Pig in a Poke

First things first...I'm not anti-pork, not even close although that doesn't mean that I could ever go on a bacon only diet for a month. In any event, if you're ever in San Francisco, go to Nopa, it has the BEST pork chop I've ever sunk my teeth into.

But I digress, from Nicholas Kristof at the NYT...

Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.

The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.

“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”

The answer is simple: politics.

The entire column in enlightening and definitely worth a read.

P.S. I just discovered the derivation of the phrase "pig in a poke" and it's pretty interesting.

From Wikipedia...

Pig-in-a-poke is an idiom that refers to a confidence trick originating in the Late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce but apparently rats and cats were not.

The scheme entailed the sale of a "suckling pig" in a "poke" (bag). The wriggling bag would actually contain a cat — not particularly prized as a source of meat — that was sold to the victim in an unopened bag.

A common colloquial expression in the English language, to "buy a pig in a poke," is to make a risky purchase without inspecting the item beforehand.