Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [154]
Consumer groups and public health officials wanted strict controls on what livestock could be fed. The Consumers Union demanded a total ban on the feeding of “all mammal remains to all food animals.” Such a ban was now being imposed in Great Britain; scientists there had demonstrated in 1990 that pigs could be infected, through injection, with a variant of mad cow disease. Moreover, a British ban on the feeding of ruminants (goats, sheep, cattle, elk, deer) to other ruminants had not been entirely successful at halting the spread of BSE. Prohibited material intended for poultry and hogs had, one way or another, still wound up being fed to cattle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that, at a bare minimum, the feeding of ruminants to ruminants had to be outlawed in order to prevent an outbreak of BSE.
On August 4, 1997, almost a year and a half after the FDA promised a speedy response to the threat of mad cow, new animal-feed restrictions took effect. “The United States has no BSE,” the agency declared, “and the final rule provides the necessary feed controls… should BSE occur here.” The FDA described its new ban as “mammalian-to-ruminant, with exceptions.’ Dead sheep, goats, cattle, deer, mink, elk, dogs and cats could no longer be fed to cattle. Rendering plants and feed mills would have to prevent these banned ingredients from mingling with feedstuffs that cattle were still allowed to eat: dead horses, pigs, and poultry; cattle blood, gelatin, and tallow; and plate waste collected from restaurants, regardless of what kind of meat those leftovers contained. Extensive records had to be kept on the disposition of various animal proteins, and feeds that were now prohibited for cattle had to be clearly labeled as such. There were no new restrictions, however, on what could be fed to poultry, hogs, zoo animals, or pets. Indeed, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the National Food Processors Association, and the Pet Food Institute successfully lobbied against any new labeling requirement for pet foods. These industry groups rightly worried that the FDA’s proposed warning label — “Do not feed to ruminants” — might alarm consumers about what their pets were actually being fed.
The dire predictions of the meat, feed, and rendering industries — their claims that new FDA rules would create havoc and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars — proved unfounded. Cattle remains that had previously been fed to cattle were instead fed to pets, hogs, and poultry. Aside from slightly higher transportation costs, the new feed restrictions had a negligible economic effect. One rendering industry supplier told Meat Marketing & Technology magazine that the whole rule-making process had proven to be “a remarkable example of cooperation between the industry and the FDA.” That cooperation, another rendering executive said, had “protected the beef industry and the rendering industry” without creating “a mood in the country that recycled protein ingredients would be harmful.” The trade journal noted that some of the wording of the new FDA rules had been taken “verbatim” from the rendering industry’s own recommendations.
In the United States, mad cow gradually receded from the headlines — until January, 2001. For