What’s my beef with meat?

Here I go again.  You may be wondering, perhaps with increasing irritability, why I keep posting about meat.  Short version: The bottomless American appetite for cheap and abundant meat is starving much of the world and contributing to global environmental destruction.  And the economies of scale that yield cheap meat are based on warehousing and slaughtering methods that are cruel and abusive to living animals, and that endanger our food supply.

If you prefer a longer version of the story, go read these links:

• Carnivores Like Us (the source of that great photo above)  (Aside: I follow this stuff fairly closely, but was stunned to read in a sidebar in ”Carnivores Like Us” that “70% of the total antibiotics consumed in the US are used to enhance growth and promote weight gain in livestock.”)
• Face it, we aren’t all going to become vegetarians
• Bad Cow Disease
• Health Risks Outweight Farming Cost Cuts

If you don’t want to think about ethics or economy at all, but still want to reduce your meat consumption, perhaps just for health reasons, read Mark Bittman’s tips, “Putting Meat in its Place.”

And if you prefer the cartoon version of this whole discussion, check out the Simpson’s episode, “Apocalypse Cow,” free on Hulu.  (Deep and grateful bow to The Ethicurean for calling that to our attention.  If you have any interest at all in food ethics and economics, you should be reading that blog.)

Open season on wolves

Many apologies for the long, dry spells around here! It’s a pretty nutty semester. Nutty enough that I barely registered the delisting of Gray Wolves from the Endangered Species List until a week after it happened. And during that first week, 10 wolves were shot in Wyoming alone - and the number had risen to 13 after 10 days. I wonder how many will be gone by Earth Day (Saturday)? How many “fierce, green fires” snuffed?

Oh, so many directions to direct a rant — toward a grotesquely oversubsidized western ranching industry that gets government assistance to extirpate top predators and wreak further havoc with our dwindling biodiversity, toward the the nearly-irrational hatreds and suspicions directed at individuals who wish to protect the nation’s wildlife, toward an Administration hell-bent on crippling the Endangered Species Act and every creature it protects (OK, that’s an easy choice)…

If you haven’t read Barry Lopez’s classic, Of Wolves and Men, treat yourself.

(Image to the right is St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio.  Story here.)

On a peripheral note, the Bushies will be suspending 30 or more environmental laws in order to complete work on The Fence this year.  What does a Homeland Security Fence have to do with the environment?  More than you probably realize.

Just as Bush is unilaterally dismantling the Endangered Species Act (yep, that’s the same link as above - in case you skipped it!), he is trying to “disappear” the EPA (that link will probably change next month, so I’ll quote one passage at length):

“Meat Out”

Late note: I started this post several weeks ago when the news broke, but forgot to finish it! So I’m finishing the thoughts and putting it up in honor of Meat Out day.

The HSUS investigation into abuses of cattle and protocol at the Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse has now led to the largest beef recall in the United States — 143 million pounds.

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.

“Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall,” Schafer said in a statement.

They say 37 million pounds went to the National School Lunch Program, and that most of the meat has probably been eaten. (So what’s the point of the recall?) And here’s the thing: this is just one processing facility, and it happened to get caught - thanks to an undercover investigator. Just how widespread and longstanding might these practices be? Notes Anna Lappe’:

This incident — including the abuse and questionable food safety of the meat from this slaughterhouse — is not just a case of a few bad apples. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system in which animal abuse and health concerns are predictable by-products of following the prime directive — maximizing profit — in a context of inadequate oversight.

The brutality captured in the video may be particularly extreme, but the nature of slaughterhouse’s ramped-up production inexorably leads to such animal suffering. With pressure to keep lines moving fast, for example, workers often fail to completely stun animals, so that cows can be conscious during slaughter. And those production levels? They’re soaring. Tyson, the largest processor in the country, slaughters 222,000 head of cattle a week, the equivalent of 1,321 an hour, seven days a week.

This high-octane production threatens eaters’ health, too. Under such conditions, meat can become tainted with fecal matter, increasing the likelihood of contamination with the potentially deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacteria. Since April 2007, concerns about E. coli instigated recalls of at least 30 million pounds of beef — enough to have provided a burger to every man, woman, and child in the nation. With this week’s recall, add another four for each of us.

As long as we’re on the subject…

This story was bad enough that even the networks couldn’t really ignore it and the USDA has begun an investigation.  An investigator working for the Humane Society of the United States took a job at the Hallmark Meat Packing plant in Chino, CA and proceeded to document horrifying routine practices that include dragging sick cattle with chains, prodding them with fork lifts, spraying high-powered streams of water up their nostrils and shocking them, all to get them standing up long enough to pass USDA inspection for slaughter.  (What USDA inspector is “fooled” by this, and how much does he/she get paid under the table?)  “Downer” cattle are not allowed into the food supply, just in case they carry Mad Cow Disease.  Hallmark sells meat to Westland Meat Company, which sells meat to the national school lunch program.  That, more than the blatant abuse, is what has most people in a tizzy.  But hopefully, these awful images will start to bother folks who don’t usually spend much time thinking about how cows turn into hamburgers.

(Another great portrait by Jordan McClement. Click on this thumbnail for a higher-resolution version.)

As long as I’m ruining your appetite, read this feature from last month’s Mother Earth News, explaining how globalized industrial poultry farming - not migratory birds! - has increased the threat of avian flu:

The globalization of this Westernized industrial model of poultry production has not only facilitated the spread of deadly viruses like H5N1, but also plays a role in their emergence in the first place. After all, people have been raising birds in their back yards for thousands of years and birds have been migrating for millions. Only in recent years have we seen an exponential increase in the number of outbreaks of highly pathogenic (disease-causing) strains of bird flu. As leading flu scientist Ilaria Capua remarked, “We’ve gone from a few snowflakes to an avalanche.”

The world’s foremost expert on bird flu, Robert Webster, director of the U.S. Collaborating Center of the World Health Organization, was asked by the senior correspondent of the TV show “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” to identify the “change in conditions that suddenly lit a match to the tinder” — in other words, what started the avalanche. Dr. Webster replied:

“Farming practices have changed. Previously, we had backyard poultry. I grew up on a farm in New Zealand. We had a few backyard chickens and ducks. The next door neighbor was so far away it didn’t matter. Now we put millions of chickens into a chicken factory next door to a pig factory, and this virus has the opportunity to get into one of these chicken factories and make billions and billions of these mutations continuously. And so what we’ve changed is the way we raise animals.”

Meat guzzling

Coincidental to my dairy musings yesterday is today’s NYT feature on the impending “sea change” in the economics of meat consumption. It’s a very good piece; I hope you’ll look at the whole thing, but here’s a “meaty” excerpt:

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

Getting real about what we eat

This morning I took a class on vegan cooking taught by Colleen Patrick-Goodreau. The class was entertaining and educational, and I came home with some great recipes and renewed vegan aspirations. The Better Half and I are vegetarians aiming for veganism, but have yet to successfully divorce ourselves from dairy products and eggs. We’ve been trying to strike “compassionate” and low-impact compromises by purchasing milk from the fabulous and relatively local Straus Family Creamery and hunting down eggs from cage-free, organic, veggie-feeding producers. But it’s kind of a cheesy compromise, if you’ll pardon the pun. I wrote to at least one of the egg producers we’ve tried, to ask whether and how they monitor conditions in their suppliers’ facilities, and received no answer. The devil is undoubtedly in the details.

I had known for awhile about the practice of debeaking chickens in factory farms. But only a year or so ago I learned that millions - yes, that’s millions - of male chicks are routinely ground into animal feed or conveyor-belted directly into dumpsters (where they are crushed or otherwise suffocated). This is because industrial egg producers have little use for males - males are not egg-layers, you don’t need many roosters to fertilize hundreds or even thousands of hens, and the male birds haven’t been genetically engineered to be good “meat” chickens. But the dang things keep hatching! And our demand for cheap eggs insures that this practice will continue - unless we vote with our dollars and show that we’re willing to pay a couple bucks more for humanely farmed eggs.