You may not know it, but the US Department of Agriculture does; if there is detection of an antibiotic in an animal off to the processing plant, the entire railcar full will be destroyed. On the other hand, if you never use antibiotics for a sick animal, you are being inhumane and jeopardizing a whole herd.

Yet it has become common in this century for premium food marketing executives to sign off on ridiculous claims like they are “raised without antibiotics” while, like "grass-fed" and "free-range", shielding themselves because legally it is a simple marketing designation, as with "certified organic" food. They can claim it because caveat emptor for consumers who pay more, it has no meaningful difference at all. That 98 percent of the public has never worked on a farm is why so many urban residents buy Non-GMO Project labels on 65,000 products that were never GMO in the first place. A company just pays a few thousand dollars and fills out a form saying they don't use GMOs.


Want to bet that your cheese isn't a GMO? Because if it isn't, your environmental impact is larger than giant commercial farms that use science.

Since President Clinton, Woomeister In Chief. irrationally made alternatives to medicine the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money that could instead have been used for science, exempted supplements from FDA oversight if companies just place an 'FDA has not validated anything we claim' statement in fine print, and gave Organic industry lobbyists their own special marketing panel inside USDA, it has been open season on trust in government science. 

Allowing that to happen made the organic and other niche segments rich while penalizing ethical companies who used truthful advertising. Finally, USDA may be starting to crack down.

“Consumers should be able to trust that the label claims they see on products bearing the USDA mark of inspection are truthful and accurate,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “USDA is taking action today to ensure the integrity of animal-raising claims and level the playing field for producers who are truthfully using these claims, which we know consumers value and rely on to guide their meat and poultry purchasing decisions.”

Now, if only EPA would take some notes from USDA and clean up their house the same way. Instead, EPA Administrator Michael Regan has turned it into a scientific clown car doing whatever lawyers in politically allied groups tell him to do, while claiming the courts are forcing him to ban every aspect of science he can find.