Diet is now estimated to cause more cancers than smoking. The cancers most linked to diet are bowel, stomach, oesophageal, breast and prostate cancers. Early last year, an outraged public flooded the USDA with nearly 280,000 comments opposing the agency s proposal to allow factory farming, sewage sludge, genetic engineering and irradiation in organic food production. Despite this outpouring of public outrage, the USDA is again thinking of diluting organic standards. The USDA has disregarded almost entirely the recommendations of the National Organic Standards Board.
Today s increasingly prosperous China can afford meat.
This changing diet has forced big changes in Chinese agriculture. To meet the needs of 1.2 billion consumers, the nation is moving away from the traditional communal plots to Western-style agribusiness. I saw that change for myself at China s largest chicken farm, Dajiang, located about an hour s drive south of Shanghai. The place is not so much a farm as a factory, with massive conveyor belts carrying fuzzy day-old chicks by the tens of thousands. Its feeding shed holds 20,000 birds apiece.