For a few days, Minister Alberto Garzón has been involved in the controversy. The matter, which has already become noise through the information channels, is given by some statements appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian, where the Minister of Consumption has come to explain what we already know, that intensive livestock farming offers little meat quality due to the interest of cattle raising thousands of heads of cattle in the shortest possible time.
This has reopened the debate about our diet and its relationship with health, both terms -food and health- conditioned by the market economy. It would be good to bring to the debate the “Labor Theory of Value”, the same theory that Marx put forward based on the approach of the English economist David Ricardo, to explain that in capitalist society what is valued is the production of a commodity in the least possible working time. In this way, production is maximized while minimizing costs.
These issues are developed by the North American evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace in his book Big farms, big flu, published in Spanish by Captain Swing. In this work, Rob Wallace explains in a didactic way the relationship between the market economy, which benefits the installation of macro-farms, and infectious diseases. Without going any further, the chapter dedicated to the pig industry opens with an accurate metaphor where Wallace warns us that “swine flu advances like a cloven-hoofed boar”.
From his knowledge, Wallace tells us about the existing threat in the face of an epidemic that, although, for most, may be mild, in its evolution it is where the possibility of the original virus recombining with other strains to produce a new one grows. pandemic variant. In other words: the industrial model of macro-farms where poultry, cows and pigs await their slaughter in confinement, body to body, makes infectious diseases possible.
Industrial farmers attack scientific arguments in such a way that they are able to trick the truth and use science to mask it. The same thing happened when they put pressure on the WHO and got them to change the name of the swine flu to more scientific and less aggressive acronyms, thus leaving it as H1N1. But, as Wallace says, if we focus only on viruses, we will do a great favor to intensive livestock, since we will lose the economic focus that determines that animals are genetically touched with hormones that our body will process as toxins.
Since society is rooted in the economy, all categories, including scientific ones, depend on the quantitative criterion. Rob Wallace’s book tells us about the relationship between the different categories that are threatened in our days, such as ecology, health and society, showing us that only by uprooting these categories from the economic parameters, only in this way, can we achieve a healthier world in all aspects.
To show the damage of macro-farms, Wallace illustrates us through the pandemic circuits; infections that in the short and medium term can bring us the model of intensive farms. As an option, Wallace bets on probiotic ecology, something that the 2030 Agenda presents, which supports sustainable and agroecological production, thus limiting specialized agri-environments in which pathogens emerge and mutate, becoming a deadly plague.
With these things, any person with a minimum of common sense would not take advantage of the statements of the Minister of Consumption for electoral purposes, but they would be received as good news, since the industrial model of intensive livestock is harmful to the population, although some people benefit financially from it. Because agribusiness should not condition the health of the population.
The stone ax is a section where Montero Glez, with the will of prose, exercises his particular siege to scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge
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#clovenhoofed #boar