A Little Arsenic With Your Glass of Water?

I've been thinking lately that perhaps a 3month session of the Maryland General Assembly is not the way to govern this state?   In the time frame of mere weeks, over a thousand attempts to create new law are submitted by our lawmakers and more than a few (LOL) never make it to a vote.

A great number of the ones that do make it to a vote, come to the floor of the General Assembly with little public input.  Don't get me wrong, they do come to the floor after A LOT of input from lobbyists, PACs, special interest groups (for all sides) and from time to time an administrative push from the big guy living just off State House Circle.

But each time I sit through a committee hearing, waiting my turn to speak either as a guest on a panel, or as a concerned individual, I marvel at how difficult it must be for a legislator to make an informed decision about anything that comes through the session.

Take HB953, introduced this year by Delegate Tom Hucker to ban the use of arsenic in poultry feed.  Seems like a no-brainer doesn't it?  Why allow a known carcinogen, a toxic poison, to be part of our food chain?  Thank you Delegate Hucker, for making a valiant attempt at a sane piece of legislation.

Then you listen to the heated debate between the State Attorney General and the Poultry Industry.  One says it's perfectly safe, the other says its a poison going into our water and onto our farmlands.

Guess which side won?

In case you don't know -  the Poultry Industry has been adding arsenic to poultry feed for years, as a fast way to increase the weight of a bird and to also combat the diarrhea type illness the bird will most likely contract from spending its short 5.5 week life walking around on top of and eating its own poop while squeezed into a 30,000 square foot house with 29,999 other birds.

One woman, during a hearing, actually said it would be cruel to not feed them the arsenic - we don't want these poor little birds to suffer with explosive diarrhea while we're cramming them into dusty, ammonia ridden houses that are artificially lit 24/7 so we can make them grow to 5.5. lbs in less than half the time it would take them to get there naturally.  Yeah, that would be cruel.

Some of our State Delegates and Senators were quick to point out that the arsenic being fed to these chickens is non-toxic and perfectly safe.  Why, one gentleman exclaimed, "arsenic is listed in the Periodic Table of Elements" and his face positively glowed from his apparent extensive knowledge of chemistry (or coaching from poultry insiders just before the hearing.)

Um, let's see - we have Uranium, Cobalt-60, Thorium, Chromium, Cadmium, and Lead just to name a few in the Periodic Table of Elements.  Want these little gems in your diet?

Hey!  Let's all sing along with Tom Lehrer, ok?  here you go- click here for his 'Elements Song' !

Point of fact is, while arsenic going in one end is non-toxic, when it comes out the other end it has converted to a toxic form of arsenic.  So the arsenic that stays in the chicken is toxic (like to fry those little chicken livers up in a pan? Heavy amounts stored there!)  The majority of the arsenic that went in comes out in the poop as a toxic form of the heavy metal.  (not to be confused with Slayer.)

And what happens to the two billion tons of chicken poop produced in Maryland each year?  Most of it goes onto farm land, to grow more corn and soybeans that will be made into more arsenic laced chicken feed.  Problem is, the farm land soils on the Eastern Shore are very high in phosphorus and arsenic does not bond with phosphorus.

So all that toxic arsenic on our farmlands now washes into nearby ditches and streams with the rain, or passes through the soils and into our groundwater.

So back to that 'debate' between our Attorney General and the Poultry Industry folks.   AG Doug Gansler would like to build incinerators to burn chicken litter (poop + shavings) to create electricty.  A plausible solution to the excess manure problem.  But you can't burn arsenic laden poop, because now you're going to shift all that heavy metal (not Slayer) into the atmosphere.   And Lord knows, we already have enough problems with all the ammonia emmissions coming out of those chicken houses.

So if Perdue Farms says they don't use arsenic in their chicken feed (and they are still able to grow fat birds in a short time frame,) and the State wants to help create more jobs in the construction of and operation of these power producing incinerators, and chicken growers might actually one day be able to create their own inexpensive source of electricity to power their chicken houses from small scale power plants on the farm, why you ask did our state lawmakers put one more roadblock in the way of dealing with Maryland's #1 agricultural pollutant - chicken shit.

Maybe they just needed a little more time to get educated on the topic, instead of eating lunch with the Poultry Industry while allowing the public only a few seconds to speak at a hearing in Annapolis.

Bet those chicken nuggets at lunch were tasty little morsels.......pass the arsenic, please.