Drug Resistant Cooties Everywhere In Texas

Those drug resistant cooties are spreading like wildfire in Texas, oh yea, a lot of other places too! Need something to look forward to besides death and taxes? How about cooties? Now that farming, ranching and industrial food production has embraced chemicals, technology and mechanization on a grand scale we can all look forward to a bit of drama if we eat. There is no way to avoid it and in fact it’s likely a good thing, ever tried to grow your own broccoli? From experience it can be said that unless you embrace the dark side you probably can’t grow things as fast as you eat them, as a sub-urbanite that is. Eating is something we all do and if it weren’t for the large commercial operations we’d probably be working on our Alferd Packer skills.

Nevertheless some caution, or corporate responsibility is necessarily in order. No one wants steel filings in their macaroni and cheese but as industrial processes go that wasn’t that bad, was quickly remedied and hey, haven’t you ever watched “How It’s Made”? (An early memory tells me I saw a guy smoking a ciggie pushing a rail car size tub of cornmeal mush drop an ash in but that hasn’t diminished my appetite for Fritos.) So caution is advisable and some of the alarmists may have a point when they note that airborne drug-resistant bacteria are being found downwind of feedlots in Lubbock. As tips of icebergs go that’s right up there there with “What’s wrong with the canary?”, “A little paint fumes never hurt me.”, “Get some on you, see it doesn’t burn.” and “Don’t be a wimp, you can pick that up.”

Doctors are prescribing less and less of those antibiotics every day. That is every day after they started seeing more and more sores that didn’t heal. So why are the cows, chickens and pigs still doped up? Well they fatten faster for one, and that’s not anecdotal, that’s empirical, same as the evidence that young girls who eat a lot of chicken enter puberty much, much earlier than they used to and empirical counts for a lot more that just what you believe. What’s the answer there? We could wait a little longer than six weeks for our chicken dinner I guess, if waiting was in anyone’s nature. Another answer might be a vegetarian diet seeing as how it takes about a gazillion times more to raise enough meat to eat as it does to just eat the grass ourselves.

But Texas, well that’s gonna be a tough sell.