I long ago stopped eating beef, but for those who haven't...
I stopped eating beef many years ago because, as The New York Times reported in 2004 about the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “you’d have a hard time finding a federal agency more completely dominated by the industry it was created to regulate.” When the regulated are also the regulators, regulation is a sham. There’s no factual reason to believe U.S. beef is safe because the industry prevents anyone from systematically testing whether it is or is not safe:
The beef industry has fought for nearly two decades against government testing for any dangerous pathogens, and it isn’t hard to guess why: when there is no true grasp of how far and wide a food-borne pathogen has spread, there’s no obligation to bear the cost of dealing with it….
Last year the Agriculture Department tested only 20,000 cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, out of the roughly 35 million slaughtered. Belgium, with a cattle population a small fraction of ours, tested about 20 times that number for the disease. Japan tests every cow and steer that people are going to eat.
The Dept. of Agriculture is likely covering up “mad cow” disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), if America is like other countries:
In Britain, where mad cow disease was discovered, the ministry of agriculture misled the public about the risks of the disease from the very beginning. In December 1986, the first government memo on the new pathogen warned that it might have “severe repercussions to the export trade and possibly also for humans” and thus all news of it was to be kept “confidential.” Ten years later, when Britons began to fall sick with a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, thought to be the human form of mad cow, Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg assured them that “British beef is wholly safe.” It was something of a shock, three months later, when the health minister, Stephen Dorrell, told Parliament that mad cow disease might indeed be able to cross the species barrier and sicken human beings.
In the wake of that scandal, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Japan banned imports of British beef — yet they denied for years there was any risk of mad cow disease among their own cattle. Those denials proved false, once widespread testing for the disease was introduced.
Until just last year, “downer” cows — cows unable to stand up — could still legally be killed and sold as beef.
Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer announced a total ban on the slaughter at meat plants of cows too sick or weak to stand… The review was prompted by a 143-million-pound beef recall in February, ordered after the Humane Society released undercover video showing employees abusing downer cows at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, Calif.
Which brings us to the latest disgusting beef news — that “tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by [O157:H7 E. coli], federal health officials estimate… [E]ating ground beef is still a gamble,” according to The New York Times:
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.
The frozen hamburgers that [put Stephanie Smith in a coma for nine weeks and left her paralyzed], which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.
Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.
Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together….
Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others….
Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country, conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55 that were failing to follow their own safety plans.
“Every time we look, we find out that things are not what we hoped they would be,” said Loren D. Lange, an executive associate in the Agriculture Department’s food safety division.
Posted by James on Friday, October 09, 2009