From Cow to Cannibal

by Chet Day

September 11, 1997

The other evening as a cool front drifted through our state, I jogged along Highway 70 in the rolling mountains of NE Tennessee and passed a herd of grazing cattle. Feeding on thick, green pasture grass, one cow by the fence next to the two-lane blacktop glanced my way, rolled its big brown eyes upward, almost in amusement, mooed once, and then resumed chewing.

I couldn’t help but chuckle aloud as I took a deep breath of the crisp fall air and felt thankful for being so vibrantly alive and for enjoying a moment of communion with a fellow inhabitant of the earth.

As I continued along the shoulder of the highway, reflecting on my moment with the cow, I asked myself for what seemed like the millionth time how I could have spent more than forty oblivious years of my life ignoring the butchering of such creatures so I could stuff my face with hamburgers, steaks, hot dogs, and the other concoctions we carve and steal from the bodies of these peaceful animals.

This encounter with the cow provoked many thoughts because I had spent a good part of the week researching the August recall of 25 million pounds of E.coli contaminated hamburger that left the Hudson Foods Plant in Columbus, Nebraska, back in June. And that research had led me to other facts about the beef and meat industry that disturbed me even more.

When I swapped my computer for my jogging shoes that evening, I’d already spent a day and a half trying to write this opinion piece, but the more I wrote the more off-center I drifted. Usually a fairly objective and controlled person who keeps most things of the world a good arm’s length away from the core of my being, I felt as though I’d been physically, emotionally, mentally, and morally assaulted by what I’d learned regarding America’s beef and animal feed industries.

Originally, I’d planned this editorial to summarize the facts of the biggest beef recall in history and to then let the reader arrive at a conclusion. But every time I tried to write objectively, I kept coming up blank... and that rarely happens because I almost always have a deep well of words from which to draw.

So this morning I begin again, as James Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake, and perhaps this time I can find the words and feelings to communicate a great wrong being committed in our country.

You know, these days, so many of us, in our hectic, busy lives, see so much in shades of gray. I can close my eyes to things that should infuriate my moral sense, and, most of the time, for my own peace, I shrug, stand mute, and go about my business, tucking the corners of some outrage under the mattress of the bed in the farthest guest room of my mind.

And yet this week I learned some facts about the American food industry that revealed to me what I consider something so morally, medically, and intuitively wrong that I want to shout what I’ve discovered to every person on earth.

Oh my, I am so close to this, so oddly attached emotionally. Only a few short months away from my fiftieth birthday, I experience the off-centering turmoil of a great wrong, and I feel helpless before it. An awakening has occurred, and it races through my thoughts and emotions with the current of a storm-swollen river.

***

In the first weeks of August, 1997, Hudson Foods Company admitted to the U.S. government that it needed to recall 20,000 pounds of hamburger that was contaminated with E.coli bacteria. Shortly thereafter the USDA upped the recall to 1.2 millions pounds.

By the time Princess Di’s death swept the meat story from the news, Hudson had recalled 25 million pounds of contaminated flesh and had sold the Columbus, Nebraska, plant that had released the infected hamburger.

Even though the USDA sent into the Columbus packing facility their so-called SWAT team of expert inspectors about mid-August, by the first of September, according to U.S. News and World Report, these crack inspectors could only conclude “that a jumbled record system and questionable procedures made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine how E.coli bacteria had tainted the hamburger patties fashioned there.”

Beef! It’s what’s for dinner.

Oh well, so it goes, I thought when I read the conclusion of the inspectors. I don’t like it, but their final report that nobody would ever know what really happened didn’t surprise me, and, besides, everything worked out okay. The company recalled the bad burgers, only 17 people got sick -- and none of them died -- and Hudson Foods sold the offending packing house to solve the problem. (According to a Hudson press release, IBP, the company that purchased the plant, is “the world’s premier producer of fresh beef, pork and related allied products.”) I guess by selling the Columbus facility, both Hudson and IBP get around the “questionable procedures” identified but not specified by the government swat team. I figured, well, the politicians and pundits like me will squawk for a few days and then the status quo will reassert itself and all will return to normal and nothing will be done to ensure the safety of beef for the consumer.

The politicians did get in a few self-serving licks. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said in mid-August on CNN's "Late Edition with Frank Sesno" when the Hudson beef recall still dominated the news, “I've sent the SWAT team out to this particular plant because I want to send a signal throughout the industry that we will not tolerate practices which are incompatible with public health.”

Oh yeah, everybody believes that the government absolutely won’t tolerate any “practices which are incompatible with public health.”

But America’s memory has the attention span of a five-year old Saturday morning cartoon addict. Only a few zealots remember the politicians like Glickman spouting similar platitudes the last meat recall back in 1993 when four children died and hundreds of people fell seriously ill after eating contaminated hamburgers at fast food joints in the northwest.

After those deaths and all kinds of chest-pounding and legalistic saber rattling, our government took serious, important steps to protect the public welfare. Do you remember? In a public relations’ campaign waged by the authorities with the help of the nightly news and the establishment press, the USDA taught those who continued to eat meat after the 1993 contamination to cook their burgers until the center reached a certain temperature “to kill possible germs and other contaminants.”

You see, because the meat industry is BIG business and because reforms cost BIG money, nothing really changed as a result of the 1993 outbreak of E.coli, and I doubt that much will change now unless Americans wake up and refuse to purchase the so-called “beef” being sold.

Beef! It’s what’s for dinner.

Before the Princess Di story took over the news, though, I did figure another self-interest group would use this latest beef recall as a rationale to start telling us that we must irradiate the meat they grind in America’s flesh processing plants before it ends up in home refrigerators.

Interestingly, my prediction came true. "Irradiation offers the best chance of substantially reducing bacterial and parasitic contamination in food," Michael Osterholm, state epidemiologist for Minnesota, said in the September 1 edition of Newsweek. "It is the critical missing piece in reducing the risk of illness."

Well, this kind of talk didn’t stay in the news very long because the media decided it needed to spend about ten days covering the death of Princess Di, but, nonetheless, I’d like to ask Michael Osterholm and the rest of the irradiating proponents what else happens at cellular level to foods that they bombard with their radiation.

If radiation destroys bacteria, what does it do to the nutrient factors in foods that keep our immune systems functioning? Why do we have so many new autoimmune diseases here at the end of the century? Funny, those who want to process our foods to keep them safe for us rarely want to talk about the side effects of their treatments. Why don’t they tell us what heat, steam, caustic chemicals, radiation, and genetic manipulation do to the nutrients in the foods they adulterate for “safety sake”?

It scares me when I reflect on the similarities between the arguments presented for food safety by the meat industries and similar scientific and statistical “proof” presented for human health by establishment medicine. But the experts don’t have much to say about side effects, do they?

And these side effects of our “disease” and “food” industries may well be maiming and killing people!

Of course I’m not alone in objecting to bombarding any kind of food with radiation. "We're not big fans of irradiation," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety expert at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It raises environmental and worker safety issues, and strips nutrients and affects food taste,” she said.

But then one can always find some university expert who’ll argue the other side: "Some people still believe the stuff glows in the dark," Gary Smith, head of the Center for Red Meat Safety at Colorado State University, told a Reuter’s reporter on August 31. Beyond skeptical consumers, it would be a logistical feat to irradiate the some 13 billion pounds of hamburger Americans eat each year, he said, adding, "We've lost our sense of safety that people had 50 years ago. I'm very concerned that irradiation be seen as the magic bullet because the only magic bullet is to cook it and cook it until nothing survives."

In other words, Professor Smith, you want us to cremate our sirloin before putting it in our mouths, right? You want us to forget those happy days of telling the waitress when we order our 16-ounce T-bone steak, “Rare, ma’am, I want to hear that ole steak moo when I stick my fork in it.”

Beef! It’s what’s for dinner.

As long as you burn it to cinders before placing it on the dinner china.

“Heck,” some meat eater friend of Professor Smith’s might add, “so what if a few people get a belly ache once in a while? Big deal! Millions of us enjoy our meat at every meal. The beef industry has a great record of public safety. Shoot, we’re safer eating a burger than we are flying in an airplane. And you don’t get much safer than that.”

Not true.

According to a Reuter’s health story, foodborne illnesses sicken 33 million people each year and kill 9,000 in the United States alone. Scientists agree the worst foodborne bacteria may be E.coli:0157, first identified in 1982. It causes diarrhea, severe cramps, dehydration, and in some cases, kidney failure. E.coli bacteria appears naturally in the intestines of cattle. If intestinal material comes into contact with meat during processing, it can contaminate the meat. Researchers believe E.coli contamination arises during the slaughtering and packing process, when fecal matter from the intestines of cattle, where the bacteria naturally occurs, comes into contact with beef.

You probably think, as I used to during my flesh-eating days, that it would be rare for intestinal content to come into contact with the meat we eventually eat. If you’ve never given any thought to meat processing, and most of us don’t because we like to think our meat comes in nicely wrapped packages and not from some poor butchered cow, you probably assume the whole process is sterile and kind.

If you maintain that assumption, you’ve made a grave error.

Dave Gifford, a student at Trinity College, visited a slaughterhouse and wrote about his experience:

“I entered the kill shed through a short, tunnel-like hall through which I could see what I soon learned was the third butchering station. The kill shed consisted of one room in which a number of operations are performed by one or two of six butchers at four stations along the length of the room. In the kill shed there is also a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector who examines parts of every animal who goes through the kill shed.

“The first station is the killing station. It is worked by one man whose job is to herd the animal into the killing stall, slaughter him or her, and begin the butchering process. This stage of the process takes about ten minutes for each animal, and begins with the opening of a heavy steel door that separates the killing stall from the waiting chute. The man working this station must then go into a corridor adjacent to the waiting chute, and prod his next victim into the killing stall with a high-voltage electric cattle prod.

“This is the most time-consuming part of the operation because the cattle are fully aware of what lies ahead, and are determined not to enter the killing stall. The physical symptoms of terror were painfully evident on the faces of each and every animal I saw either in the actual killing stall or in the waiting chute.

“During the 40 seconds to a minute that each animal had to wait in the killing stall before losing consciousness, the terror became visibly more intense. The animal could smell the blood, and see his or her former companions in various stages of dismemberment. During the last few seconds of life, the animal thrashes about the stall as much as its confines allow.

“All four of the cows whose deaths I witnessed strained frantically, futilely, and pathetically towards the ceiling -- the only direction that was not blocked by a steel door. Death came in the form of a pneumatic nail gun that was placed against their heads and fired.”

Beef! It’s what’s for dinner.

Ever since I saw a black and white television documentary filmed entirely in a meat packing house, I’d been appalled by the idea of killing cows so I could eat the flesh from their dead bodies. Appalled, yes, but not enough to stop eating meat until five years ago. And even then I shamefully admit I didn’t do it for ethical reasons but for health reasons.

So I don’t throw stones at meat eaters since I belonged to their ranks for more than 40 years. But I’m ready to hurl boulders at the individuals currently producing the meat that goes down America’s throat every day.

Why?

The many horrors of the meat industry came together for me when I read a story by Michael Satchell and Stephen J. Hedges in the September 1 issue of U.S. News and World Report.

From this story and my other research, I realized that we had a new food chain in the United States.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I learned in school that rain feeds the grass which feeds the cattle who provide us with our meat and milk and cheese. I learned that we need plenty of fresh milk and good meat every day of our lives to build strong healthy bodies. I believed the truth of this simple story but chose, as most of us do, to not ask or think about how the meat got from the nice cow to the nice plate on my table.

Today, public relation campaigns and catchy slogans notwithstanding, we have a new food chain, which goes something like this: For reasons of efficiency and economics, many cattlemen feed their animals anything.

And I mean anything.

Satchell and Hedges tell us “Agricultural refuse such as corncobs, rice hulls, fruit and vegetable peelings, along with grain byproducts from retail production of baked goods, cereals, and beer, have long been used to fatten cattle.”

Okay. Since I don’t consume meat anyway that didn’t bother me too much, though I’d prefer to see cattle eating only natural foods like grains and grasses.

The authors continued, “In addition, some 40 billion pounds a year of slaughterhouse wastes like blood, bone, and viscera, as well as the remains of millions of euthanised cats and dogs passed along by veterinarians and animal shelters, are rendered annually into livestock feed--in the process turning cattle and hogs, which are natural herbivores, into unwitting carnivores.”

This information knocked me flat. Not wanting to believe it, I got on the Internet to seek confirmation. A few searches later, I realized that cattle have been eating the rendered remains of other cattle for years.

Many of America’s once proud cattlemen have not only turned herbivores into carnivores, but they’ve also turned their cows into cannibals!

Beef! It’s what’s for dinner.

You may not be familiar with the idea of “rendering” plants. I only recently educated myself about this dead animal and discarded flesh disposal industry. And yet rendering represents a mult-billion dollar business, and these facilities operate 24 hours a day just about everywhere in America, and they’ve been in operation for years. Funny that so few of us have ever heard of them...

Let’s take a look at an article entitled “The Dark Side of Recycling” from the Fall, 1990, Earth Island Journal to learn about rendering plants:

“The rendering plant floor is piled high with ’raw product’: thousands of dead dogs and cats; heads and hooves from cattle, sheep, pigs and horses; whole skunks; rats and raccoons --all waiting to be processed. In the 90-degree heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses.

“Two bandanna-masked men begin operating Bobcat mini-dozers, loading the ‘raw’ into a 10-foot-deep stainless-steel pit. They are undocumented workers from Mexico, doing a dirty job. A giant auger-grinder at the bottom of the pit begins to turn. Popping bones and squeezing flesh are sounds from a nightmare you will never forget.

“Rendering is the process of cooking raw animal material to remove the moisture and fat. The rendering plant works like a giant kitchen. The cooker, or ‘chef,’ blends the raw product in order to maintain a certain ratio between the carcasses of pets, livestock, poultry waste and supermarket rejects.

“Once the mass is cut into small pieces, it is transported to another auger for fine shredding. It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour. The continuous batch cooking process goes on non-stop 24 hours a day, seven days a week as meat is melted away from bones in the hot 'soup.’ During this cooking process, the soup produces a fat of yellow grease or tallow that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are sent to a hammermill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens sift out excess hair and large bone chips. Once the batch is finished, all that is left is yellow grease, meal and bone meal.

“As the American Journal of Veterinary Research explains, this recycled meat and bone meal is used as ‘a source of protein and other nutrients in the diets of poultry and swine and in pet foods, with lesser amounts used in the feed of cattle and sheep. Animal fat is also used in animal feeds as an energy source.’ Every day, hundreds of rendering plants across the United States truck millions of tons of this ‘food enhancer’ to poultry ranches, cattle feed-lots, dairy and hog farms, fish-feed plants and pet-food manufacturers where it is mixed with other ingredients to feed the billions of animals that meat-eating humans, in turn, will eat.

“Rendering plants have different specialties. The labeling designation of a particular ‘run’ of product is defined by the predominance of a specific animal. Some product-label names are: meat meal, meat by-products, poultry meal, poultry by-products, fish meal, fish oil, yellow grease, tallow, beef fat and chicken fat.

“Rendering plants perform one of the most valuable functions on Earth: they recycle used animals. Without rendering, our cities would run the risk of becoming filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and bacteria would spread uncontrolled through the population.

“Death is the number one commodity in a business where the demand for feed ingredients far exceeds the supply of raw product. But this elaborate system of food production through waste management has evolved into a recycling nightmare. Rendering plants are unavoidably processing toxic waste.

“The dead animals (the ‘raw’) are accompanied by a whole menu of unwanted ingredients. Pesticides enter the rendering process via poisoned livestock, and fish oil laced with bootleg DDT and other organophosphates that have accumulated in the bodies of West Coast mackerel and tuna.

“Because animals are frequently shoved into the pit with flea collars still attached organophosphate-containing insecticides get into the mix as well. The insecticide Dursban arrives in the form of cattle insecticide patches. Pharmaceuticals leak from antibiotics in livestock, and euthanasia drugs given to pets are also included. Heavy metals accumulate from a variety of sources: pet ID tags, surgical pins and needles.

“Even plastic winds up going into the pit. Unsold supermarket meats, chicken and fish arrive in styrofoam trays and shrink wrap. No one has time for the tedious chore of unwrapping thousands of rejected meat-packs. More plastic is added to the pits with the arrival of cattle ID tags, plastic insecticide patches and the green plastic bags containing pets from veterinarians.

“Skyrocketing labor costs are one of the economic factors forcing the corporate flesh-peddlers to cheat. It is far too costly for plant personnel to cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled T-bone steaks. Every week, millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering process and become one of the unwanted ingredients in animal feed.

“The most environmentally conscious state in the nation is California, where spot checks and testing of animal-feed ingredients happen at the wobbly rate of once every two-and-a-half months. The supervising state agency is the Department of Agriculture's Feed and Fertilizer Division of Compliance. Its main objective is to test for truth in labeling: does the percentage of protein, phosphorous and calcium match the rendering plant's claims; do the percentages meet state requirements? However, testing for pesticides and other toxins in animal feeds is incomplete.

“In California, eight field inspectors regulate a rendering industry that feeds the animals that the state's 30 million people eat. When it comes to rendering plants, however, state and federal agencies have maintained a hands-off policy, allowing the industry to become largely self-regulating. An article in the February 1990 issue of Render, the industry's national magazine, suggests that the self-regulation of certain contamination problems is not working.

“One policing program that is already off to a shaky start is the Salmonella Education/Reduction Program, formed under the auspices of the National Renderers Association. The magazine states that ‘...unless US and Canadian renderers get their heads out of the ground and demonstrate that they are serious about reducing the incidence of salmonella contamination in their animal protein meals, they are going to be faced with... new and overly stringent government regulations.’

“So far, the voluntary self-testing program is not working. According to the magazine, ‘...only about 20 per cent of the total number of companies producing or blending animal protein meal have signed up for the program...’ Far fewer have done the actual testing.

“The American Journal of Veterinary Research conducted an investigation into the persistence of sodium phenobarbital in the carcasses of euthanised animals at a typical rendering plant in 1985 and found ‘... virtually no degradation of the drug occurred during this conventional rendering process...’ and that ‘...the potential of other chemical contaminants (e.g., heavy metals, pesticides and environmental toxicants, which may cause massive herd mortalities) to degrade during conventional rendering needs further evaluation.’

“Renderers are the silent partners in our food chain. But worried insiders are beginning to talk, and one word that continues to come up in conversation is ‘pesticides.’ The possibility of petrochemically poisoning our food has become a reality. Government agencies and the industry itself are allowing toxins to be inadvertently recycled from the streets and supermarket shelves into the food chain. As we break into a new decade of increasingly complex pollution problems, we must rethink our place in the environment. No longer hunters, we are becoming the victims of our technologically altered food chain.

“The possibility of petrochemically poisoning our food has become a reality.”

-- ... (...@...com), December 25, 2000

Answers

This is heart rendering

-- (Nemesis@awol.com), December 25, 2000.

Seeing as this is your FIFTH post on this topic I think it's safe to say you've found something new to obsess over.

But don't worry, when you grow tired of this end-of-the-world topic I'm sure you'll find another one to take it's place.

-- nonehere (none@to.give.net), December 25, 2000.

Well --, ignore nowhere. Thanks for your posts. People still have their heads stuck in GW/AG/FSC-ETC. They virtually ignored my E. coli post a few days ago.

The purity of our food is a huge issue. Yes, toxic wastes are getting into animal feed from rendering plants. Hazardous chemicals are being mixed in fertilizers with no government regulation. E. coli is an issue for undercooked ground beef but is not a danger for whole cuts when the surface is braised.

The big scare is nvCJD which can only be killed by 800 degrees F. If it gets into a lab, it cannot be removed and will contaminate everything there.

-- Johnn Littmann (littmannj@aol.com), December 25, 2000.

Nice try PETA, but I belong to the branch here in Phoenix too.... People Eating Tasty Animals..... (hmmm, I sure could go for a whopper about now!)

-- People first (enough@ tree.huggers.anom), December 25, 2000.

That was actually physically painful. I had to stop reading several times to catch my breath

Have you ever felt ashamed to be a human? I have

-- cin (cin@cin.cin), December 25, 2000.

No, I must admit I've never been embarassed to be human.

I just think about the alternative. Imagine waking up and finding you were a Lima Bean. Now _that_ would be embarassing.

-- E.H.Porter (Just.Wondering@about.it), December 25, 2000.

“Have you ever felt ashamed to be a human?”

Nope! Not for a millisecond, never once, not ever.

Sometimes I’m ashamed for other humans.

-- Try (2B@better.person), December 26, 2000.