This is why I have stopped eating hamburgers.
The New York Times reports that the FDA has proposed new rules on animal feed:
The Food and Drug Administration proposed new rules yesterday to prevent the spread of mad cow disease by banning brains and spinal cords from older cows in all animal feed.
“What?!” you say, half-chewed nuggets of ground beef falling from your lips. “There are digested brains and spinal cords in my Big Mac?”
Well, yes. But wait — there’s more:
But the rules are not as strict as those the agency proposed last year and never adopted, and critics promptly denounced them as inadequate.
The new proposal still allows chickens, pigs and other noncattle animals to be fed material that some scientists consider potentially infectious, including the brains and spinal cords of young animals, and the eyes, tonsils, intestines and nerves of older ones.
Cows can potentially ingest that material because they can be given chicken feed and droppings swept up from the floors of poultry farms, scrapings from restaurant plates, and a calf milk replacement made from cow blood and fat. In the rules proposed in early 2004, poultry litter and plate waste would have been banned.
Eyes? Tonsils? Intestines? Nerves? Droppings? Put that on a bun and eat it — if you haven’t already.
None of this is news if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s excellent Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. In that book, Schlosser exposes everything you never wanted to know about the fast food industry, and were afraid to ask.
A constant theme running throughout Schlosser’s book is that the fast food industry and its Washington lobbyists have succeeded in gutting or removing many safety regulations in the United States.
If you’re wondering who, in their right mind, would sanction the feeding of animal brains, guts, and turds to animals whose stomachs were made to digest grass, or why they would want to do so, the Times article provides the answer:
Getting rid of the vertebrae, spines, spinal nerves, eyes, intestines and other potentially infectious parts of all cattle - including the meat that nerves remain attached to - would create more than two billion pounds of waste, which he said would be an environmental problem
and a big expense for the industry.
[snip]
A slaughterhouse can split a fresh carcass and vacuum out the soft brain and spinal cord, he said, but renderers pick up animals that are bloated or in rigor mortis. The extra costs of removing organs “may take away the economic incentive,” he said, “and carcasses will be disposed of illegally.”
It’s all about the profit margin. Never mind the health of the American consumer. And never mind accountability — since Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human form of mad cow disease) can have an incubation period of up to thirty years, none of the people making these decisions will have to face the consequences of their actions. Instead, like the massive national debt that Bush has piled up, this burden will fall on our children, and our children’s children.
Deregulation has long been a central platform of the Republican party — conservatives argue that private industry suffers when the government imposes rules upon it. But the FDA’s latest attempt to regulate the meatpacking industry in the face of a potential public health crisis reminds us that, left to themselves, businesses will always take the easiest path, regardless of the human consequences.
If you’re surprised by the current Bush administration’s blatant cronyism, and tendency to put the fox in charge of the henhouse, you shouldn’t be — as Schlosser notes, it’s a longstanding Republican practice:
During the 1980s, as the risks of widespread contamination increased, the meatpacking industry blocked the use of microbial testing the federal meat inspection program.
[snip]
Nevertheless, the Reagan and Bush administrations cut spending on public health measures and staffed the U.S. Department of Agriculture with officials far more interested in government deregulation than in food safety. The USDA became largely indistinguishable from the industries it was meant to police. President Reagan’s first secretary of agriculture was in the hog business. His second was the president of the American Meat Institute (formerly known as the American Meat Packers Association). And his choice to run the USDA’s Food Marketing and Inspection Service was a vice president of the National Cattleman’s Association. President Bush later appointed the president of the National Cattleman’s Association to the job.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. What most unites George W. Bush’s two Supreme Court nominees are their connections to corporations — John Roberts’ long list of corporate clients included the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and The Dallas Morning News calls Harriet Miers “the quintessential corporate lawyer.”
Like FloridaExGOP, I think the underlying message of both nominations is “It’s corporate rights, stupid.”
If these two nominees turn out to be Bush’s most longstanding legacy, we can look forward to a continued agenda of corporate deregulation.
And if I ever return to Burger King, which encourages customers to “Have it Your Way,” I’ll be sure to ask them to hold the tonsils and eyeballs.
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