What exactly is "Antibiotic Free" meat?

Browsing through the isles of any supermarket that sells other than the standard factory produced food products, you will see a variety of labels and terms. There is organic, free range, grass fed, vegetarian fed, antibiotic free, hormone free, etc. The list goes on and on.  What do all these labels mean? We want to start taking a look at each of these and give a little background into what you are buying and feeding your family.

Today, lets explore the label "antibiotic free". It can be worded a number of ways, but all have a similar meaning. To have this label, the meat inside the package can not have been fed any antibiotics while the animal was alive. That sounds good, right? but wait.. lets ask a simple question... why would you need to put that on a label? everyone today knows that you don't take antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, and only take them under a doctor's supervision, right?

Not so in factory farms. That tidbit of basic understanding is completely ignored within the confines of factory food production. It is  in fact necessary to feed the factory food animals a constant diet of low dose antibiotics their entire lives. The politically correct reason for this is "to keep them from getting sick". But wait.... lets ask another simple question... why would they get sick? Didn't these same animals exist for thousands of years before man invented antibiotics a few decades ago? How is it possible that animals today cant live without constant antibiotics yet the same animals did fine for all of recorded history?

There are two answers to that. First, these are not always the same animals. The factory farms use machines to do much of the meat processing, so it is to their advantage to ensure that all the animals have identical growth rates and body shape. The natural variety that occurs within genetics is unacceptable to a corporation wanting to produce meat on an assembly line. So, these animals have been altered... carefully bred to produce carbon copies of themselves only. They have also been bred to cause faster growth on less feed, to increase the profits of the corporations. Unfortunately these genetic alterations do not come without a price. The animals become genetically more fragile and disease prone. The breeding has become so advanced today, that the problem is magnified. It is somewhat true that the animals used for food in America can not always exist without antibiotics any longer. Genetically speaking, the animals we eat are "freaks of nature" that could not exist in the wild, because nature itself removes such genetically inferior animals to protect the species. That in itself should make us all take pause... we are genetically altering the animals so that they can no longer exist in the real world.

The second answer is even worse. The reality of confinement based factory food plants is that the animals are in such deplorable unsanitary conditions that bacteria is rampant, and even good healthy genetically superior animals would become ill in those conditions. Oddly, in many situation, the government recognizes that the  conditions in which the animals live are hazardous to the point that humans are not allowed to enter the facility without protective clothing to protect themselves, not the animals. It would be "illegal" to place a unprotected person in the environment that these animals live in day to day. That, my friends, is the main reason animals in factory food production need antibiotics, to fight off the daily onslaught of bacteria they live in.

There is a third answer in some species is in the unnatural food fed to the animals. In order to increase profits in one way or another, food is provided to the animals that nature never intended for them to eat. A prime example of this is feeding grain diets to cows. When this is done, the only way to keep the cows alive seems to be antibiotics. The cows themselves do not have the ability to fight off the effects of this unnatural food in the quantities provided.

Here is an interesting quote from Stanford University on the effects of antibiotics use in factory food production:

Shopping for meat and dairy products that contain no antibiotics or growth hormones is a winner for your health and the environment. Because of crowding, stress-inducing conditions, and unnatural diets that often occur in the conventional meat and dairy industries, antibiotics are needed to fend off disease. In addition to antibiotics, animals are also given growth hormones— to stimulate year-round high production of milk, for instance. It is estimated that as much as 80-90% of all antibiotics given to humans and animals are not fully digested or broken down and eventually pass through the body and enter the environment intact through wastewater and runoff. When bacteria in the environment interact with these antibiotics, they may transform into more resistant strains that pose a greater risk to both animals and humans. By choosing hormone-free and antibiotic-free meat and dairy products, you can help keep the environment clean and healthy.



source: http://sustainablechoices.stanford.edu/actions/at_the_store/antibiotichormonefree.html



So... an interesting thing happens... when the farm is producing "antibiotic free" meat, suddenly everything changes. The animals pens actually have to be cleaned. The food has to be right for the animal. The animals have to be provided healthy living conditions to eliminate a bacteria laden environment. The breeds have to be capable of having their own immune system.  So, in essence, "antibiotic free" means that a fairly decent life was provided to the animal. Antibiotic fed meat (anything without that label)  virtually guarantees a life for the animal that is sad, unhealthy, and against the laws of nature.

For the record, the animals at Little Sprouts Farm are never fed routine chemicals or antibiotics. We even discourage use of medicines for illness unless all natural methods have failed. We use nature, instead of fighting her. The irony here is that ultimately, profitability increases when this is done, over the long run. This is one of the proofs Little Sprouts is trying to show. Most farmers that have converted from the accepted knowledge of chemically sustained poor quality of life to natural healthy environments have lowered labor costs, increased product quality, and increased profits.

So, when your shopping labels and you see "antibiotic free", you know what the history of that is. When you don't see that.. you also know the history. The choice... is in your hands alone.