Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [163]
The current FDA feed rules are primarily concerned with efficiency and utility, not public health. They allow cattle to be fed pigs, pigs to be fed cattle, cattle to be fed poultry, and poultry to be fed cattle. They allow dogs and cats to be fed dogs and cats. Although leading American manufacturers promise never to put rendered pets into their pet food, it is still legal to do so. A Canadian company, Sanimal Inc., was putting 40,000 pounds of dead dogs and dead cats into its dog and cat food every week, until discontinuing the practice in June, 2001. “This food is healthy and good,” said the company’s vice president of procurement, responding to critics, “but some people don’t like to see meat meal that contains any pets.”
Perhaps the most effective action taken by the federal government to prevent the introduction of BSE to the United States — a 1989 ban on imports of livestock and feed from Great Britain — was the one action that threatened no economic harm to the American meat industry. The ban on imports, like any protectionist measure, helped American producers. But a strict FDA prohibition of all animal protein in animal feeds would reduce some of the profit that American agribusiness firms can derive from vertical integration. At the moment, the most common source of animal protein in poultry feed isn’t hogs or cattle. It’s poultry. Tyson Foods takes leftover chicken meat and skin and intestines from its poultry slaughterhouses, ships them to Tyson feed plants, adds them to chicken feed, and then provides the feed to Tyson growers, so that baby chicks can eat their ancestors. The Tyson feed mill in Buzzard Bluff, Arkansas, processes about 10 million pounds of chicken parts every week.
The mad cow epidemic has greatly reduced beef consumption in Europe and Japan, devastating farmers who raise cattle. Livestock practices that once seemed to be cost-efficient turned out to be disastrously inefficient. Feelings of anger and betrayal among consumers have prompted a fundamental reappraisal of agricultural policies. Food safety, animal welfare, and environmental concerns are gaining precedence over the traditional agribusiness emphasis on production levels. The Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Austria are seeking basic, structural changes in how European food is produced. Even Great Britain now seems to be questioning its reliance on high-volume, industrialized farming. For years the Labour government of Tony Blair had forged close ties with leading food processing, supermarket, and fast food companies. Blair’s handling of the foot-and-mouth epidemic seemed more influenced by the export needs of Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, than by the latest scientific evidence on the efficacy of vaccines. His unapologetic defense of a £15,000 political donation from the McDonald’s Corporation prompted critics to call the majority party “McLabour.” His appointee to serve as Rural Recovery Coordinator, Chris Haskins, headed a large food processing firm, ran a dairy that supplied the milk for McDonald’s milkshakes, and publicly belittled the prospects for small farms and organic agriculture. Nevertheless, even Lord Haskins proposed a shift of EU agricultural policy in October of 2001, arguing that subsidies should be awarded to farms whose production methods do not harm the environment.
The German government has taken the lead on this issue in the EU, calling for the de-industrialization of agriculture and planning to make 20 percent of its farmland organic by