Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Could the Public Option Help Keep Us From Eating to Extinction?

According to this Salon article, it may easily be that last night's tuna steak dinner and the haddock in recent weeks consisted of commercially extinct fish. Damnation.

In an articulate comment to the article, the writer says that half the fresh water in the world goes to quenching the thirst of livestock.

Like Laura Rogers at HuffPo, I noticed the ads in the Washington Metro reminding us that 70 percent of our antibiotics are used on livestock that is not sick. Ick.

These are but a few public policy issues that might have more weight in the public discourse if their implementation mattered in a tangible way. Making the "Public Option" available in pending health care reform could close the loop of the federal government's responsibility, so that what producers and harvesters do to our food might show up in our collective health care system as opposed to the disparate private insurance companies' responsibility.



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