3.31.2003

what's in the meat?

**Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and those who have just eaten, may read this passage under their own discretion.**

" The problem begins in today's vast feedlots. A government health official, who prefers not to be named, compared the sanitary conditions in a modern feedlot to those in a crowded European city during the Middle Ages, when people dumped their chamber pots out the window, raw sewage ran in the streets, and epidemics raged. The cattle now packed into feedlots get little exercise and live amid pools of manure... Feedlots have become an extremely efficient mechanism for "recirculating the manure," which is unfortunate, since E.coli 0157:H7 can replicate in cattle troughs and survive in manure for up to ninety days.

" Far from their natural habitat, the cattle in feedlots become more prone to all sorts of illnesses. And what they are being fed often contributes to the spread of disease. The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle... About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes --the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle-- until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after... Great Britain suggested they were responsible for... "mad cow disease." Nevertheless, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle... Steven P. Bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry, is appalled by what goes into cattle feed these days. "Goddamn it, these cattle are ruminants... They're designed to eat grass and, maybe, grain... They are not designed to eat other animals."

" The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also being fed to cattle... in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994. "

[earlier in the chapter]

" In the USDA study 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat. "

~ Chapter 9 in Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. ~
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