Avian flu outbreak raises a disturbing question: Is our food system built on poop?

Avian flu outbreak raises a disturbing question: Is our food system built on poop? If it's true that you are what you eat, then most beef-eating Americans consist of a smattering of poultry feathers, urine, feces, wood chips and chicken saliva, among other food items. As epidemiologists scramble to figure out how dairy cows throughout the Midwest became infected with a strain of highly pathogenic avian flu — a disease that has decimated hundreds of millions of wild and farmed …