Coles and Growth Hormones

S
There is a big story running in Australian papers about how Coles (one half of the grocery oligopoly) is going 'hormone free' with it's beef. 

Notice that the quote attributed to Curtis Stone says 'all the fresh beef'.  What about the rest?

And try to guess who might have pressured their 'supply chain' into production systems that 'depend' on things like growth promoting hormones and antibiotics in the first place?

Supermarkets seem to me a bit like miners - except they don't do the remediation that even strip miners are now required to do as a condition of their licensing.   Supermarkets are only 'cheap' because they have created a system that reduces costs that people pay at the checkout while driving costs people pay through other means.

They 'mine' their supply chains for 'efficiencies' that are only efficiencies if you ignore costs of land degradation and social dislocation caused by industrial agricultural systems.

They jam the health system with people sick from eating the food they sell. 

They use advertising and lobbying to create a world in which 'cheap food' is an political necessity.  Reality check!  No one in human history has spent a lesser proportion of their income on food that the modern consumer!

We don't need cheap food.  We need (as we always have) good food and systems that produce it reliably.

I don't like the idea of growth hormones or, more particularly, farming systems that make it necessary for animals to be fed drugs we don't fully understand.  But Coles should get no credit for doing this.  They should get condemnation for:
-  hedging on products containing processed beef; and
-  jerking around their suppliers - after encouraging them into such counter-productive systems in the first place.

In the end supermarkets are not sustainable - and some of us are more exposed to their unsustainability than others.
F