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Bucks Slow Food Member Interviewed on Katie Couric

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Tags: Applegate Farms, Bucks County, CBS News, Katie Couric, slow food

Dear Farmers’ Market Locavores,

January 20 & 21: Katie Couric interviews Bucks County Slow Food chapter member Steve McDonnell, CEO of Applegate Farms (a New Jersey company) on the CBS evening news. Katie is reporting in a two part series about antibiotic use in industrial farming on January 20-21. Currently 70% of the antibiotics used on large-scale farms are given to healthy animals. Applegate Farms has always maintained a firm no-antibiotic requirement for their meat producers.

Antibiotics are often fed to livestock to help them grow faster. However, the antibiotics have created increasing resistances in some animals to antibiotics, and have allowed diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and staph to morph into strains that are more resistant to medicine. These resistances are then passed on to humans as they eat the drug-resistant pork, chicken, and beef around their dinner tables.

Antibiotic resistances are no trivial matter. Many diseases are much more difficult to cure if a person has developed resistances to some standard antibiotics. This year, the World Health Organization stated that antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to human health.

Find out why sourcing your meat from local farms, where you can speak directly with the farmer, is best for your health and that of our community and far beyond.

I know I’ll be watching both nights. Gina Asoudegan, board member of the Bucks County Food Shed Alliance, works for Applegate Farms and set up the interview.

Susan Pierson, Market Manager

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