We were up in Steamboat Springs (my happy place) this week, and while properly handling and cooking hamburgers, I suddenly realized how many adult males were standing around smoking their cigarettes.

Same thing was observed just outside several restaurant entry ways during the week.

I had never thought much about how many still are addicted to those nasty inventions of mankind. So I got to thinking, when was the last headline about someone dying a death related to cigarette smoking?

I certainly read a lot this week about the Salmonella linked to raw turkey; and two articles (one in Meatingplace.com) about an upward tick in foodborne illnesses so far in 2018. I was even asked for interviews on these subjects by CBS evening news and Consumers Report.

I declined. Reminded me of BPI and pink slime.

And then I decided to compare health effects from smoking vs. eating contaminated foods. There are 480,000 deaths per year from smoking, 2,612 from foodborne illnesses. Both numbers are the CDC’s web pages.

Of the food related deaths, 800 are from viruses and 1,000 are bacterial with 571 from Salmonella and Campylobacter. Smoking related deaths amount to 1,300 per day, food related deaths a paltry 6 per day.

There were a little over 100,000 laboratory confirmed cases of foodborne illnesses from pathogens often linked to food. That number is from the CDC’s FoodNet surveillance tool, and represents approximately 15 percent of the American population. So an honest estimate if all of America was in the FoodNet system would be about 700,000 cases laboratory confirmed.

There were more than 16 million Americans living with a disease caused by smoking, and those diseases will not be going away as a foodborne illness usually does.

On average, smokers die 10 years earlier than nonsmokers. On average, meat consumers do not die earlier than non-meat consumers (My thoughts, not CDC’s).

In 2016, $9.5 billion was spent on advertising and getting kids hooked on this very addictive drug. I like a good bone in rib eye, but I am not addicted.

We could stop smoking related deaths easier than food related deaths, but we won’t. Instead we will bad mouth the animal ag industry and sue them when people get sick. But we won’t be suing the Marlboro Man or the companies.

For some reason we have decided it is legal and OK to smoke and to get kids hooked early on, and when they age and get sick who pays the bills?

You and me, in one or more ways. It could be thru public health care insurances such as Medicare or Medicaid, higher insurance premiums to all private payers, or higher medical bills for all of us to cover the indigent.

Where is the public outrage like we saw with Jack in the Box, Peanut Corporation of America, Foster Farms, Jensen Farms, etc.?

American farmers and ranchers are raising meat to be consumed to keep us healthy, the tobacco farmers are raising a weed that will make addicts out of our youth and eventually kill them. Yet all the uproar about addiction seems to be around the opioid epidemic, not tobacco.

Go figure.

Wait a minute. How is meat the bad guy here?

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