It sickened the New York Times and the LA Times–and prompted Senator Richard Durbin and Representative Rosa DeLauro to mobilize for a single food safety agency, rather than leaving things up to the USDA. It can be linked to the Bush Administration’s slackening of regulations and staffing key USDA with Friends of George. It was prompted by a video released by the Humane Society of the United States, which picked a plant at random and showed cattle being shoved, forklifted and prodded on their way to slaughter, too sick to walk. It was the largest meat recall in American history, over 143 million pounds of beef, 37 million of which went to public school lunches.
The Chicago Tribune’s health blog ran a video of “downers,” cattle who are too sick to stand, and a list of books addressing Confined/Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFO) and the spread of disease among animals and humans. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle and Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma top the list.
We saw this coming
In October 2007 there was a beef recall after suspicions of E. coli contamination when two consumers got sick. The Illinois Department of Health launched an investigation after the two illneses were reported, which resulted in The American Foods Group voluntarily recalling 96,000 pounds of ground beef.
Starting in 1989, before most foodies got hip to small, organic, sustainable farms for better food and a safer planet, environmentalists took aim at CAFO as the nation’s biggest polluter of lakes, rivers and streams. “Agriculture is the single greatest source of water pollution in the country,” wrote Elizabeth Becker for the New York Times in 2002. Small family farms, and environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council criticized a 2002 Bush initiative to reduce pollution, backed by Christine Todd Whitman, then the Head of the Environmental Protection Agency, because it prevented public review of large farms’ pollution plans, and was largely seen as favoring business.
Further back still, in 1973, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement on the health risks of feedlot proximity to children, most notably in the drinking and recreation water supply. It was found that an animal feedlot in Indiana was emptying its waste along a creek, which ran into a lake used for swimming.
The paper explains that CAFOs were introduced after World War Two, when American prosperity and the demand for meat were on the rise. Originally established in deserted areas far from population centers, the paper asserted that, (by 1973), CAFOs were moving closer and closer to the market areas throughout the country, posing a greater risk to the population in terms of pollution and disease.
What’s so bad about feedlot animals? As Barbara Kingsolver outlines in her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, feedlot animals eat grain rather than grass, which makes their digestive system more acidic and prone to disbyosis. The pediatricians authoring the policy paper above also refer to naturally occurring “epizootics,” or epidemics, in confined feeding facilities, as well as chemical pollution by animal wastes and chemical changes related to microbiologic and chemical pollution.
Barbara Kingsolver’s daughter college-age Camille says it best. On a cross-country road trip from Virginia to Arizona when she was eleven, the family car passed by acres of CAFOs. “The odor was horrifying…and the sight of the animals was haunting: cows standing on mountains of their own excrement, packed so tightly together they had no room to walk…Looking out the window at these creatures made my heart sink and my stomach lose all interest. The outdoor part of the operation seemed crueler than anything that might go on inside a slaughterhouse. When I got home I told my parents I would never eat beef from a feedlot again.”
The United States of Vegetarians?
Faced with disease, animal cruelty, and harm to the planet, should we give up meat? Maybe vegetarianism is a good option if you’re eating lunch in a cafeteria.
But if you can find a good farmer, and they are everywhere, then develop a relationship of trust with the producer who is sure to become a good friend, and enjoy all the beef you want, knowing, as chef and author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall puts it in his book, The River Cottage Meat Book, “that there is a moral dimension in your dealings with meat. Please think about it…”
Think about it, talk about it, and if you’re a chef, let your purveyors know. If you’re a consumer, let your favorite restaurants and your favorite retailers know, as well.
Posted by: Rebecca Ruquist
