Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [117]
Really, We’re Not Mad
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Cows must have some friends in high places. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary. Apparently it is more important to protect the cows than the people eating them. Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.
One serious disease related to our friends the cows has emerged in the past twenty years: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or so-called mad cow disease. Mad cow, and its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are invariably fatal for both cows and humans. Unfortunately, tracking mad cow is complicated by the fact that it frequently incubates for years in the victim. The disease became infamous during the 1980s outbreak in England, where more than 150 humans died from eating BSE beef, and thousands of cattle were destroyed. A tiny malformed protein called a prion is the BSE culprit. The prions cause other proteins in the victim to rearrange into their unusual shape, and destroy tissue. Prions confine their activities to the nervous system, where they cause death. How do cows contract prions? Apparently from eating other cows. What? Yes, dead cow meat gets mixed into their feed, imposing cannibalism onto their lifestyle. It’s a way to get a little more mileage from the byproducts of the slaughterhouse.
An appropriate response would be to stop this, which the British did. They also began testing 100 percent of cows over two years old at slaughter for BSE, and removing all “downer” cows (cows unable to walk on their own) from the food supply. As a result, the U.K. virtually eradicated BSE in two years. Reasonably enough, Japan implemented the same policies.
In the United States, the response has been somewhat different. U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows. Since prions aren’t destroyed by extreme heat or any known drug, they readily survive this food-chain loop-de-loop. Cow blood (yum) may also be dinner for other cows and calves, and restaurant plate wastes can also be served.
After the first detected case of U.S. mad cow disease, fifty-two countries banned U.S. beef. The USDA then required 2 percent of all the downer cows to be tested, and 1 percent of all cows that were slaughtered. After that, the number of downer cows reported in the United States decreased by 20 percent (did I mention it was voluntary reporting?), and only two more cases of BSE were detected. In May 2006, the USDA decided the threat was so low that only one-tenth of one percent of all slaughtered cows needed to be tested. Jean Halloran, the food policy initiatives director at Consumers Union, responded, “It approaches a policy of don’t look, don’t find.”
How can consumers respond to this? Can we seek out beef tested as BSE-free by the meat packers? No. One company tried to test all its beef, but the USDA declared that illegal (possibly to protect any BSE cows from embarrassment). Would I suggest a beef boycott? Heavens, no; cows are our friends (plus, I believe that would be illegal). But it might be worth remembering this: not a single case of BSE, anywhere, has ever turned up in cattle that were raised and finished on pasture grass or organic feed. As for the other 99 percent of beef in the United States, my recommendation would