Beef really is made with chicken s#*t

Beef really is made with chicken s#*t

Tom Philpott
Grist
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:23 EST


What the hell are you feeding us?

Agricultural societies, I imagine, have always fed waste products to livestock. On diversified farms, pigs and chickens get lots of kitchen scraps and "culls" - produce that can't be sold. And it's worthwhile to keep cows around if you have access to pasture - cows convert a wild, low-input perennial crop (grass), which humans can't digest, into highly nutritious beef and milk.

But as agriculture industrialized, the waste products that farmers serve to farm animals have industrialized, too. Before the rise of massive facilities that house thousands of chickens and vast feedlots that confine thousands of cows, I doubt anyone thought of feeding "chicken litter" - feces mixed with bedding, feathers, and uneaten feed - to cows. Chicken litter was a valuable fertilizer; it added not just nitrogen and other nutrients to soil, but also plenty of organic matter.

But with the rise of industrial chicken production, farms produced way too much litter to be absorbed by nearby land (not that they don't often severely overload the land around them).

So what was once a resource has become a waste problem - and one solution has been to feed chicken litter to cows. Cows consume between 1 million and 2 million tons of chicken waste per year - and then we consume those cows This is a vile practice that should be banned. Here's how Consumers Union describes the quality of chicken litter as cow feed:

Poultry litter consists primarily of manure, feathers, spilled feed and bedding material that accumulate on the floors of the buildings that house chickens and turkeys. It can contain disease-causing bacteria, antibiotics, toxic heavy metals, restricted feed ingredients including meat and bone meal from dead cattle, and even foreign objects such as dead rodents, rocks, nails and glass. Few of these hazards are eliminated by any processing that might occur before use as feed. The resulting health threats include the spread of mad cow disease and related human neurological diseases, the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the potential for exposure to toxic metals, drug residues, and disease-causing bacteria.

That description reminds us that the regulation of livestock feed is pretty minimal.

As I've reported before, feedlot operators are feeding cows more and more distillers grains - waste from the corn-ethanol process - even though regulators acknowledge that the practice seems to encourage the growth of the deadly-to-humans pathogen E coli 0157. Distillers grains are also loaded with antibiotic residues and various industrial chemicals.

Given that food-safety authorities are only too willing to let filthy industrial waste be fed to the animals that we eventually eat - and overlook clear evidence of health consequences in the process - no one should be surprised that the biodiesel industry is jonesing for a piece of the livestock-feed market. The main industrial waste product from biodiesel is glycerin, a substance often used in cosmetics. As biodiesel production ramps up, the industry is churning out much more of the stuff than it can sell to the cosmetic industry.

And even when biodiesel producers can sell their glycerin for that purpose, the stuff first must be purified - an energy-intensive and expensive process. Often, biodiesel plants spend more purifying glycerin than they get back in sales. So there's a huge glut, and the industry is looking for a place to profitably dump a bunch of unpurified glycerin. Can anyone guess not what comes next?

Get this, from Farm & Ranch Guide:

Crude glycerin can be purified for use in human products such as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and a variety of food items. Purification of crude glycerin is a costly and energy-intensive procedure; therefore, glycerin intended for livestock consumption is normally not purified.

Yes, glycerin is now flowing from biodiesel factories to feedlots, without being purified in between.

I have no idea if cows fed on industrial glycerin suffer ill health effects. Nor, I'd wager, do food-safety authorities. But if evidence of such effects arises, we have no reason to think that authorities will intervene to stop the practice.

Enough tainted burger to infect the whole Mexico City

Last time the ol' Meat Wagon got cranked up, California-based Huntington Meat Pack had recalled 860,000 pounds of ground beef laced with e. coli 0157. That was enough tainted product, we calculated at the time, to make the equivalent of 3.56 million Quarter Pounders. Whoa.

But it turns out that. like a certain car maker, Huntington didn't cast its recall net quite wide enough. From a USDA press release:

Huntington Meat Packing Inc., a Montebello, Calif., establishment, is expanding its recall of January 18 to include approximately 4.9 million additional pounds of beef and veal products that were not produced in accordance with the company's food safety plan. The products are adulterated because the company made the products under insanitary conditions failing to take the steps it had determined were necessary to produce safe products, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.

Damn: an additional 4.9 million pounds, produced "under insanitary conditions." According to our proprietary mathematical models, that's enough dodgy beef to make 19.6 million Quarter Pounders. The two recalls combine for a grand total of 24.5 million Quarter Pounders, or enough to (potentially) sicken every man, woman, and child in Mexico City - with a few million burgers left over for suburbanites. (Attention meat industry: this is not an invitation to dump recalled meat on foreign markets!)

The scale is colossal, jaw-dropping; the big numbers had Meat Wagon's trusty IBM mainframe sending out smoke signals.

And it gets worse; there could literally be foul play involved. Back to the press release:

The recall was expanded based on evidence collected in an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) with assistance from FSIS. This evidence shows that the products subject to this recall expansion were produced in a manner that did not follow the establishment's Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan. A HACCP plan describes the process controls an establishment must take to prevent food safety hazards and create a safe and wholesome product. The investigation has uncovered evidence to show that the food safety records of the establishment cannot be relied upon to document compliance with the requirements. Therefore, FSIS must consider the products to be adulterated and has acted to remove the products from commerce.

I hope this means that the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which oversees the meat industry on safety issues, is finally growing a set of ...uh, teeth. Not long ago, the Obama administration finally named and FSIS director, after dawdling for a year. Last week, the agency ramped up its amazingly lax standards around the safety of meat served in schools. As Tom Laskawy out it, let's hope these are "the seeds, and not the crumbs, of change."

Here's a litmus test: how about banning the dumping of disgusting industrial waste products in animal feed, like chicken litter and distillers grains?

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Distillers grains are also loaded with antibiotic residues and various industrial chemicals.

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Health & Wellness

Banned in 160 Nations... Yet U.S. FDA Regards it as Safe?


Dr. Mercola
Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:37 EST

A livestock drug banned in 160 nations and responsible for hyperactivity, muscle breakdown and 10 percent mortality in pigs has been approved by the FDA.

The beta agonist ractopamine, a repartitioning agent that increases protein synthesis, was recruited for livestock use when researchers found the drug, used in asthma, made mice more muscular.

Ractopamine is started as the animal nears slaughter.

How does a drug marked, "Not for use in humans. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask" become "safe" in human food? With no washout period?

The drug is banned in Europe, Taiwan and China, and more than 1,700 people have been "poisoned" from eating pigs fed the drug since 1998, but ractopamine is used in 45 percent of U.S. pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle.

Sources:

AlterNet February 2, 2010

Dr. Mercola's Comments

Ractopamine, aka Paylean and Optaflexx, is banned in 160 countries, including Europe, Taiwan and China. If imported meat is found to contain traces of the drug, it is turned away, while fines and imprisonment result for its use in banned countries.

Yet, in the United States 45 percent of pigs, 30 percent of ration-fed cattle, and an unknown percentage of turkeys are pumped full of this drug in the days leading up to slaughter.

Why?

This drug, manufactured by Elanco Animal Health, increases protein synthesis. In other words, it makes animals more muscular ... and this increases food growers' bottom line.

Adding insult to injury, up to 20 percent of ractopamine remains in the meat you buy from the supermarket, according to veterinarian Michael W. Fox. Yet this drug is marked "Not for use in humans," and is known to increase death and disability in livestock.

Why is Ractopamine Allowed in U.S. Meat?

While other drugs require a clearance period of around two weeks to help ensure the compounds are flushed from the meat prior to slaughter (and therefore reduce residues leftover for human consumption), there is no clearance period for ractopamine.

In fact, food growers intentionally use the drug in the last days before slaughter in order to increase its effectiveness.

"How does a drug marked, "Not for use in humans. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask" become "safe" in human food? With no washout period?" asks columnist Martha Rosenberg.

She answers:
"The same way Elanco's other two blockbusters, Stilbosol (diethylstilbestrol or DES), now withdrawn, and Posilac or bovine growth hormone (rBST), bought from Monsanto in 2008, became part of the nation's food supply: shameless corporate lobbying.

A third of meetings on the Food Safety and Inspection Service's public calendar in January 2009 were with Elanco, a division of Eli Lilly -- or about ractopamine."
Massive Industry Lobbying Gets Agribusiness What it Wants ...
at Your Expense

Industrial agriculture lobbyists wield incredible power in Congress, and the fact that ractopamine is in U.S. meat is a shining testimony to this.

Time magazine put it quite well when they described current farm policy as "a welfare program for the megafarms that use the most fuel, water and pesticides; emit the most greenhouse gases; grow the most fattening crops; hire the most illegals; and depopulate rural America."

There are too many conflicts of interest to name, but, for example, you may be surprised to learn that former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack is now the Secretary of Agriculture, an appointment that took place despite massive public outcry.

What was needed for an effective Secretary of Agriculture was someone who would develop and implement a plan that promotes family-scale farming and a safe and nutritious food system with a sustainable and organic vision.

What we got was yet another politician who's already made room in his bed for the industry lobby. Overall, Vilsack's record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms (the ones that use chemicals like ractopamine) and promoting animal cloning.

Cozy Connections Allowed rbGH Hormones in Your Dairy Products, Too

Michael Taylor, a former vice president of public policy and chief lobbyist at Monsanto Company, is now the senior advisor for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Who is Michael Taylor?

He is the person who not only "oversaw the creation of GMO policy," according to Jeffrey Smith, the leading spokesperson on the dangers of GM foods, but also oversaw the policy regarding Monsanto's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rbGH/rbST).

This growth hormone, which has been banned in Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand because of cancer risks and other health concerns, was approved in the United States while Taylor was in charge at the FDA. Smith writes:
"Taylor also determined that milk from injected cows did not require any special labeling. And as a gift to his future employer Monsanto, he wrote a white paper suggesting that if companies ever had the audacity to label their products as not using rbGH, they should also include a disclaimer stating that according to the FDA, there is no difference between milk from treated and untreated cows."
Taylor's white paper, which again was untrue as even FDA scientists acknowledged differences in the rbGH milk, allowed Monsanto to sue dairies that labeled their products rbGH-free!

In a similar vain, the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine's Office of Surveillance and Compliance sent a 14-page warning letter to Elanco regarding ractopamine three years after its approval for use in pigs. They accused the company of withholding information about "safety and effectiveness" and "adverse animal drug experiences."

Nonetheless, the next year the FDA decided to approved ractopamine for use in cattle, too, and later for turkeys as well.

What Should You do if You Don't Want Drugs and Chemicals in Your Food?

As the U.S. agriculture industry now stands, antibiotics, pesticides, GM ingredients, hormones and countless other drugs are fair game in your food. So if you purchase your food from a typical supermarket, you are taking your chances that your food is teeming with chemicals and drugs -- even those that have been banned in other countries.

So please do your health a favor and support the small family farms in your area. You'll receive nutritious food from a source that you can trust, and you'll be supporting the honest work of a real family farm.

It all boils down to this: if you want to optimize your health, you must return to the basics of healthy food choices. Put your focus on WHOLE foods - foods that have not been processed or altered from their original state - food that has been grown or raised as nature intended, without the use of chemical additives, drugs, hormones, pesticides and fertilizers.

It's as simple as that!

It is not nearly as daunting a task as it may seem to find a local farmer that can supply your family with healthy, humanely raised animal products and produce. At LocalHarvest.org, for instance, you can enter your zip code and find farmers' markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area, all with the click of a button.

Once you make the switch from supermarket to local farmer, the choice will seem natural, and you can have peace of mind that the food you're feeding your family is safe.

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