We know that livestock raised at the industrial scale are often fed strange stuff, like antibiotic-laced grain and animal byproducts. But news that poultry and hogs raised in confined operations are fed 17 percent of the wild fish caught each year (seriously) raises eyebrows for other reasons, like the indisputable fact that some fish populations are severly depleted. (The same argument could be made for the nonrenwable rate at which we use topsoil growing grain for animals, but that's another post.)

According to a guest columnist in Grist:

Each year we feed 14 million tons of wild-caught fish (including anchovies, sardines, mackerel, and herring) to pigs and chickens around the globe...Pigs and chickens eat double the amount of fish that Japan consumes annually and six times more seafood than the entire U.S. population eats each year.

Protein is an important part of any diet and often comes at a high premium. Except, perhaps, when derived from a factory farm.

Source: Grist

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Bad links
written by Marina, July 03, 2008

I love your set of sites, so, here's a suggestion: provide your readers with a contact email address for technical problems. For instance, right now, your ecogeek site is off line because it hangs while waiting for something called ad.afy11.net. Also, although you took the "wearing the future" link off your main site, it's still present and broken on all your other sites, including this one. There really should be a better way to get complaints or notifications to the webmaster, than to post them as comments to articles on the blog. Thank you, and keep up the good work!

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