I know, right? I've spent the past 15+ years studying food, nutrition and the food industry in this country....which is why I'm now so determined to grow as much of our own food as possible. When I worked in the power industry my department(s) received GAO reports straight from the government. I was the only one who read all of them (a good way to pass the time on graveyard shifts). The information they contained about our mechanized food industry horrified me, and then horrified my husband when I came home from work and told him all about it. Most of our friends and family think we're a little crazy...and I think they're woefully uninformed.
I skipped a lot, reading backwards now Lol. What you posted here was the reason why I resurrected our garden and chicken raising after we abandoned them a few yrs ago, we got sick and tired of the work with kids, jobs, etc. After watching, reading, hearing, much on the food today I decided the work was worth it. Would like to be completely self sustainable someday, might not be fully but every little bit helps.
I work at a dairy plant, my job is condensing the whey from 4% to 40% solids and loading out one to two trailers 60,000lbs ea of the stuff a day. It originally went out to a place that condensed it further down to a powder, removed the lactose from it and also something in it that goes into the coating on pills. Driver told me they had a load of smelly blood, spleens, hearts, other 'stuff'' from a beef slaughter house. They told him it gets dehydrated down to a powder and shipped to soup companies as beef protein to be put in soups...mmmm...
Now our whey is being shipped to a place that makes animal feed out of it. I asked the driver what animals is it fed to?
It gets mixed with all sorts of stuff, trailer loads of out of date, damaged, non-saleable everything, bread donuts ring dings and ho ho's twinkies potato chips corn chips macaroni and the cheese packets spaghetti, he named off a list of stuff he's seen them dump into the giant mixer, even candy with the wrappers on still. The place must be the garbage dump for the food industry. They mix our concentrated whey in and dump it on a huge floor that dehydrates it, then they bust it up into chunks and send it out to the beef feed lots out west...mmmm...cows ain't supposed to eat that sheet.