Currently browsing posts about: Meat

The New York Times reports that the company selling contaminated ground beef responsible for killing two people and making 500 others sick, “stopped testing its ingredients years ago under pressure from beef suppliers.”

Recall that since 1994, the USDA bans E. coli 0157:H7 in ground meat.  It encourages, but does not require, meat companies to test for the pathogen. Why don’t they test?  Because they don’t have to.

If they did test, they might find toxic E. coli and have to cook or destroy the meat.  As the Times reported in depth last month, Testing puts meat companies in “a regulatory situation.”  As one food safety officer put it, slaughterhouses do not want his packing company to test for pathogens: “one, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.”

Instead of requiring safety testing, the USDA uses a “restrained approach.”  As Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, told the Times, USDA has the power to require testing but doesn’t use it because it has to take the companies’ needs into consideration: “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health.”

The moral?  Meat companies will only produce meat safely if forced to.  As we saw yesterday, oyster companies will only produce safe oysters if they have to.  That’s why we need a food safety system in which all foods have to be produced safely.  What will it take to get Congress to act?

If only meat were just a food and not the flash point for concerns about health, climate change, and tax policy.  But it looms large in all such debates.

According to reports, meat is linked not only with a higher rate of cancer but also with type 2 diabetes.   Does this make logical sense?  It could, especially if meat eaters take in more calories and are fatter than non-meat eaters.

We’ve heard so much lately about how farm animals contribute to environmental problems and climate change, but Nicolette Hahn Niman writes in the New York Times of “the carnivore’s dilemma.”  It’s not the animals themselves that contribute to climate change, it’s the industrial methods of raising them that are the problem.  She ought to know.  She and Bill Niman run the free-range ranch in Bolinas, California highlighted in Time magazine last August.

On the other hand, Princeton professor and ethicist Peter Singer argues in the New York Daily News that meat is so bad for health and the environment that it ought to be taxed.

How to deal with all of this?  Push for more humanely and sustainably raised farm animal production, dont’ eat meat if you choose not to, and if you do eat meat, just don’t eat too much of it.

Update, November 4: I forgot to include Jonathan Safran Foer’s piece in the New York Times magazine on why he is against meat.

A new study from the Archives of Internal Medicine says yes.  People who eat the most red meat have a 20% to 30% increased risk of premature mortality.  In an accompanying editorial, Barry Popkin points out additional reasons to consider eating less meat: food prices, the environment, and climate change.

The Associated Press and the Washington Post have much to say about this study.

And here’s the meat industry’s reaction.

In case you were wondering how come Bill Niman is no longer associated with Niman Ranch meats, yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle explains the whole sad story, one framed by the writer as a matter of idealism vs. economic realities.

Perhaps coincidentally, Nicolette Hahn Niman’s new book,  Righteous Porkchop, is just out.  This is a thoughtful and affecting memoir of her version of the events–her background as an activist lawyer, her romance with Bill, and their work together.  I blurbed it, pointing out that it should establish her as an independent national voice for efforts to reform industrial animal production.

I also blurbed Betty Fussell’s entertainingly researched cultural history of American beef, Raising Steaks. If you want to know what the fuss about humanely and sustainably raised meat is about, these books are a great starting point.

The USDA has finally posted its rules for health claims on meats in the January 16 Federal Register. After dealing with the 44,000 or so comments it received on the issue, the USDA defines what “naturally raised” means for meat and livestock.  In sum: no growth promoters, antibiotics, animal by-products, or fish by-products. This is a voluntary standard, but should help.

The effects of agriculture on climate change are not something I’ve written much about, mainly because I don’t know how to evaluate the assumptions involved in assessing the effects.   Different assumptions lead to different conclusions.  But if we are going to develop agricultural systems that are truly sustainable, they will have to keep greenhouse gas emissions to a minimum.  Yesterday’s New York Times lays out the issues pretty well.  If its analysis is correct, we all need to be eating a lot less meat.  In any case, this seems like a good place to start the conversation.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has launched a new website on overuse of antibiotics in industrial production of farm animals.  It summarizes and references four aspects of the antibiotic problem: the problem itself, the threat to human health, and actions needed to improve oversight and legislation.  A good resource!  And it links to the report on industrial animal agriculture production done by a committee of which I was a member.  Use and enjoy!

Update, June 10: Now the protests have grown to 70,000 people and the entire South Korean cabinet has offered to resign–all because it agreed to accept U.S. beef, which all those people believe is tainted with mad cow disease.