Fri, 09 Sep 2005

Food Safety

I got a writeback on this post from yesterday from Kathryn, who asks, "What is safe to eat anymore, in terms of animal consumption? I'm serious. Between mad cow and bird flu, I'm getting scared. If you felt like posting on this ..." And indeed, this is important enough to move to the 'top of the blog', so to speak, and so, here we are.

First off, bird flu. This is not an issue with eating chicken or poultry, it's an issue of having chicken or poultry to eat, and avoiding the disease yourself! Avian flu is mutating into forms that are directly communicable to humans by air transmission - in short, breath the same air a chicken (or an infected human) breathes, and you can potentially get it. Just like the "real" flu - which is what this is a variant of.

Industrial methods and modern breeding have made chickens incredibly disease prone - and at this point, with avian flu moving into migratory waterfowl populations, we're pretty much powerless to prevent the oncoming pandemic. In short, a supermarket chicken won't give you bird flu when you eat it, it'll pass it on when it's still alive and breathing. Which it won't be, for long, once the grower realizes it's got it. Which will lead, inevitably, to a poultry shortage, and consequent price increases.

And if the owner tries to treat it with antibiotics that are also used in humans, there's a better than even chance that it'll develop a resistance to those antibiotics. Hence, when the disease spreads to humans, we'll essentially be disarmed. Scary stuff ...

Mad cow, on the other hand, is transmitted by eating infected products. But only a narrow range of tissues can carry the prions responsible, namely brain and nerve tissue (including spinal cord material). "But I don't eat cow brain sandwiches!", you protest. To which I'd reply, "Indeed, few do - knowingly...."

Like factory farming, the modern slaughterhouse is a purely industrial operation, designed to render the maximum product at the end. This not only involves gruesome killing methods, but equally horrific processing technologies, many of which strip meat from bone mechanically. As with any mechanical process, these are prone to misalignments - the carcass goes into the machine at slightly the wrong angle, for instance, and a few vertebrae get crunched along with hamburger. You'd never know it by taste or texture, but if the cow was infected, congratulations! You've just chowed down on a prion sandwich!

The key here is to "meet your meat" (no apologies to PETA - those idiots have done more to set the cause of food safety back in this country than nearly anyone else). Find a local beef producer, get a tour of the operations, ask about the processing and buy your beef (or lamb, or pork) from him. You'll probably have to buy by the quarter (anywhere from 100 to 200 lbs of meat) but you'll not only be getting a healthier product, you'll be getting a slightly cheaper one - we sell quarters for $5 per pound, which, while expensive for hamburger is less than half the cost per pound of the steak cuts. And your quarter carcass contains many steaks, roasts, soup bones, stew meat and other goodies as well as hamburger.

Buying this way requires a freezer, to be sure, but the benefits both medically and economically are such that the freezer will pay for itself in practically no time at all. A quarter will last a family of four about 3 or four months - a couple about 6 or 8 months. It's a lot of meat, but it's good stuff that you understand. That's really the key: understanding where your food comes from. For as Wendell Berry is fond of saying, "Eating is an agricultural act."

Here are a few links that may be of further interest:


and finally, my own rant on factory farming and consumer understanding: Why I do What I Do.

/Agriculture | 1 writeback | permanent link

On 9/9/2005 12:29:00
Kathryn wrote

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