Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
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Big Poultry Breeds Bird Flu and asks Consumers to Pay the Price / Boyce Upholt

Avian influenza roee shpernik 07

The food production system is so far away from most of our lives that it can kind of do what it does, and most consumers don't need to take note. And I think a lot of the powers at be have reason to sort of... not want to admit that production practices can contribute to things like bird flu, so that story is not widely reported. This bird flu itself, it was a big deal back in 1997 when it first hit Hong Kong and people were dying from it there. But it sort of has been lingering in the background for so long that there is a sort of complacency like 'Well I guess it's just around' and we, you know, almost wind up ignoring it because it's been there so long.

Boyce Upholt returns to This is Hell! to discuss his piece recently published by the New Republic, "The Frightening Cost of Cheap Eggs: Why paying more for eggs could save us from another pandemic".

 

Image: Wikimedia commons via Roee Shpernik. Avian influenza, poultry depopulation, extermination of turkeys by foam, Israel

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Boyce
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Boyce Upholt

Boyce Upholt is an award-winning freelance writer focused on the way we use and imagine the non-human world. He covers, among other subjects, public lands, exploration, biodiversity, foodways, infrastructure, and the cultural history of ”wilderness.” His work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and many other publications, and has been noted in the Best American Science and Nature series. Boyce won the 2019 award for investigative journalism from the James Beard Foundation. He is most recent book is The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi (Norton, 2024).

 

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