool, nosebleed, traumatic hemorrhage, spermatorrhea due to kidney deficiency, leukorrhea with reddish discharge, gastralgia, belching and acid regurgitation, eczema, and ulcers. Recommended dosage is from 10 to 30 grams in decoction, or 1.5 to 3 grams in powder.

1. Bai Fen San. Bai Fen San comes from Xiao Er Yao Zheng Zhi Jue (Key to Syndrome Identification and Treatment of Diseases in Infants). In this formula, Hai Piao Xiao combines with Bai Ji (Bletilla Rhizome) and Qing Fen (calomel) to treat all various malnutrition sores.

2. Bai Zhi San. Bai Zhi San is from Fu Ren Da Quan Liang Fang (Great Complete Collection of Fine Formulas for Women). In this prescription, Hai Piao Xiao works along with Bai Zhi (Angelica Root) and Xue Yu Tan (Crinis Carbonisatus) to cure leukorrhea with reddish discharge.

3. Gu Chong Tang. Gu Chong Tang is chosen from Yi Xue Zhong Zhong Can Xi Lu (Records of Heart-Felt Experiences in Medicine with Reference to the West). This recipe is exclusively formulated for uterine bleeding. And other main herbal ingredients include Qian Cao Gen (Rubia Root), Zong Lu Tan (Fibra Stipulae Trachycarpi)，Wu Bei Zi (Gallnut of Chinese Sumac)，and more.

Cuttlebone side effects and contraindications
Up to now, no noted adverse reactions and drug interactions associated with cuttlefish bone were reported. For all this, TCM tends to think that it should be used with care in case of fire excess from yin deficiency. Otherwise, long-term use of this herb may cause constipation. By the way, it is highly recommended to use it together with other herbs that can lubricate the intestines.

 

[katfinlou]

What a fascinating article, thanks for posting!! After all ive been through what with a ruptured oesophagus (2012) the brittle asthma and cut oesophagus over the xmas holiday it sounds like i should be taking cuttle fish regularly never mind my tortoise. Ive thoroughly enjoyed reading this, thanks again!!

 

[Anyfoot]

Well someone mentioned sausages earlier in this thread, read this if you dare.

All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others, especially by the time they have been turned into sausages. In fact the gulf between the toothpaste tubes of flavoured pink fat that pass for economy sausages and the best made bangers could not be wider. Yet in the Orwellian world of food regulation and labelling it can be hard to tell them apart. Mass produced, dependent on the industrialisation of livestock, the origin of its ingredients frequently unidentifiable and debased, the cheap sausage is a classic product of our system of 21st century food production.
Last year we consumed 1.7bn meals of sausages at home, according to market analyst Taylor Nelson Sofres, and our appetite for them is expanding. Many more were sold by caterers.

Until a few years ago manufacturers put all sorts of unmentionables into their sausages. Diaphragms and spleens, tails and lips all counted as meat. But since the trauma of BSE there have been much tighter restrictions on which parts can be used for human consumption and processors have moved on. The industry is now polarised between those leading a revival in top-of-the range sausages (made with what most people would recognise as meat for those who can afford around £3 a pound) and those operating at what producers refer to as "the arse end" of the sector where sausages sell for 50-55p a pound or for even less to caterers. Those who most need the best - growing children, the elderly, those in hospital - nearly always eat the worst.

The secret of the successful "economy" sausage these days lies not so much in strange offals but in fat and protein engineering. Pig rind is an essential ingredient in the protein engineer's toolbox. Frozen, imported, chopped to a slurry and soaked with hot water, it produces a bargain blancmange which can make up 30-35% of the sausage and still be called meat. Manufacturers' handbooks recommend rind emulsion because its high protein content boosts the nitrogen counts which are the basis for tests to determine the meat content of products.

The cutting edge now, however, is in fat technology. Fat is seriously cheap and with the help of additives you can make it eat with a bit of chew, just like meat. You can buy thick rectangular slabs of pork back fat for about 50p a kilo to make your economy sausage. But if you want to cut costs even further, the cheapest stuff on the market is something called flare fat. This is the highly saturated fat that collects around the vital organs of the pig such as the kidneys. It was traditionally rendered into lard because you couldn't put it into sausages without it running straight back out again when they were cooked. It also clogs up your arteries. But now food scientisits are developing ways to make it hard so it doesn't ooze out.

You might mix your fat with what people in the trade call the posh man's MRM. Mechanically recovered meat has to be declared on the label and shoppers have become increasingly suspicious of it. So, instead, manufacturers have developed the LIMA machine. Unlike an MRM processor, which crushes the carcass after the main muscle meat has been removed, a LIMA machine can debone the last scraps of meat from a carcass by pushing it through a stainless steel sieve at a lower pressure. Splinters of bone will give it a higher calcium content than muscle meat in tests but the hard bones are left behind and it doesn't have to be declared on the label.

For a bit of economy texture you would probably also add pork cheek or jowl. Sausages were, after all, invented to use the offcuts of animals. The jowl is the bit of the pig from the earhole to the end of the snout, which is cut off, deboned, skinned and block frozen. But while many manufacturers use jowls, some worry about including them. They contain the pituitary glands and therefore tend to be where drug residues or disease are concentrated. "Put it this way, you wouldn't knowingly fry them for breakfast," one explained. Because it has been in direct contact with the animal's food, the butchered jowl tends to have high microbiological counts and degenerates at twice the speed of the rest of the carcass.

Add plenty of water, rusk (sometimes up to 30%), sugar in the form of dextrose to make them go brown when cooked, flavourings and colourings to mask the absence of anything we would recognise as meat, phosphates and soya to bind the water and fat in, and you have the perfect recipe for big profits.

Here is a recipe for a school sausage, given to us by a manufacturer who prefers to remain anonymous. It is for what he described as a "pork product" made "down to a price" to win a local authority contract. The sausage contents: 50% "meat", of which 30% is pork fat with a bit of jowl, and 20% mechanically recovered chicken meat, 17% water, 30% rusk and soya, soya concentrate, hyrolysed protein, modified flour, dried onion, sugar, dextrose, phosphates, preservative E221 sodium sulphite, flavour enhancer, spices, garlic flavouring, antioxidant E300 (ascorbic acid), colouring E128 (red 2G). Casings: made from collagen from cow hide.

Bernard Hoggarth is a sausage manufacturer at the top end of the market and he can't quite make sense of it. "We feed our pigs the best possible wheatgerm, the best milk, the best soya. Yet people feed their children rubbish. Funny, isn't it?" Hoggarth's business, Cranswick gourmet sausage company, supplies Sainsbury's with its Taste the Difference range of sausages, Prince Charles with his Duchy Originals, and Waitrose, Safeway and Morrison's through a sister company, Lazenby. The wheatgerm for fattening his pigs is the vitamin-rich, highly nutritious casing of the wheat which is stripped out and discarded when wheat is milled to white flour - to make white sliced bread, say. Cranswick sausages cost just under £3 a pound because they use real ingredients. Prime shoulder and belly pork are mixed with fresh herbs, delivered daily, or real wine, garlic and olive oil. The store room in Hoggarth's Hull-based factory is packed with the sort of slabs of meat, oils and green leaves most cooks would be happy to have in their larders.

The food standards agency has proposed new rules to require clearer labelling of meat content, so that added fat, offal, gristle and rind would have to be separately identified and shoppers could tell more easily what they are getting. The move has been welcomed by consumer groups but they are also worried. The proposals will lower the legal minimum meat content, so that pork sausages would only have to contain 42% meat as newly defined. Manufacturers will no longer have to declare the amount of water they have added either, which "gives them an opportunity for fraud and debasement," according to Shropshire trading standards expert, David Walker.

But it is not just in the quality of the ingredients that the difference between the Cranswick sausages and the economy version is evident. Their provenance encapsulates the gap between food that is produced with concern for animal welfare and environmental impact and that which is not. All the meat Cranswick uses comes from British outdoor reared pigs which have mostly been fed by its own feedmills and have been slaughtered in its own abattoirs so that quality can be controlled right down the line.

Not all swine do so well. Some are indeed more equal than others. Last summer Dutch and Belgian pigs, many of which would have ended up being imported in to the UK for manufacturing in to products such as sausages, had particular cause for complaint.

They were found to have been illegally fed waste from the production of hormone replacement therapy pills for postmenopausal women.

Residues of medroxy progesterone acetate (MPA), a synthetic hormone, found in the pigs were traced back to Wyeth, an American owned pharmaceutical factory in Ireland. MPA is banned from vetinerary use in Europe but is used in the USA and Australia as a growth-promoting hormone to make livestock put on weight faster.

A Dublin-based waste management company Cara had been collecting the water used in the production of sugar-coated HRT pills from the Wyeth factory and shipping it to a company called Bioland on the Dutch /Belgian border. There it was converted into glucose syrup to be mixed into pig feed. Nearly 100 Dutch feed manufacturers used the syrup and exported it throughout Europe. Dutch pig farms were closed down while their animals were tested and thousands of pigs were slaughtered. Wyeth and Cara both deny responsibility. Bioland is now bankrupt and its owners have been charged with breaches of food safety legislation. Belgian authorities are still investigating how widespread the use of illegal hormones in pig production is. Although the effects on humans of eating pork contaminated with MPA are thought to be short-lived, the scandal followed hot on the heels of others about animal feed contaminated with cancer-causing dioxins, and did nothing, post-BSE, to dispel the impression that Europe's meat industry is the dustbin of its food sector.

A short and fully traceable supply chain is one of the reasons British consumers, when asked, say they prefer British meat, and supermarkets say they support British farmers. Yet the UK pig industry is dying on its feet. Four years ago the British herd numbered 800,000 breeding sows. Now there are barely 500,000. About 2,000 pig farmers have gone out of business in that period and many predict the end of pork production in this country.

Although there were government subsidies in the 1960s to encourage intensification and greater productivity, pig farmers have received almost no subsidies from the EU. The trend in the UK in the last decade has instead been to improve welfare, in response to apparent public demand. British farmers, and legislation, are currently ahead of European competitors on standards. But the strength of the pound against the euro has meant that they have been heavily squeezed, and although many people, including retailers, say they want happy pigs they don't put their money where their mouths are. "All supermarkets take it as accepted that they will pay the lowest price on the day. There is no other mechanism for them. Buyers cannot buck the trend," Digby Scott, editor of Pig World, says.

The beginning of the decline can be traced back to BSE. The UK banned meat and bonemeal in animal feed in 1996, so instead of making a bit of money from selling the parts of the pig not suitable for human consumption, farmers had to pay to dispose of them. This so called BSE tax was calculated by the meat and livestock commission to be costing British pig farmers £5.26 per pig. In the rest of Europe they continued to use meat and bonemeal from animals until 2000, when a ban was introduced. EU farmers have until 2005 to implement it however. Outside the EU it is still legal, despite evidence of BSE in Continental herds.

Mark Hayward is a pig farmer in Wickham Market in Suffolk. Like most British farmers these days he is very angry. He is not above joining a convoy of other farmers to blockade supermarket distribution centres when he hears that they are importing Dutch pork while claiming to buy to British standards.

He invested heavily in converting his pig farm from intensive production to Freedom Foods standards a couple of years ago. His sows now farrow outdoors and his piglets are fattened in outdoor straw pens. Out in the fresh air rather than crowded 2,000 to a shed, they are less susceptible to the respiratory diseases which plague intensive units and so he doesn't have to use the routine antibiotics others do. Nor does he need to practise tail docking, a routine mutilation made necessary when pigs kept in barren and overcrowded conditions bite each other.

But responding to animal welfare campaigners' pressure has cost British farmers their competitive edge, according to Hayward. Times are hard and he is now getting rid of a large part of his herd of pigs in the hope of surviving.

To take an example, the sow stall was banned in the UK in 1990 and had to be phased out by 1999, yet it will still be allowed in the rest of the EU until 2013. A sow stall is a crate with bars into which a pregnant sow weighing 300kg is pushed to remain for its breeding life. She can stand up and lie down but otherwise not move, having only six inches in front of her and six inches behind. Stalls are very efficient - a farmer can squeeze 50 sows into the space he or she now needs for 10 animals, and feed and water them easily, but they are immensely distressing to the pigs, according to Peter Stevenson of Compassion in World Farming. Not only are intensive systems cruel, but they make herds vulnerable to the rapid spread of devastating diseases such as foot and mouth and swine fever. But abolishing them costs money, which is one of the reasons British farmers' pork is more expensive.

Elsewhere in East Anglia, a pig farmer agreed to take us into one of his intensive pig units, on the condition of anonymity. Walking down the corridor of Stalag 13, as he cheerfully called it, brushing under the filth hanging from the low ceilings and holding our noses against the stench of ammonia, we peered through inspection hatches into darkened pens where pigs were crowded on to slatted floors. The slats cause bruising and foot injuries, the pigs are bred to grow so fast and large they frequently suffer from joint and leg problems, and one in 10 births has to be assisted because confined sows cannot exercise their uterine muscles.

The smell is a reminder of the environmental problems caused by this sort of farming. Pigs which are intensively fed grain produce **** high in nitrates and phosphates. In small quantities and spread over an adequate area of land it is fertilising. But in the large quantities excreted by intensive pig farms, it is highly polluting.

But as Bernard Hoggarth says, "you gets what you pays for".

 

[katfinlou]

And my new life as a vegetarian starts here...

 

[russian/sulcata/tortoise]

Well someone mentioned sausages earlier in this thread, read this if you dare.

All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others, especially by the time they have been turned into sausages. In fact the gulf between the toothpaste tubes of flavoured pink fat that pass for economy sausages and the best made bangers could not be wider. Yet in the Orwellian world of food regulation and labelling it can be hard to tell them apart. Mass produced, dependent on the industrialisation of livestock, the origin of its ingredients frequently unidentifiable and debased, the cheap sausage is a classic product of our system of 21st century food production.
Last year we consumed 1.7bn meals of sausages at home, according to market analyst Taylor Nelson Sofres, and our appetite for them is expanding. Many more were sold by caterers.

Until a few years ago manufacturers put all sorts of unmentionables into their sausages. Diaphragms and spleens, tails and lips all counted as meat. But since the trauma of BSE there have been much tighter restrictions on which parts can be used for human consumption and processors have moved on. The industry is now polarised between those leading a revival in top-of-the range sausages (made with what most people would recognise as meat for those who can afford around £3 a pound) and those operating at what producers refer to as "the arse end" of the sector where sausages sell for 50-55p a pound or for even less to caterers. Those who most need the best - growing children, the elderly, those in hospital - nearly always eat the worst.

The secret of the successful "economy" sausage these days lies not so much in strange offals but in fat and protein engineering. Pig rind is an essential ingredient in the protein engineer's toolbox. Frozen, imported, chopped to a slurry and soaked with hot water, it produces a bargain blancmange which can make up 30-35% of the sausage and still be called meat. Manufacturers' handbooks recommend rind emulsion because its high protein content boosts the nitrogen counts which are the basis for tests to determine the meat content of products.

The cutting edge now, however, is in fat technology. Fat is seriously cheap and with the help of additives you can make it eat with a bit of chew, just like meat. You can buy thick rectangular slabs of pork back fat for about 50p a kilo to make your economy sausage. But if you want to cut costs even further, the cheapest stuff on the market is something called flare fat. This is the highly saturated fat that collects around the vital organs of the pig such as the kidneys. It was traditionally rendered into lard because you couldn't put it into sausages without it running straight back out again when they were cooked. It also clogs up your arteries. But now food scientisits are developing ways to make it hard so it doesn't ooze out.

You might mix your fat with what people in the trade call the posh man's MRM. Mechanically recovered meat has to be declared on the label and shoppers have become increasingly suspicious of it. So, instead, manufacturers have developed the LIMA machine. Unlike an MRM processor, which crushes the carcass after the main muscle meat has been removed, a LIMA machine can debone the last scraps of meat from a carcass by pushing it through a stainless steel sieve at a lower pressure. Splinters of bone will give it a higher calcium content than muscle meat in tests but the hard bones are left behind and it doesn't have to be declared on the label.

For a bit of economy texture you would probably also add pork cheek or jowl. Sausages were, after all, invented to use the offcuts of animals. The jowl is the bit of the pig from the earhole to the end of the snout, which is cut off, deboned, skinned and block frozen. But while many manufacturers use jowls, some worry about including them. They contain the pituitary glands and therefore tend to be where drug residues or disease are concentrated. "Put it this way, you wouldn't knowingly fry them for breakfast," one explained. Because it has been in direct contact with the animal's food, the butchered jowl tends to have high microbiological counts and degenerates at twice the speed of the rest of the carcass.

Add plenty of water, rusk (sometimes up to 30%), sugar in the form of dextrose to make them go brown when cooked, flavourings and colourings to mask the absence of anything we would recognise as meat, phosphates and soya to bind the water and fat in, and you have the perfect recipe for big profits.

Here is a recipe for a school sausage, given to us by a manufacturer who prefers to remain anonymous. It is for what he described as a "pork product" made "down to a price" to win a local authority contract. The sausage contents: 50% "meat", of which 30% is pork fat with a bit of jowl, and 20% mechanically recovered chicken meat, 17% water, 30% rusk and soya, soya concentrate, hyrolysed protein, modified flour, dried onion, sugar, dextrose, phosphates, preservative E221 sodium sulphite, flavour enhancer, spices, garlic flavouring, antioxidant E300 (ascorbic acid), colouring E128 (red 2G). Casings: made from collagen from cow hide.

Bernard Hoggarth is a sausage manufacturer at the top end of the market and he can't quite make sense of it. "We feed our pigs the best possible wheatgerm, the best milk, the best soya. Yet people feed their children rubbish. Funny, isn't it?" Hoggarth's business, Cranswick gourmet sausage company, supplies Sainsbury's with its Taste the Difference range of sausages, Prince Charles with his Duchy Originals, and Waitrose, Safeway and Morrison's through a sister company, Lazenby. The wheatgerm for fattening his pigs is the vitamin-rich, highly nutritious casing of the wheat which is stripped out and discarded when wheat is milled to white flour - to make white sliced bread, say. Cranswick sausages cost just under £3 a pound because they use real ingredients. Prime shoulder and belly pork are mixed with fresh herbs, delivered daily, or real wine, garlic and olive oil. The store room in Hoggarth's Hull-based factory is packed with the sort of slabs of meat, oils and green leaves most cooks would be happy to have in their larders.

The food standards agency has proposed new rules to require clearer labelling of meat content, so that added fat, offal, gristle and rind would have to be separately identified and shoppers could tell more easily what they are getting. The move has been welcomed by consumer groups but they are also worried. The proposals will lower the legal minimum meat content, so that pork sausages would only have to contain 42% meat as newly defined. Manufacturers will no longer have to declare the amount of water they have added either, which "gives them an opportunity for fraud and debasement," according to Shropshire trading standards expert, David Walker.

But it is not just in the quality of the ingredients that the difference between the Cranswick sausages and the economy version is evident. Their provenance encapsulates the gap between food that is produced with concern for animal welfare and environmental impact and that which is not. All the meat Cranswick uses comes from British outdoor reared pigs which have mostly been fed by its own feedmills and have been slaughtered in its own abattoirs so that quality can be controlled right down the line.

Not all swine do so well. Some are indeed more equal than others. Last summer Dutch and Belgian pigs, many of which would have ended up being imported in to the UK for manufacturing in to products such as sausages, had particular cause for complaint.

They were found to have been illegally fed waste from the production of hormone replacement therapy pills for postmenopausal women.

Residues of medroxy progesterone acetate (MPA), a synthetic hormone, found in the pigs were traced back to Wyeth, an American owned pharmaceutical factory in Ireland. MPA is banned from vetinerary use in Europe but is used in the USA and Australia as a growth-promoting hormone to make livestock put on weight faster.

A Dublin-based waste management company Cara had been collecting the water used in the production of sugar-coated HRT pills from the Wyeth factory and shipping it to a company called Bioland on the Dutch /Belgian border. There it was converted into glucose syrup to be mixed into pig feed. Nearly 100 Dutch feed manufacturers used the syrup and exported it throughout Europe. Dutch pig farms were closed down while their animals were tested and thousands of pigs were slaughtered. Wyeth and Cara both deny responsibility. Bioland is now bankrupt and its owners have been charged with breaches of food safety legislation. Belgian authorities are still investigating how widespread the use of illegal hormones in pig production is. Although the effects on humans of eating pork contaminated with MPA are thought to be short-lived, the scandal followed hot on the heels of others about animal feed contaminated with cancer-causing dioxins, and did nothing, post-BSE, to dispel the impression that Europe's meat industry is the dustbin of its food sector.

A short and fully traceable supply chain is one of the reasons British consumers, when asked, say they prefer British meat, and supermarkets say they support British farmers. Yet the UK pig industry is dying on its feet. Four years ago the British herd numbered 800,000 breeding sows. Now there are barely 500,000. About 2,000 pig farmers have gone out of business in that period and many predict the end of pork production in this country.

Although there were government subsidies in the 1960s to encourage intensification and greater productivity, pig farmers have received almost no subsidies from the EU. The trend in the UK in the last decade has instead been to improve welfare, in response to apparent public demand. British farmers, and legislation, are currently ahead of European competitors on standards. But the strength of the pound against the euro has meant that they have been heavily squeezed, and although many people, including retailers, say they want happy pigs they don't put their money where their mouths are. "All supermarkets take it as accepted that they will pay the lowest price on the day. There is no other mechanism for them. Buyers cannot buck the trend," Digby Scott, editor of Pig World, says.

The beginning of the decline can be traced back to BSE. The UK banned meat and bonemeal in animal feed in 1996, so instead of making a bit of money from selling the parts of the pig not suitable for human consumption, farmers had to pay to dispose of them. This so called BSE tax was calculated by the meat and livestock commission to be costing British pig farmers £5.26 per pig. In the rest of Europe they continued to use meat and bonemeal from animals until 2000, when a ban was introduced. EU farmers have until 2005 to implement it however. Outside the EU it is still legal, despite evidence of BSE in Continental herds.

Mark Hayward is a pig farmer in Wickham Market in Suffolk. Like most British farmers these days he is very angry. He is not above joining a convoy of other farmers to blockade supermarket distribution centres when he hears that they are importing Dutch pork while claiming to buy to British standards.

He invested heavily in converting his pig farm from intensive production to Freedom Foods standards a couple of years ago. His sows now farrow outdoors and his piglets are fattened in outdoor straw pens. Out in the fresh air rather than crowded 2,000 to a shed, they are less susceptible to the respiratory diseases which plague intensive units and so he doesn't have to use the routine antibiotics others do. Nor does he need to practise tail docking, a routine mutilation made necessary when pigs kept in barren and overcrowded conditions bite each other.

But responding to animal welfare campaigners' pressure has cost British farmers their competitive edge, according to Hayward. Times are hard and he is now getting rid of a large part of his herd of pigs in the hope of surviving.

To take an example, the sow stall was banned in the UK in 1990 and had to be phased out by 1999, yet it will still be allowed in the rest of the EU until 2013. A sow stall is a crate with bars into which a pregnant sow weighing 300kg is pushed to remain for its breeding life. She can stand up and lie down but otherwise not move, having only six inches in front of her and six inches behind. Stalls are very efficient - a farmer can squeeze 50 sows into the space he or she now needs for 10 animals, and feed and water them easily, but they are immensely distressing to the pigs, according to Peter Stevenson of Compassion in World Farming. Not only are intensive systems cruel, but they make herds vulnerable to the rapid spread of devastating diseases such as foot and mouth and swine fever. But abolishing them costs money, which is one of the reasons British farmers' pork is more expensive.

Elsewhere in East Anglia, a pig farmer agreed to take us into one of his intensive pig units, on the condition of anonymity. Walking down the corridor of Stalag 13, as he cheerfully called it, brushing under the filth hanging from the low ceilings and holding our noses against the stench of ammonia, we peered through inspection hatches into darkened pens where pigs were crowded on to slatted floors. The slats cause bruising and foot injuries, the pigs are bred to grow so fast and large they frequently suffer from joint and leg problems, and one in 10 births has to be assisted because confined sows cannot exercise their uterine muscles.

The smell is a reminder of the environmental problems caused by this sort of farming. Pigs which are intensively fed grain produce **** high in nitrates and phosphates. In small quantities and spread over an adequate area of land it is fertilising. But in the large quantities excreted by intensive pig farms, it is highly polluting.

But as Bernard Hoggarth says, "you gets what you pays for".

im to lazy to read

 

[russian/sulcata/tortoise]

have you ever just looked at cow udders and think that they look really gross. like really look that that, its disgusting!

 

[russian/sulcata/tortoise]

 

[katfinlou]

have you ever just looked at cow udders and think that they look really gross. like really look that that, its disgusting!
View attachment 112549

I remember as a little girl thinking Id have to eat grass if I was going to breast feed my future children. You can't imagine my relief when I found out I didn't need to eat grass lol

 

[russian/sulcata/tortoise]

I remember as a little girl thinking Id have to eat grass if I was going to breast feed my future children. You can't imagine my relief when I found out I didn't need to eat grass lol

that actually made me laugh!

 

[russian/sulcata/tortoise]

i want!

 

[katfinlou]

Are they actually real? It's beautiful!!

 

[russian/sulcata/tortoise]

Are they actually real? It's beautiful!!

 

[Star-of-India]

have you ever just looked at cow udders and think that they look really gross. like really look that that, its disgusting!
View attachment 112549

Personally, I find healthy udders to be amazing and very cool. Hardly gross! But while I didn't grow up on a farm, I had the run of the cow and pig barns at UC Davis as a kid. Nowadays I'm sure random access to such barns would be highly restricted.

 

[Moozillion]

Are they actually real? It's beautiful!!

I googled "furry cows" and found these pics (and more) along with the discussions. They are not a special breed, but are "any cow with good genes" (whatever that means that has been specially groomed, shampooed, blow-dried and styled!!!
A cow or bull that has been groomed like this fetches a much higher price than a very similar animal that has not been groomed!!!

 

[katfinlou]

So they're just everyday ordinary cows with a brush and blow dry? That's amazing!! I wish i could look so cute with a wash and blow dry lol

 

[Michael Twohy]

I thought they were cut out of the cuttlefish when they were caught for food.

i think thats what they do

 

[russian/sulcata/tortoise]

giant cuttlefish!