Song of Long Ago

I love beef. I craved, with a passion, medium-rare hamburgers all through my pregnancy, LOVE a pink steak with eggs for breakfast, love meatloaf, hamburger helper, beef hotdogs, and, well, you get the idea. Oh, and that commercial where the proud trumpet plays while you watch a montage of all the men standing next to their barbecues? I love that commercial!! I seriously cheer when I see it =) Now that my love for the product has been established ...

So recently I read this book. It was a medical thriller which happened to explain some of the way things work in a meat processing plant. The book was fictional, but the author offers at the end, a suggestion to check out some books from which the inspiration for his story came. Because the gruesomeness of the book had made me nearly swear off hamburger for life, I HAD to investigate the facts. Surely this was hype. Surely the beef industry could not be THAT bad?! Imagine my surprise when I find videotape, scientific reports, and MSNBC in depth and undercover reports validating the attrocities detailed in the fictional book. Originally, when I had set out to read about meat processing, my concern was for my health and the health of my daughter. After watching videotape that is beyond inhumane involving the treatment of ill cows in attempts to get them to pass inspection I am even more averse to the idea of consuming beef. I am not an environmentalist, a veggie lover, a health nut, an environmentalist or an activist by nature. I say this because I think it adds validity to my current concern with ongoing consumption of beef. To explain my concerns I have to get a bit graphic: I apologize!
Here's the story for those who are unaware. E-Coli comes from fecal contamination. People believe it is so rare for beef to contain E-Coli because (I think) the image in most people's mind is that beef would have to have been TOUCHED by human hands with fecal matter on them, or somehow, in some other random form, have been randomly and weirdly contaminated. This was how I imagined beef becoming contaminated by E-Coli anyway. This is not the case. So then, how does fecal matter end up in our hamburgers? For this explaination we have to look at the whole process of beef processing from start to finish. Farmers raise cows for either beef, or dairy. Either way, inevitably desease happens in every farm. When a cow gets sick and gets the runs, it gets too weak to stand up. Then it ends up covered in it's own fecal matter. A man is called to come pick up the "downed" cow. That man is supposed to take the cow to the "rederer". A machine that chops up the cow to feed to other cows. Often that cow, that sick cow, ends up in the meat plant to be turned into ground beef. How? The man that is supposed to take it to the renderer takes it to the plant to make a quick buck. The farmer takes it to the plant quick before it gets any sicker. Surely, you say, this can't be common. No? Then explain the actions of several meat processing plants who have automatic responses to animals that are too weak to stand up. Documented reports and videotapes abound online of more than one plant where the workers shock, shoot, punch, and poke into the eyeball of cows to MAKE them stand up. See, if they can walk INTO the plant, they are "qualified" as "healthy" and can be turned into beef. If it is uncommon for downer cows to be in ground beef, why would the workers have so much common knowledge of how to make the cows stand and walk in to the plant? Let's forget the fact that the link between downer cows and BSE (mad cow desease) is firmly established and focus on the E-Coli for a moment longer. Here, after walking into the plant, the cows are killed and strung up to be skinned then cut. If however, the cow falls down several times, is ill, defacating from it's illness consistently, falling into it's own defacation, the odds of that beef coming through processing with some kind of fecal contamination is exremely high. Even if it's hosed down, what does a brief hosing down do to remove virus infected fecal matter? Let's divert from the sick cows and take a look at the cows that ARE healthy. With the now common practice of using electric shock to get cows into place in the plant, even healthy cows lose control of their bowels. When they're killed, evenentually even those healthy cows can end up laying on the kill room floor in their own fecal matter. We've now established that beef DOES come through with contamination, and while it's not even close to half of the time, it is often enough and disgusting enough, and CONVINCING enough for me to at LEAST rethink my consumption of beef.
People say it's rare for people to catch E-Coli from beef. They say that people have been eating it for years and have never been sick before. Problem is, E-Coli that kills, and mad cow desease are fairly new to our food chain and their presence is not diminishing ... it's GROWING as the beef industries struggle to keep costs down with rising fuel and inflation and SICKER cows because of the feed containing redered diseased beef. People need money more, sick cows are fed to other cows more commonly (it's not against the law?) and more sick cows are sold ... barely passing as "healthy" bovine. More antibiotics are given to prevent sickness and the sickness mutates to a worse sickness. This is why no one caught E-Coli or mad cow before.
I am not saying all people should stop eating whatever it is they want to eat. I am writing this because I read this book, discovered from multiple sources including under cover investigations that there were gruesome and troubling facts behind it, and feel confused and worried about our need as a consumer to defend our choices of consumption above possibility of risk ... and I'm concerned about our assumption that our food will remain healthy and bacteria free. With our country heading into a recession I think we should all be at least somewhat concerned. Food goes through more processing and shipping now than ever before in our history. Add that fact to an equation that involves a recession forcing a need to cut costs and keep that food coming to the consumer and you get a pretty high probability that our food supply is not going to remain as guaranteed safe as we would like to think it is. I know it's been safe for a long time and that the chances of contracting a deadly strain of E-coli, for now, are somewhat rare ... But with the current number of CONFIRMED cases of yearly E-Coli totalling 20,000 people in the US alone I have to ask myself if I want to continue in my assumption that it will never happen to me? I don't intend to become one of those activists around whom all of their friends feel judged for their choices to continue eating whatever they like. Heck, who knows how long even MY self-imposed ban of ground beef will last! I am only suggesting here we investigate and take seriously the possibility that where things were is not where they are, and that we should all seriously consider some type of change in, at least, how we purchase, prepare, or eat our food. If I decide to eat ground beef again, you can be sure I will be twenty times more vigilant about the quality of the beef, where I buy it, and how I cook it. This is, what I would suggest for all who choose to continue their consumption of beef. My hope is that everyone will at least take a look at the facts out there, and then make some kind of informed decision based on something other than what we've heard from the USDA, our friends (me included!) or our personal limited experience. That said, most people I know make sure beef is cooked to a proper internal temperature, and will continue to do so ... it's the one or two accidental contaminents, or "whoops" when it's too rare, treatment of the animals, the gross out factor, and the rising risk of more determined E-Coli that worries me.
This is sad for me ... believe me! **sigh** I do love my beef!

*sources* Robin Cook- Toxin / Fox, Nicols- Spoiled: What is Happening to Our Food Supply and Why We Are Increasingly At Risk / http://www.hsus.org/farm/news/ournews/undercover_investigation.html / http://www.hsus.org/farm/resources/animals/cattle/faq_mad_cow_disease.html / http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/30/undercover.slaughter.video/index.html / and more ... just google "downed cows", "downer cows", "bovine cruelty", "contaminated beef", or look up the statistics for E-coli on national public health department website

Posted in: on 10.8.08 at at 17:21