Avoid ‘doctored food’

Thanks for the “Penicillin Pigs” editorial on Earth Day, April 22. I hope the American Medical Association, the Maine Medical Association, the Maine Public Health Association, the Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Maine People’s Alliance, which are backing Sen. Edward Kennedy’s bill to restrict the use of animal feed containing antibiotics deemed critical for fighting human illnesses, take a look at farmed salmon and farmed shrimp.

After we researched farmed salmon last year we took it off our menus and substituted wild Alaskan salmon. We are not the only restaurants that have done so. It costs a lot more but we sleep better.

We have just finished a farmed shrimp research project and have stopped buying them. We have a new wild source from the Gulf of Mexico, which also costs about 20 percent more, but they have none of the antibiotics or pesticides that are routinely used in farmed shrimp.

I wonder if eating all this doctored food for the past 20 years could be the reason they can’t seem to stop SARS. If you check out farmed salmon and farmed shrimp on the Web you probably will not want to feed it to your children. Cheaper is not always the right way to go. Ask where what you are ordering comes from.

Nancy D. Gray

Harraseeket Inn

Freeport