Bye Bye Beef

Livestock on Drugs and Government Agencies Run by Livestock Producers

2010-07-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

CBS News Says:

The livestock producers who feed antibiotics to animals in meat factories say:

It's OK because the FDA owned and operated by the animal factories says it's OK.

Note the repeated and continuous use of the word "farm"? This building could be located anywhere they could get a permit. This operation is not dependent on a farmlike environment or anything having to do with farming. Why? Because it is not a farm, it is an animal factory.

To Get Our Farm Animals Off Drugs, First Get Our Politicians Off Farm (and Drug) Money

2010-07-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

By DAVID KIRBY
When it comes to all the addictions that plague our society, there are two that rarely get enough attention, let alone a badly needed intervention: Our factory farms' addiction to low-dose antibiotics, and our politicians' addiction to high-octane cash from mega industries like Big Ag and Big Pharma.

This week, the Obama Administration issued one of its most half-baked, half-assed policy moves to come along in quite some time. On Monday, the FDA gingerly announced that it is thinking about maybe recommending that livestock and poultry operations use anitbiotics more judiciously.

Many animal factory farms (or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations - CAFOs) rely heavily on sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics mixed into animal feed to prevent disease and make their animals grow faster. Operators can buy these pharmaceuticals by the barrellfull at a feed store, without a prescription and without the supervision of a vet. According to some figures, up to 70% of all US antibiotics are given to farm animals.

Most CAFOs need these drugs to make a profit. Take the antibiotics away and many would not be able to cram so many animals into such a tight confinement without those creatures getting sick and dying. And without these drugs, the indistrialist would not be able to get their pigs and chickens to market with the warp speed they are now able to achieve - resulting in more feed, less profit.

But low-dose antibiotic use, many scientists contend, can lead to high-risk antbiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistant bacteria now threaten millions of people around the world, and who knows what new Sci-Fi superbug may currently be incubating in the filth and feces of some jam-packed hog factory reeking nearby a schoolyard in, say, North Carolina?

Take MRSA: It now kills more American than AIDS, and some of it is coming from pork producers.

Obama's FDA is clearly worried, but not worried enough to infuriate industrial agriculture - which pours millions into lobbying and campaign warchests each year - and Big Pharma - which quietly pulls in billions each year from hawking drugs to animal factories.

"Developing strategies for reducing (antibiotic) resistance is critically important for protecting both public and animal health," FDA draft guidelines published in Monday's Federal Register said.

And FDA Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, MD told reporters that "This is an urgent public health issue. To preserve the (the drugs') effectiveness, we simply must use them as judiciously as possible. We are seeing the emergence of multidrug-resistant pathogens" and "the overall weight of evidence supports the conclusion that using medically important antimicrobial drugs for production purposes is not appropriate."

It's not appropriate, but we're still going to allow it. "We're not expecting people to pick up this guidance and change their practice tomorrow," he said. "This is the first step in the FDA establishing the principles from which we could then move, if necessary, toward other mechanisms of oversight, which is regulation."

Ah yes, "regulation." I remember that quaint concept.

If this is such an "urgent public health issue," then why not just ban the practice outright? The FDA has that authority, and it would bring our animal production practices closer to those found in more advanced nations like Canada and the EU countries.

So why only a "recommendation" - Isn't that akin to "recommending" that offshore oil rigs employ the safest technology possible?

The answer, of course, is money - and the official timidity it buys. In 2008, Pharma gave Obama $2.14 million and Big Ag kicked in $2.26 million, according to Open Secrets.

In return, the Obama Administration has shown it will mostly confront Big Ag only on environmental issues - and even then the efforts are not what activists would like. But when it comes to other practices, such as feeding chicken crap to cows and penicillin to pigs, they have so far refused (to quote a phrase) to step on anyone's throat.

As for Pharma, I cannot name a single thing the President has done that would displease that immensely powerful sector - though I am happy to be proven wrong.

Meanwhile, animal industrialists will fight any ban on farm animal drugs, and will probably even oppose this milquetoast FDA "recommendation." They claim the widespread use of antibiotics in CAFOs poses no threat to humans, and that most of the drugs used in poultry and livestock production are for treating sick animals (a practice that is opposed by no one).

But that is simply not the case. Farm and feed magazines are overflowing with ads for antibiotics that promise "Fast growth" and "Record time to market," not, "We'll make your sick sow feel better!" Meanwhile, Danish pig farmers are doing just fine after adjusting to raising their animals without growth promoting drugs. US pig producers can certainly do the same.

But if the Obama Administration won't step on the throat of Big Ag, who will? Congress?

Don't bet on it.

The "Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act" (PAMTA) - introduced by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and supported by candidate Obama in 2008 - is languishing in Congress. The bill would phase out non-therapeutic use of medically important antibiotics in farming, without restricting them for sick animals or treating pets.

The bill's opponents include powerful Democrats from, you guessed it, states filled with factory farms. They are unmoved by sensible arguments made by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Practice, or the American Public Health Association. They want money.

If we want to wean our farm pigs off drugs meant for people, then we first must wean our DC pigs off campaign cash donated by Big Ag and Big Pharma.

David Kirby is author of the book "Animal Factory - The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment" (St. Martin's Press).

Comedians on Eating Animals

2010-05-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

Cows on Drugs

2010-04-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

by Donald Kennedy
Op-Ed Contributor to the New York Times
April 17, 2010

Now that Congress has pushed through its complicated legislation to reform the health insurance system, it could take one more simple step to protect the health of all Americans. This one wouldn’t raise any taxes or make any further changes to our health insurance system, so it could be quickly passed by Congress with an outpouring of bipartisan support. Or could it?

More than 30 years ago, when I was commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, we proposed eliminating the use of penicillin and two other antibiotics to promote growth in animals raised for food. When agribusiness interests persuaded Congress not to approve that regulation, we saw firsthand how strong politics can trump wise policy and good science.

Even back then, this nontherapeutic use of antibiotics was being linked to the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria that infect humans. To the leading microbiologists on the F.D.A.’s advisory committee, it was clearly a very bad idea to fatten animals with the same antibiotics used to treat people. But the American Meat Institute and its lobbyists in Washington blocked the F.D.A. proposal.

In 2005, one class of antibiotics, fluoroquinolones, was banned in the production of poultry in the United States. But the total number of antibiotics used in agriculture is continuing to grow. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 70 percent of this use is in animals that are healthy but are vulnerable to transmissible diseases because they live in crowded and unsanitary conditions.

In testimony to Congress last summer, Joshua Sharfstein, the principal deputy commissioner of the F.D.A., estimated that 90,000 Americans die each year from bacterial infections they acquire in hospitals. About 70 percent of those infections are caused by bacteria that are resistant to at least one powerful antibiotic.

That’s why the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Pharmacists Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Public Health Association and the National Association of County and City Health Officials are urging Congress to phase out the nontherapeutic use in livestock of antibiotics that are important to humans.

Antibiotic resistance is an expensive problem. A person who cannot be treated with ordinary antibiotics is at risk of having a large number of bacterial infections, and of needing to be treated in the hospital for weeks or even months. The extra costs to the American health care system are as much as $26 billion a year, according to estimates by Cook County Hospital in Chicago and the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, a health policy advocacy group.

Agribusiness argues — as it has for 30 years — that livestock need to be given antibiotics to help them grow properly and keep them free of disease. But consider what has happened in Denmark since the late 1990s, when that country banned the use of antibiotics in farm animals except for therapeutic purposes. The reservoir of resistant bacteria in Danish livestock shrank considerably, a World Health Organization report found. And although some animals lost weight, and some developed infections that needed to be treated with antimicrobial drugs, the benefits of the rule exceeded those costs.

It’s 30 years late, but Congress should now pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which would ban industrial farms from using seven classes of antibiotics that are important to human health unless animals or herds are ill, or pharmaceutical companies can prove the drugs’ use in livestock does not harm human health.

The pharmaceutical industry and agribusiness face the difficult challenge of developing antimicrobials that work specifically against animal infections without undermining the fight against bacteria that cause disease in humans. But we don’t have the luxury of waiting any longer to protect those at risk of increasing antibiotic resistance.

Donald Kennedy, a former commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, is a professor emeritus of environmental science at Stanford.

Maniacal Meat Industry Sensitive to Criticism Boohoo

2010-04-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

by Tom Philpott at http://www.grist.org/

The Farm Bureau is none too happy with the EPA today for publishing a blog post urging Americans to give up meat.

The post in question was written by an EPA intern and recounts her decision to stop eating meat. The author, Nicole Reising, cites the "environmental effects of meat production" and urges readers to stop eating meat.

The American Farm Bureau Federation issued a statement today decrying the post as disrespectful to ranchers.

"While this is a position taken by an intern of the agency, EPA should control its blog space," said AFBP President Bob Stallman. "What is written on its blog comes across as its official position toward farmers and ranchers that it regulates and shows a terrible disregard for them and the agriculture industry."

To be clear, the American Farm Bureau Federation calls itself the "Voice of Agriculture," but it's really the voice of industrial agriculture--and the few companies that benefit from it. To say that the EPA "regulates" concentrated-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is a bit fanciful. As the Washington Post recently put it:

Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

The brazen intern in question, Nicole Reising, had proposed--without considering the feelings of meat-industry execs or CAFO operators!--that "Regulations can be made to help prevent the effects of meat production, but the easiest way to lessen the environmental impacts is to become a vegetarian or vegan."

Over on TNR, Brad Plumer quibbles with Reising: "if you're trying to tamp down on the consequences of meat production, the 'easiest' approach may be to start small and just convince people to eat less meat, rather than swearing off it altogether."

I would quibble with Reising and Plumer. Habits form and congeal over decades. Historically, meat has been dear; it's now cheap largely due to specific government action and inaction over the past 30 years.

People aren't going to cut back on meat because EPA interns and political bloggers want them to. Curbing the ruinous practices of the meat industry starts with enforcing the regulations already on the books; and that means a new commitment on the part of Reising's bosses at the EPA, as well as leaders at FDA and USDA, to make the meat industry pay for the messes it creates.

When that happens, people will surely eat less meat--and the meat that they do eat will tend to come from ecologically robust agriculture, and not the dark, Satanic meat mills that now dominate.

USDA says meat supply routinely tainted with harmful residues

2010-04-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

By Tom Philpott from http://www.grist.org/

Next time you're at an eatery whose sourcing practices you don't trust, avoid the veal. Skip the burger, too. Those are the immediate takeaways from this stomach-turning report (read in PDF) from the USDA's Office of the Inspector General. The long-term takeaways are more profound--and disturbing.

The report focuses on the USDA's system for keeping hazardous chemical residues--"veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals"-- out of the meat supply. You know, meat--the stuff that Americans eat more than a half a pound of per day, on average.

How is the agency doing at this critical task? From reading the report, I'd describe its system as sieve-like--but that would be unfair to sieves. After all, those kitchen implements do at least catch most of the solid bits suspended in a liquid. The USDA routinely lets chemical residues flow right into the nation's meat supply--without catching a damned thing.

The problem is not trivial, as the report makes clear:

Residues of drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals differ from microbiological pathogens like E. coli, Salmonella, and Listeria Monocytogenes, which the public more readily associates with food safety. While cooking meat properly can destroy these pathogens before they are consumed, no amount of cooking will destroy residues.

In fact ... "In some cases, heat may actually break residues down into components that are more harmful to consumers." [Emphasis mine.]

Evidently, the problem is worst of all for meat from animals raised on dairy farms. Such cows find their way into the beef supply in two ways. "Spent" dairy cows--ie, ones that are too sick or old to lactate--get slaughtered for beef. Their meat is so tough that it's mainly used as hamburger. As for veal, much of the U.S. veal market is supplied by the male offspring of dairy cows. Such animals are known as "bob veal."

According to the report, "Plants handling [spent] dairy cows and bob veal were, in 2008, responsible for over 90 percent of residue violations found."

Now, the USDA's meat safety arm, the FSIS, knows full well that beef-processing plants that deal with dairy cows tend have the great bulk of residue trouble. But get this, from the report:

FSIS allowed such plants to continue treating residue problems as "not reasonably likely to occur"--the determination that would allow plants to justify not implementing additional procedures to control residues.

One such plant had 211 violations in 2008, the report states--and still was able to operate as though such violations were "not reasonably likely to occur."

Okay, so why is meat from dairy cows so likely to be tainted with residue? The report puts it bluntly:

Some producers provide antibiotics to dairy cows in order to eliminate an infection after a calf is born. If the producer perceives that the cow is not improving, he may sell the animal to a slaughter facility so that he can recoup some of his investment in the animal before it dies. If the producer does not wait long enough for the antibiotic to clear the animal's system, some of this residue will be retained in the meat that is sold to consumers.

So let's get this straight: sick cows pumped full of antibiotics are routinely being slaughtered for burger meat.

As for veal ...

Farmers are prohibited from selling milk for human consumption from cows that have been medicated with antibiotics (as well as other drugs) until the withdrawal period is over; so instead of just disposing of this tainted milk, producers feed it to their calves. When the calves are slaughtered, the drug residue from the feed or milk remains in their meat, which is then sold to consumers.

Now do you see why I advised against ordering veal and burgers in the opening paragraph?

Recall that "spent" dairy cows were at the center of the notorious 143 million-pound beef recall back in 2008, when Humane Society investigators caught workers at a California meat plant cruelly prodding "downer" cows through a slaughter line. Long-time Meat Wagon readers will remember that, despite the recall, 37 million pounds of that suspect meat made it to school cafeterias. That's because school cafeterias, with their tight budgets, are forced to buy the cheapest beef possible. And as we learned in the downer-cow scandal, the cheapest beef possible comes from plants that deal with spent dairy cows.

Putting everything together, this report is telling us that meat tainted with residues is routinely making it into school cafeterias.

Well, that's the stuff I found most scandalous in this amazing report. There's more, too. Apparently, for a lot of nasty chemical residues, the EPA has no minimum tolerance levels. And because the EPA has no minimum tolerance levels, the USDA just lets them pass right on through to the public.

And get this: when the agency positively identifies residue-tainted meat, it ... does nothing about it: "We also found that FSIS does not recall meat adulterated with harmful residue, even when it is aware that the meat has failed its laboratory tests."

To me, this report dramatizes the withering away of the federal government's ability to protect the public from the negligence of powerful industries. Just as coal mines continue operating despite repeated safety violations, the meat industry churns out tainted product as a matter of course ... with the full knowledge of government regulators. (All of this reminded me of the study a while back showing that "people who eat meat and poultry have significantly higher levels of common flame retardants compared to vegetarians.")

The analogy between residues in meat and unsafe coal mines goes only so far, though. Every once in a while in a coal mine, a spectacular "accident" happens, drawing attention to the safety issue. For residue-tainted meat, the consequences are mainly subtle and cumulative. As the report puts it, "the effects of residue are generally chronic as opposed to acute, which means that they will occur over time, as an individual consumes small traces of the residue." In other words, heavy eaters of industrial meat--i.e., literally hundreds of millions of Americans, many of them kids--are like the frog in the pot, not noticing that the water is slowly getting hotter and hotter.

Rest assured: the FSIS swears it will correct all the wrongs exposed in this report. But also consider this: the USDA's Office of the Inspector General pointed out many of the same issues in a 2008 report (PDF). The FSIS swore it would make everything better then, too. The current report was explicitly written to assess the steps that have been taken since then, which doesn't inspire confidence.

King Corn versus Industrial Meat

2010-04-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

by Tom Philpott from Grist.org

Who wins when King Kong and Godzilla go at it? The audience--at least those folks who can avoid getting stomped by the behemoths. And here we have an entertaining cage match between two powerful, entrenched lobbies: King Corn and Industrial Meat. The topic is ethanol. The corn lobby wants the federal government to keep ramping up the goodies for corn-based ethanol. The meat lobby will accept ethanol goodies to a certain point--but roars like an abused CAFO pig when government ethanol goodies push up the price of corn significantly. The meat industry, you see, can only turn a profit when corn is cheap.

My take: a pox on both their camps. We need less corn and less low-quality, resource-intensive meat. The government should eliminate all ethanol goodies and give Corn Belt farmers incentives to transition to other crops: grass-finished beef, vegetables, etc. But of course, no one in Washington listens to me: I don't represent a powerful, entrenched industry. Here's what we're likely to get instead: more ethanol goodies, and more incentive for farmers to increase corn production--soil, climate, Gulf of Mexico be damned. Corn prices will hover in the $3-$5/bushel range, and the meat industry will slash costs in other areas to maintain profitability. In other words, pretty much business as usual.

But ... Corn Belt farmers and their surrounding communities would benefit economically if they at least partially exited the co(r)n game, transitioned some of their land to fruits and vegetables, and sold the produce within the region. So says a new study from the Leopold Center. The study focused on the Upper Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

In one scenario, the researchers estimated what would happen if farms in those states supplied seasonal fruits and vegetables to the region's 28 metropolitan areas with at least 250,000 people. (Currently, the vast bulk of produce consumed in the region is trucked in from elsewhere.)

To do so, about 200,000 acres would have to be transitioned from corn and soy (that's a tiny amount of land in Corn Belt terms--about two-thirds the size of a typical Iowa farm county). "Considering all relevant multipliers, that farm-level production would support 6,694 jobs and $284.61 million in labor income in the six-state area," the researchers conclude. Meanwhile, keeping that same amount of land in corn and soy supports 1,892 jobs and $42.517 million in labor incomes. In other words, there would be a massive net economic gain from transitioning that much land to fruit and veg.

Seems like many farmers in the Midwest would do well to cancel their National Corn Growers Association memberships and start thinking about what it would take to grow and market veggies.

If we are what we eat, we are in trouble

2010-04-12T05:59:00.000-07:00

The Financial Times (London)
April 10, 2010

By Simon Kuper

Eating Animals
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Hamish Hamilton £20, 341 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of our Insatiable Appetite
By David A Kessler
Penguin £9.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99

An Edible History of Humanity
By Tom Standage
Atlantic Books £8.99, 269 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Suppose that you and your partner go out for dinner tonight. You order steak and salad while your partner has chicken with rice. Now inspect your plates. Your cow spent almost all its life in a shed, burping methane that heats the planet. It was then slaughtered, often incompetently: it may have been still alive when its head was skinned and its legs cut off. Your "salad", doused in dressing, is really "fat with a little lettuce".

Your partner's chicken lived for six weeks, diseased and crammed so closely with other birds that it cracked several bones. After torture, came slaughter: the bird was shoved into a truck, taken to the slaughterhouse, and shackled upside down. It died screaming and excreting on itself in terror. The rice comes from plants bred by scientists in the 1960s. Both your meals are lathered in the extra fat, sugar, salt and chemicals to which you have become addicted. Enjoy your meal.

Three sterling books by Jonathan Safran Foer, David Kessler and Tom Standage examine a new era in food. Until about 20 years ago, people mostly thought about how to obtain food. Then, in rich countries, they began thinking about how to enjoy it more. Cookery and diet books invaded the bestseller lists. Now people are increasingly wondering whether they should enjoy today's food. Jamie Oliver's passage from British cook through global TV chef to scourge of the food industry captures the trend. Foer and Kessler have written manifestos that support Oliver's assault; Standage provides the historical context.

Almost everything we eat in rich countries nowadays has been invented or reinvented in recent decades, largely without us noticing. Our great-grandparents would not have recognised most of our food. Even today's chickens have been genetically engineered into virtually new species. And we have far more choices than any previous generation did. What we eat is now who we are: we have the unprecedented luxury of choosing our diets. These authors guide us through our new virtual supermarket, steering us towards decisions that require a radical breach in our eating habits.

Standage, business editor of The Economist, romps entertainingly through the role of food in history. An Edible History of Humanity shows fantastic erudition, especially for a journalist, is written in pleasing Economist prose, and feels only a little rushed. Food turns out to explain everything, from the creation of society (how hunter-gatherers became farmers) to the exploration of the world (everyone including Columbus was looking for spices) to the soaring of the world's population (the "green revolution" gave most of us enough to eat). However, a book this good deserves a proper conclusion. "Food is certain to be a vital ingredient of humanity's future" just won't do.

What emerges most clearly from Standage's account is that humans gave up eating naturally occurring foods long ago. Only hunter-gatherers lived off wild foods. When they settled on farms millennia ago - a blunder, as it meant they had to work harder for less food - they took up genetic engineering. By about 2000BC, farmers had bred maize, and indeed cows and chickens, into high-yielding foods that could no longer survive in the wild without us. Standage writes: "A cultivated field of maize, or any other crop, is as man-made as a microchip."

The "green revolution", with its chemical fertilisers and high-yield seeds, is only an unusually drastic attempt to engineer food. The revolution was born in a German laboratory in 1909, when the chemist Fritz Haber produced significant amounts of ammonia, a new source of fertiliser. In the 1960s, the revolution reached developing countries. By 2000, its new high-yielding "dwarf" varieties of wheat and rice accounted for most of the cereals most humans ate. All the rice in China, for instance, now comes from "new" varieties.

We can now feed the world with ever fewer farmers. Eighty per cent of Rwandans still farm, the same proportion as in Uruk, Mesopotamia, 5,500 years ago, but only about 1 per cent of today's Americans and Britons do. Yet as farms become increasingly mechanised, nostalgia for traditional farming grows. (The recent BBC TV series Victorian Farm, and the eternal radio soap opera The Archers, play on this nostalgia.) "A common feature of wealthy societies," says Standage, "is a feeling that an ancient connection with the land has been lost." From Roman nobles to George W Bush, elites often like to hang on to their farms "to demonstrate that they had not forgotten their people's purported origins as humble farmers".

Yet few of today's city-dwellers have much of an idea of where their food comes from. We care more than ever about food, but know less than ever about it. In his manifesto, Eating Animals, Foer argues convincingly that if we could see today's meat industry, we would stop eating meat.

Before Foer began writing this book, he himself knew nothing about farming. "In my 30 years of life, the only pigs, cows, and chickens I had touched were dead and cut up." Like most of us, he had a vague sense of farms as rural idylls straight out of the "Old MacDonald" song. When his wife became pregnant, he began thinking about what to feed his son.

Foer is an acclaimed novelist but Eating Animals opens like bad fiction: twee treacle about his son, his grandmother, and her famous chicken and carrots. It is only when the book turns into a painstaking study of factory farming, complete with 60 pages of notes, that it really takes off. Foer turns a technical topic into elegant prose.

Factory farming started in 1923, apparently by accident, we learn. The reputed inventor was Celia Steele, a Delaware housewife who kept chickens. As the story goes, she ordered 50 new birds, but 500 were delivered. Foer writes: "Rather than get rid of them, she decided to experiment with keeping the birds indoors through the winter. With the help of newly discovered feed supplements, the birds survived." By 1935, Steele had 250,000 birds.

Foer defines factory farming as "a system of industrialised and intensive agriculture in which animals - often housed by the tens or even hundreds of thousands - are genetically engineered, restricted in mobility, and fed unnatural diets (which almost always include various drugs, like antimicrobials)."

Factory farming produces cheap meat in unprecedented quantities. Before Steele's experiment, chicken was a rare luxury. A "chicken in every pot" was an American dream. Today, says Foer, the average American eats "the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime", while spending an unprecedentedly small share of his income on food. The consequences are dreadful. Billions of animals experience horrible deaths after worse lives. Constantly sick, they give us our flu pandemics. They occupy and degrade nearly a third of the world's land, use up and pollute water, and warm the planet. According to the United Nations, animal agriculture is the single biggest cause of climate change. It contributes 40 per cent more to global warming than all forms of transport combined. As Foer says: "Someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning."

But what bothers him most is the cruelty to mammals, poultry and fish. This happens in secret, because factory farmers don't allow visitors. Nobody needs to know how the sausage is made. Foer breaks into a turkey farm at night to see the misery for himself. As he points out, it's all unnecessary. We could live at least as healthily without meat. Certainly, in rich countries, logic should impel us to close factory farms and turn meat back into a luxury food such as caviar and truffles, to be eaten on special occasions only. That would accord with our stated ethics. According to one poll Foer cites, 76 per cent of Americans say they care more about animal welfare than low meat prices. Yet we have made a collective decision to torture animals and the planet simply because meat tastes good. We can't blame the factory farmers: they supply cheap meat because we demand it.

Foer's argument may not apply in poor countries. They may need more factory farms. After all, free-range chickens won't feed 7bn people. It's hard to tell hungry people to eat ethical meat. Moreover, eating meat per se is very defensible. As Samuel Johnson pointed out about 250 years ago, if we didn't eat farm animals, we would cease to keep them and they would cease to exist. However, existing for six weeks in an excrement-drenched battery cage probably isn't worth it. I began reading this book over a delicious meat lunch. By the time I finished reading, I had reluctantly stopped eating most animals. I don't like my new diet. Foer has diminished my pleasure in life. Unfortunately, his argument convinces.

Kessler's The End of Overeating can be read as a companion manifesto to Foer's. As commissioner of the US's Food and Drug Administration in the 1990s, Kessler took on Big Tobacco. Here, he takes on Big Food. In clear and simple prose, he shows how the modern food industry has invented "hyperpalatable" foods. Once people ate tortilla chips. Then they ate tortilla chips with cheese. Now they eat them with a factory-made topping that "can look like cheese but contains mostly oil and flavouring".

The new ingredients contain ever greater helpings of what we crave most: fat, sugar and salt. Today's fibreless "adult baby food" melts in the mouth. According to one industry insider: "In the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as 25 times ... now the average American chews only 10 times." The industry has mastered what it calls "hedonics": how to make food feel and taste delicious. The new food is also addictive, like drugs. According to Kessler, many Americans now suffer from "conditioned hypereating", wolfing down fat, sugar and salt as a habit. We have learnt to reward ourselves with these foods. Diets don't work, because they just make the dieter appreciate the reward of food even more.

Admittedly the US is an extreme case. At times, The End of Overeating feels like a Gulliverian journey through a strange land, where people eat multiple helpings of things such as "chocolate frozen yogurt with sprinkles and cookie dough" at any time of day or night they like. Yet the worldwide rise in obesity rates shows that hypereating, like factory farming, is going global. The book closes with Kessler's meeting with "top executives" of a big food company in London. "I described the stimulating qualities of sugar, fat and salt, especially in combination, and told them that the brain is wired to focus on the most salient stimuli." The room falls silent. Then one executive says: "Everything that has made us successful as a company is the problem."

Like most manifestos, including Foer's, Kessler's is repetitious. At times it reads like a guide to humanity written for aliens, full of banalities such as: "We seek out things framed in a positive light and avoid those with a negative cast." At the end it tries to morph into a bestselling diet book. Nonetheless, it's hyperpalatable. Perhaps because of Kessler's status, many insiders in the food industry tell him their secrets. We discover that breakfast cereals often contain four or five different kinds of sugar: "Some combination of sugar, brown sugar, fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, honey and molasses." If sugar is the biggest single ingredient in an American food, an industry consultant explains, sugar has to be listed first on the label. Using different sugars helps skirt that rule.

Kessler and Foer express a disquiet that is already widespread. As the richest westerners enter the post-material age they have begun to leave "hyperpalatable" foods and factory-farmed animals to their poorer compatriots, and to the Chinese and Indian middle classes. Elites want elite foods. What they eat, like the car they drive and the neighbourhood they live in, is now who they are. Healthy ethical food is the new BMW.

- Simon Kuper is an FT writer based in Paris

Agribusiness Profits, Mutant Germs ... And Us

2010-04-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

Thursday, April 8, 2010

by Jim Hightower

America is under assault. From coast to coast, we are being invaded by horrific, body-consuming mutants that are already destroying 65,000 American lives a year. As a Duke University scientist puts it, "This is a living, breathing problem. It's here. It's arrived."

These are not invaders from mars, but from within our own countryside. Ironically, these are mutants of our own creation, leaving America face to face with a spreading plague of drug-resistant germs.

For decades, we have benefited enormously from the healing wonders of antibiotics. These drugs save millions of lives that would otherwise be lost to microbial infections. But more and more of the antibiotics in America's medical kit are proving to be ineffective against the plethora of germs that endanger us. Why? Too much of a good thing.

America has overdosed on antibiotics, using about 35 million pounds a year – so much that germs, which are savvy survivors, have rapidly been mutating to develop resistance to the drugs. Thus, drug-resistant microbes now kill more Americans than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.

Why have we overdosed so badly? Because the bulk of the drugs used in our country do not go to protect humans, but to protect the profits of agribusiness corporations! Seventy percent of antibiotics go to chickens, cows, and pigs – either as stimulants to force the animals to grow faster or to fight rampant infections largely caused by unsanitary, factory-farm practices.

This senseless profiteering at the expense of our health is insane, and there's a push in Congress to stop it. But lobbyists for Dow, Eli Lilly, Monsanto, Pfizer, and others are out to kill any reform... and to let the germs keep killing us. To support common sense, visit http://www.saveantibiotics.org/

"Fears over antibiotics use in livestock grow amid new warnings," Austin American Statesman, December 29, 2009.

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2010-03-21T13:40:00.001-07:00

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Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable

2010-03-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post March 1, 2010
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer

Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored and occasionally flammable.

But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the world.

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.

That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country's fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas.

And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived "dead zones" that have proliferated along the U.S. coast. In the Chesapeake Bay, about one-fourth of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced to the back ends of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys.

Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

In recent months, Oklahoma has battled poultry companies from Arkansas in court, blaming their birds' waste for slimy and deadened rivers downstream. In Florida, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed first-of-their-kind limits on pollutants found in manure.

In the Senate, Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) has proposed a bill that would allow farmers in the Chesapeake watershed to cut pollution more than required and sell the extra "credits" to other polluters. The EPA, in the middle of an overhaul for the failed Chesapeake cleanup, also has threatened to tighten rules on large farms.

"We now know that we have more nutrient pollution from animals in the Chesapeake Bay watershed" than from human sewage, said J. Charles Fox, the EPA's new Chesapeake czar. "Nutrients" is the scientific word for the main pollutants found in manure, treated sewage, and runoff from fertilized lawns. They are the bay's chief evil, feeding unnatural algae blooms that cause dead zones.

Around the country, agricultural interests have fought back against moves like these, saying that new rules on manure could mean crushing new costs for farmers.

"It's clearly going to put a squeeze on people that they've always said they didn't want to squeeze," including family-run farms, said Don Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The story of manure is already a gloomy counterpoint to the triumphs in fighting pollution since the first Earth Day in 1970. An air pollutant that causes acid rain has been cut by 56 percent. By one measure, the output from sewage plants got 45 percent cleaner.

But, according to Cornell University researchers, the amount of one key pollutant -- nitrogen -- entering the environment in manure has increased by at least 60 percent since the 1970s.

"We've dealt with the kind of conventional pollutants," that helped spark the first Earth Day, said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "Now, we see the things that are eating our lunch, if you will, are natural products . . . that are just overloading the system."

The reasons for manure's rise as a pollutant have to do, environmentalists say, with a shift in agriculture and a soft spot in the law.

In recent decades, livestock raising has shifted to a smaller number of large farms. At these places, with thousands of hogs or hundreds of thousands of chickens, the old self-contained cycle of farming -- manure feeds the crops, then the crops feed the animals -- is overwhelmed by the large amount of waste.

The result in farming-heavy places has been too much manure and too little to do with it. In the air, that extra manure can dry into dust, forming a "brown fog." It can emit substances that contribute to climate change.

And it can give off a smell like a punch to the stomach.

"You have to cover your face just to go from the house to the car," said Lynn Henning, 52, a farmer in rural Clayton, Mich., who said she became an environmental activist after fumes from huge new dairies gave her family headaches and burning sinuses. The way that modern megafarms produce it, Henning said, "Manure is no longer manure. Manure is a toxic waste now."

In the water, the chemicals in manure don't poison life, like pesticides or spilled oil. Instead, they create too much life, and the wrong kinds.

"You get Miracle-Gro for your water," said David Guest, a lawyer for the group Earthjustice who has fought for tougher limits on pollution in Florida.

The chemicals in manure serve as fertilizer for unnatural algae blooms. They drain away oxygen as they decompose. Scientists say the number of suffocating dead zones -- oxygen-depleted areas where even worms and clams climb out of the mud, desperate to respire -- has grown from 16 in the 1950s to at least 230 today. The Chesapeake's is usually the country's third largest, after the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie.

The law, however, has treated manure and other agricultural pollutants differently than pollutants from smokestacks and sewer pipes.

The EPA does not set a hard cap on how much manure can wash off farms, instead issuing guidelines that apply only to the largest operations. There, the rules might limit how much manure farmers can spread on individual fields, for instance, or order them to plant grassy strips along riverbanks to filter manure-laden runoff. Even that level of regulation has only been in place since the 1990s.

But now, the EPA has signaled an intent to tighten its grip.

Last Monday, the agency announced that reducing manure-laden runoff was one of its six "national enforcement initiatives." New rules went into effect in December that will impose even tighter restrictions on large farms.

Last fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also considered a change to its guidelines, which would have limited the amount of manure farmers could apply to their fields. But then it scrapped that idea, saying the issue needed more study.

Last week on the Eastern Shore, where farmers raised 568 million chickens last year, the problem of excess manure was still big enough to see from the road.

"See how dark that one pile is? That's chicken manure," said Kathy Phillips, 61, an environmental activist who patrols the peninsula for piles of manure stored outdoors. As a steady rain fell, she said that pollutants were probably leaching off that mound -- as tall as a van and the color of dark-roast coffee-- and into ditch water that would eventually reach the Pocomoke River, then the Chesapeake.

Phillips usually surveys these piles from the air. She has a mental map of dozens of these off-smelling mounds.

"I don't want to be the Poop Lady," said Phillips, who got into environmentalism because she loved to surf Ocean City's beaches. "But, you know, somebody had to talk about this. It's like this dirty little secret."

A few miles north, the poultry giant Perdue has come up with one way to dispose of excess manure. At a $13 million plant outside Seaford, Del., tons of poultry manure are dried, heated to kill off bacteria and compressed into pellets of organic fertilizer that is sold to golf courses or homeowners.

"This is sort of a reverse chicken," said Perdue spokesman Luis Luna, as bulldozers moved manure below. "In a chicken, the food goes in and the poop goes out. Here, the poop comes in and the plant food goes out."

That helps Chesapeake's manure problem, but it isn't the whole solution. Luna said there is enough manure on the Shore to keep more plants like this running-- but Perdue isn't planning to build more yet. So far, the fertilizer doesn't sell well enough to make that cost-effective.

A Ban on Hormonal Meat is Three Decades Overdue

2010-02-03T06:48:00.000-08:00

CHICAGO, IL, February 2, 2010 --/WORLD-WIRE/--

On January 29, 2010, with three other scientific experts, Samuel S. Epstein, MD, Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, filed a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Petition seeking an urgent ban on hormonal meat, as it poses unrecognized risks of hormonal cancers.

The Petition requests the FDA to take the following action:

Require producers of hormonal meat to label it with an explicit warning such as "Produced with the use of sex hormones, and poses increased risks of breast, prostate, and testis cancers.

Prohibit the routine implantation of sex hormone pellets under the ear skin of cattle on entry into feedlots 100 days prior to slaughter. The object of the implants is to increase meat production by about 50 pounds per animal, and profitability by about 10%.

Ban hormonal meat. The hormones in past and current use include the natural: testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone; and the synthetic: trenbolone, zeranol, and melengesterol.

STATEMENT OF GROUNDS

Based on the scientific literature, besides World Health Organization (WHO) reports, there is explicit evidence that the use of sex hormones to increase meat production poses serious dangers to consumers," Dr. Epstein warns in the Petition.

"Of particular concern are the increased risks of hormonal cancers since 1975: breast by 23%, prostate by 60%, and testes by 60%," he emphasizes.

For these reasons, the Petition urges the FDA to take the following actions, now decades overdue:

Recognize that hormonal meat poses "imminent hazards" to the total U.S. population.

Take prompt, and decades overdue, regulatory action to eliminate the use of sex hormones in meat production.

Dr. Epstein explains that some three decades ago, Dr. Roy Hertz, then Director of Endocrinology of the National Cancer Institute and world authority on breast and other hormonal cancers, warned of cancer risks due to the use of estrogenic cattle implants, particularly for the breast.

Dr. Hertz emphasized that these implants increase normal hormonal levels, and that such imbalance causes reproductive cancers. Hertz also warned of the essentially uncontrolled and unregulated use of these extremely potent biological agents, no levels of which can be regarded as safe.

"These warnings are even more apt today, particularly in view of the FDA's longstanding and reckless failure to ban hormonal meat," Dr. Epstein declares.

The misleading assurances since 1979, by the FDA and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on the safety of hormonal meat remain unchanged, Dr. Epstein declares. Of further concern are longstanding problems linked to conflicts of interest in senior agency personnel and their consultants. As clearly evidenced in a series of General Accountability Office investigations and Congressional hearings, the USDA and FDA have failed to take any regulatory action to protect the public from the dangers of hormonal meat, Dr. Epstein points out.

Dr. Epstein cites a 1986 report, "Human Food Safety and Regulation of Animal Drugs," unanimously approved by the House Committee on Government Operations, which concluded that the "FDA has consistently disregarded its responsibility - has repeatedly put what it perceives are interests of verterinarians and the livestock industry ahead of its legal obligation to protect consumers - jeopardizing the health and safety of consumers meat, milk, and poultry."

In response to questions on hormonal meat raised in February 1996 by the European Commission, the USDA responded with assurances that less than 0.25% of animals tested annually proved positive for "residue violations." Dr. Epstein asserts, "These criticisms remain equally appropriate today. In fact, meat is still not monitored for sex hormone levels by the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; The Albert Schweitzer Golden Grand Medalist for International Contributions to Cancer Prevention; and author of over 200 scientific articles and 15 books on the causes and prevention of cancer, including the groundbreaking The Politics of Cancer (1979), and Toxic Beauty (2009).

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
Professor emeritus Environmental & Occupational Medicine
University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health
Chairman, Cancer Prevention Coalition

http://www.preventcancer.com/

To subscribe to the Cancer Prevention Coalition click here http://ens-news.net/lists/?p=subscribe&id=9

Nicholas Ashford, Ph.D., J.D.
Professor of Technology and Policy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ronnie Cummins
Executive Director
Organic Consumers Association

Quentin D. Young, M.D.
Chairman
Health & Medicine
Policy Research Group
Past President,
American Public Health Association

Organic dairy farms being crushed by factory operations

2010-01-29T14:30:00.000-08:00

Family farmers who produce organic milk are petitioning for the swift adoption of new strict rule-making that would rein in the abuses of a handful of factory farms, which are violating both the spirit and letter of the federal organic law.

The pending rewrite of the organic livestock standards, with an emphasis on assuring compliance with provisions that require grazing for dairy cows, is under review at the Office of Management and Budget, where the administration is being heavily lobbied by industrial farming interests to water down the rules.

To meet the explosive growth in the organic industry, over the last five years a number of large industrial dairies, milking as many as 7,200 cows, have exploited the stellar reputation that organic dairy products have earned in the eyes of consumers who are looking for safer and more nutritious food for their families.

With the flattening of demand for organic food, these giant dairies have flooded the market with cheap milk that is now crushing the family farmers who have built this industry. These CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are anathema to organic consumers investing in a more environmentally sensitive approach to food production and humane animal husbandry. Ironically, one of the reasons they are willing to pay extra for organic milk is they think that the farmers who produce it are being fairly treated.

The current surplus of organic milk, caused by factory farms, has forced prices down for family farmers. Sadly, there have been reports around the country of a number of suicides of both conventional and organic dairy producers. Some organic farmers are now facing foreclosure, a stark contrast to the economic promise of organics over the past two decades of growth.

Organic farmers are particularly resentful of two corporate players that heavily lobbied the USDA during both the Bush and Obama administrations, attempting to weaken regulatory language that requires dairy cows to be managed in a way that promotes their natural instinctive behaviors, including grazing on open pastures rather than spending most of their lives confined in barns and feedlots.

The largest villain, in the eyes of dairy farmers, is Aurora Dairy. The $100 million corporation owns five “factory farms,” each with thousands of cows, in arid regions of Texas and Colorado. Owning its own manufacturing plant, Aurora packages and ships milk for sale as store-brand products at Walmart and a number of leading supermarket chains. Aurora’s factory farm milk reaches every corner of this country, undercutting ethical farmers and their marketing partners.

Although the president of Aurora Dairy, Mark Retzloff, has heavily contributed to the Democratic Party, President Obama, and Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor who is now USDA secretary, we trust that the current administration will focus on the suspect practices of his company rather than its past financial and political support.

In what has been described as the largest scandal in the history of the organic industry, in 2007 the USDA found that Aurora had “willfully” violated 14 tenets of the federal organic law, including confining its animals instead of grazing, and bringing illegal conventional cows into its factory farm operations.

The Bush administration let Aurora off without a cent in fines, instead placing the company on a one-year probation. Since then, 19 class-action lawsuits by consumers, charging Aurora with consumer fraud, have been working their way through the federal court system.

Bruce Drinkman, an organic dairy farmer from Glenwood City, Wis., who milks 55 cows, is right when he says:

“It would be a national scandal, as some of us face losing our farms due to the industrial dairy scofflaws, if the Obama administration sides with the ‘bad actors’ in our industry. We are in dire financial straits because of the same kind of unethical competition from factory farms that put so many of our conventional neighbors out of business. We need the president and the USDA on our side!”

By Mark Kastel, senior farm policy analyst for the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute.

Russia Bans Imports of USA Chicken

2010-01-21T10:47:00.000-08:00

Industrial meat is taking a pounding (no pun intended) in overseas markets.

Russia banned imports of U.S. poultry from Jan. 1. Imports cleared by customs before Jan. 19 are permitted.

Russia cites the use of chlorine as the reason for the ban. Consumer protection watchdog Rospotrebnadzor says the presence of chlorine in water used to cool poultry results in "the accumulation of by-products dangerous to human health" in and on the surface of the meat.

U.S. meat firms routinely use chlorine to kill bacteria that cause food poisoning. The country says the process is safe.

Russia restricts the use of chlorine in poultry plants to 0.5 parts per million.

E. Coli Beef Recall in California 864,000 Pounds

2010-01-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2010

A Montebello company is recalling 864,000 pounds of beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today.

Inspectors from the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service found a potential problem while conducting a safety assessment of Huntington Meat Packing Inc. The investigation is continuing.

In the meantime, several products produced between Jan. 5 and 15 are being recalled. And after further review of the company’s records, the same products produced between Feb. 19 and May 15, 2008, are also being recalled.

McDonalds Ammonia Enhanced Pink Slime Hamburgers

2010-01-13T11:37:00.000-08:00

The question to McDonald's corporate website about what's in their hamburger was:

Does McDonalds use Beef Products Inc.'s, (a South Dakota company) hamburger filler product known by some in the meat industry as "pink slime"? The New York Times says you do.

NOTE that I did not say or ask anything about ammonia. Get your pink slime burger at McDonalds.

Their answer:

Hello Ron:

Thank you for contacting McDonald's and for sharing your concerns. I appreciate the opportunity to share the following information with you.

Please know that McDonald's food safety and quality assurance standards are among the highest in the industry. With extensive food safety measures in place throughout the entire supply chain process, McDonald's standards meet or exceed government requirements. McDonald's uses only 100 percent USDA-inspected ground beef in their hamburger patties.

Be assured that we do not add ammonia to our hamburger patties. In fact, ammonia is only used by our suppliers as a processing aid to kill harmful bacteria. This process is approved by the USDA and ensures safe, quality food.

Additionally, ammonia is a basic building block of protein and occurs naturally in beef, both raw and cooked. It is a key component of the flavor of cooked beef. Ammonia is a naturally occurring compound in meats and fish - (fish and shellfish have more than beef). Ammonia is a nitrogen containing compound and so are proteins.

As you may not know, lean beef trimmings are approved by the USDA and are a widely used and well-established industry practice. They are subject to the same stringent standards, and inspection and testing practices, required for all beef used in the production of our hamburger patties.

McDonald's continues to work with its suppliers, local, state and federal agencies, our industry and others, to ensure these standards are rigorously maintained. And, more importantly, that we serve safe, high quality products to every customer, every time they visit our restaurants.
Again, thank you for taking the time to contact McDonald's.

Lisa

McDonald's Customer Response Center

ref#:6578462

Factory Farmed Meat Can Trigger a Global Pandemic

2010-01-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

By Kathy Freston, AlterNet. Posted January 9, 2010.

The chicken and pork industries have wrought unprecedented changes in bird and swine flu. Billions could die in a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen.

I was intrigued (and disturbed) by a book I just read online -- http://www.birdflubook.org/ -- by Michael Greger, M.D. about the potential of a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen. Greger very clearly delineates how a virus begins, mutates, and becomes dangerous. As with so many problems we are seeing lately -- environmental or health -- factory farmed meat seems to be a big part of the cause. A graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine, Michael Greger, M.D., serves as Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at The Humane Society of the United States. An internationally recognized lecturer, he has presented at the Conference on World Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and the International Bird Flu Summit, testified before Congress, and was an expert witness in defense of Oprah Winfrey at the infamous "meat defamation" trial. His recent scientific publications in American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, Critical Reviews in Microbiology, and the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition, and Public Health explore the public health implications of industrialized animal agriculture.

Read the interview here.

Visit the Kathy's website here.

Pink Slime Burgers Laced with Ammonia and E. Coli

2010-01-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

Few who saw the documentary Food Inc. will forget the scene involving Beef Products Inc., a South Dakota company that makes a widely used hamburger filler product. A Beef Products executive invited the Food Inc. crew to record his company’s inner workings. The man is clearly proud of his company’s product. “We think we can lessen the incidence of E. Coli 0157:H7,” he says.

Scraps of cow flesh, swept up from slaughterhouse floors and pulverized into a kind of paste, are moving through the tubes, subjected to a lashings of ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria. “This is our finished product,” the executive declares. He then claims that the product ends up in 70 percent of hamburgers served in the U.S. “In five years we’ll be in 100 percent,” he predicts.

Beef Products buys the cheapest, least desirable beef on offer—fatty sweepings from the slaughterhouse floor, which are notoriously rife with pathogens like E. coli 0157 and antibiotic-resistant salmonella. It sends the scraps through a series of machines, grinds them into a paste, separates out the fat, and laces the substance with ammonia to kill pathogens.

The result, known by some in the industry as “pink slime,” is marketed widely to hamburger makers. The product has three selling points, from what I can tell: 1) it’s really, really cheap; 2) unlike conventional ground beef, which routinely carries E. coli, etc, pink slime is sterilized by the addition of ammonia; and 3) it’s so full of ammonia that it will kill pathogens in the ground beef it’s mixed with.

With the U.S.D.A.‘s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

Government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-31-meat-wagon-ammonia-burger/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Who is USDA’s 1st client, the public or the industry?

2009-12-30T11:21:00.000-08:00

In 2000, the Agriculture Department declared it would match the strictest standards in the business. Since then, however, top-tier businesses have evolved even more rigorous standards, while the USDA has lagged behind. It's hard to understand why. Cost? Jack in the Box spent less than an extra penny per pound to make its standards tougher, and most processors can already meet them when asked.

But the USDA doesn't ask, and that's not the only way it shortchanges school kids:

-- The USDA buys meat for the school lunch program from the lowest bidder among those certified to meet USDA standards. But at least one certified bidder — Beef Packers Inc. of Fresno — has recalled tainted meat twice this year and earlier was suspended from the school lunch program three times.

-- The USDA oversaw the two Beef Packers ground beef recalls this year but allowed some meat produced within the recall window to go to the federal school lunch program anyway.

-- The USDA helps egg producers by buying "spent hen" meat from hens past their egg-laying prime and passing it on to the school lunch program. The chicken is so unappealing that Campbell Soup stopped using it more than a decade ago.

-- The USDA does not enforce a law that requires that school cafeterias be inspected twice a year to prevent unsafe practices, even though state and local health authorities fail to do this in more than a quarter of all schools. The law provides no penalties, but it does require schools to give inspection reports to anyone who asks. Couldn't the USDA ask, and post the results online? Alerting parents might be more effective than penalties.

No doubt part of the reason for USDA's laxity is its dual mandate to regulate the agriculture industry while also promoting it. A similar conflict of interest in air safety regulation was eliminated years ago after it was identified as a contributor to plane crashes.

The same should be done with food safety. The USDA's record suggests that it doesn't quite grasp the idea that its most important client is the public it's supposed to protect, not the industries it oversees.

E. coli-tainted Beef 248,000 Pound Recall

2009-12-30T10:44:00.000-08:00

Twenty-one people in 16 states have been infected in recent days with a potentially lethal strain of E. coli bacteria, after consuming beef in restaurants supplied by the same Oklahoma meat company, federal officials said. The outbreak spurred the company, National Steak and Poultry, to voluntarily recall 248,000 pounds of beef December 24.

Nine of the 21 sickened have been hospitalized, the USDA reported. The department has identified cases in six states -- Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota and Washington.

The recall is considered a "class 1" or a "high health risk" by the USDA, which regulates the meat industry, because among the pathogens that can harm human health, E. coli O157:H7 is one of the most lethal. Even for those who survive, there can be long-term health effects.

Part of the problem is that the USDA really does little to regulate the meat industry.

Part of the solution is stop eating beef.

Cargill's Beef Packers Plant Recalling More Salmonella Beef

2009-12-07T12:16:00.000-08:00

More than 20,000 pounds of beef have been recalled by a California company amid worries the meat is linked to two cases of salmonella, a federal food safety agency said.

Beef Packers Inc., based in Fresno, California, recalled 22,723 pounds of ground beef products produced on September 23, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service said in a statement. The labels on the beef include the establishment number "EST. 31913," the agency said.

The beef was repackaged at a distribution plant in Arizona, then sold under different retail brand names, the agency said. The agency's statement did not identify brand names.

Ground Beef Recalls Since 2007

2009-11-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

With the recent recall of 1,039 pounds of hamburger contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, and the additional 546,000 pounds of hamburger recalled, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today. Hamburger recalls since 2007 have now reached 41,958,504 pounds. And, this is not counting another recall from 2008. Then, Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co., a Chino, California establishment, voluntarily recalled approximately 143,383,823 pounds of raw and frozen beef products that FSIS had determined to be unfit for human food because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection.

Trick or Treat Half Million Pound Ground Beef Recall

2009-11-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

A voluntary recall was announced Monday for more than half a million pounds of ground beef because it may be contaminated with bacteria linked to at least two deaths, officials said.

Fairbank Farms of Ashville, New York, said the recall was issued Saturday for approximately 545,699 pounds of ground beef produced between September 14 and September 16 after the meat was "possibly linked" to E. coli O157:H7.

Eating Animals the Book

2009-10-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

In the new book Eating Animals, author Jonathan Safran Foer wants to make sure you you know that factory farming - which accounts for virtually all meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants - is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment. Changing the way our food is produced begins us; with the choices we make every day.

Here are 10 things you can do to make a difference:

1.Read Eating Animals and ask your friends, family, and coworkers to do the same.

http://www.eatinganimals.com/site/book/

2.In the words of Farm Forward: Eat conscientiously-as few animals as possible, ideally none. More than 99 percent of animal products are produced under factory farm conditions. http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/food-choices

3.Support pending state and federal legislation to improve standards for farms. Learn more about legislation aimed to improve conditions for farm animals [ http://www.hsus.org/farm/camp/legislation.html ] and legislation that addresses the effects of farms on our environment [ http://www.waterkeeper.org/ht/d/Contents/cids/275,1383/pid/201 ] and communities [ http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/community/ ].

4.Tell Congress that you want to support alternatives to factory farming. Every year, agribusiness receives billions of dollars in subsidies and grants that make factory farming possible. http://fdn.actionkit.com/cms/sign/Factory_Farm_Bailout/#1

5.Have a conversation with the people who produce your food. If you aren't allowed to see where your food comes from, you probably shouldn't be eating it. http://www.eatwellguide.org/i.php?pd=Home

6.Stay informed about current issues in the fight for more humane and sustainable farming. Sign up to receive newsletters from groups like Farm Forward http://www.farmforward.com/ and the Humane Society of the United States http://hsus.org/ You can also follow many of your favorite groups on Twitter.

7.Spread the word! Talk about Eating Animals with your friends, family and colleagues, and encourage them to read up on and these important issues themselves.

8.Support organizations working for change. Check out Jonathan's favorite organizations.

◦Farm Forward - http://www.farmforward.com/
◦Farm Sanctuary - http://www.farmsantuary.org/
◦Food and Water Watch - http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/
◦Food Democracy Now! - http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/

◦Humane Society of the United States - http://www.hsus.org/

◦People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - http://www.peta.org/

◦Sierra Club - http://www.sierraclub.org/

◦Sustainable Table - http://www.sustainabletable.org/

◦Waterkeeper Alliance - http://www.waterkeeperalliance.org/

9.Buy products from the most progressive farmers in America. Sustainable Table's Eat Well Guide http://www.eatwellguide.org/i.php?pd=Home provides an extensive list of small farmers. We also encourage you to support Frank Reese, whose Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch is featured in Eating Animals. http://www.reeseturkeys.com/

10.Organize your friends and family to place large orders from progressive farmers. For small farmers like Frank Reese, shipping is by far the most expensive aspect of bringing their products to your table. By placing large orders together with your friends, family and colleagues, anyone can afford to eat the most humane and sustainable products in America.

Flaws in Beef Inspection - The Ground Beef Gamble

2009-10-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus. The aches and cramping were tolerable that first day, and she finished her classes.

Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.

Stephanie Smith, 22, was paralyzed after being stricken by E. coli in 2007. Officials traced the E. coli to hamburger her family had eaten. Stephanie Smith was in a coma for nine weeks after being infected with E. coli.

Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.

http://www.grist.org/article/warning-this-product-may-cause-sickness-paralysis-and-death

A top official at the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service observed that his options were somewhat limited since he had to “look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health.” Note the fact that his phrasing sets the meat industry’s needs at odds with ours—the two can’t be reconciled in his eyes. What does that say about the government’s ability to ensure a safe food supply? No matter how you structure it, the industry now appears too big and too powerful to be regulated. What other explanation is there for the fact that the top food safety job at the USDA remains unfilled if not regulatory paralysis—the meat industry seems to have veto power over its regulators and hasn’t found a federal overseer to its liking.