Death By Burger

Commentary By Ron Beasley

One of the reasons our health care costs are so high is that our diet is making us sick and killing us or to be more exact the food industry is killing us.  Like the health insurance industry the food industry primarily exists to make a profit not to make us healthy.  Unlike the health insurance industry the food industry is supposed to be regulated to protect us from harm, the USDA.   As Michael Moss pointed out in the New York Times over the weekend it just ain't so.  Over at Grist Tom Laskawy takes a look at Moss's article and explains what he said and what he didn't.

Warning: This product may cause sickness, paralysis, and death

It�s hard to draw any other conclusion from Michael Moss�s New York Times blockbuster investigative piece on E. coli in industrial beef, which is centered on the plight of Stephanie Smith, a young dance instructor left comatose, near death and now paralyzed from eating a single Cargill hamburger. Of course, a �single hamburger� can include meat from hundreds, some would say thousands, of animals. As Moss puts it:

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

So why is this so? 

In one of the most chilling, and I thought devastating, quotes in the entire piece, a top official at the USDA�s Food Safety and Inspection Service observed that his options were somewhat limited since he had to �look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health.� Note the fact that his phrasing sets the meat industry�s needs at odds with ours�the two can�t be reconciled in his eyes. What does that say about the government�s ability to ensure a safe food supply? No matter how you structure it, the industry now appears too big and too powerful to be regulated. What other explanation is there for the fact that the top food safety job at the USDA remains unfilled if not regulatory paralysis�the meat industry seems to have veto power over its regulators and hasn�t found a federal overseer to its liking.

That's right - the health of the industry is more important to the USDA than the health of the American people.  Pretty standard fare for the Corporatocracy known as the United States of America.

But Laskawy explains that Moss ignores why the E. coli is in the food chain to begin with.

One area that Moss does not cover is how E. coli O157 got into industrial beef in the first place. In fact it�s there because of the meat industry�s insistence on feeding cows corn�something they cannot easily digest�instead of grass. Among other things, corn feeding requires cows to be fed a steady dose of antibiotics, which has led to the rise of antibiotic resistance among various pathogens. But more importantly, it has caused very real changes in the cow�s gut which has allowed this toxic strain of E. coli to take hold, a strain that research suggests cannot survive in the gut of cows that eat only grass.

In short, E. coli didn�t just �happen� to the meat industry�it�s a consequence of industrial practices. But nowhere in the article (or in the halls of the USDA or the largescale beef producers for that matter) is the possibility of moving away from this corn-based system raised as a solution for the industrial system. Surprisingly, the article includes virtually no proposed solutions for this crisis�just vague assurances that the USDA isn�t �standing still� on the issue. In reality, the industry focuses exclusively on �managing� the ongoing presence of E. coli O157 though the development of an E. coli vaccine for cows, and irradiation or chemical washes for the meat. All of which are attempts to mask the risks of a failed system and represent an institutionalizing of the underlying failures. And none of which make me ever want to touch industrial meat again.

Indeed, if there ever was a powerful argument for eating only grass-fed beef from small producers, this article is it. The only conclusion worth drawing from this expose is that industrial ground beef simply isn�t worth the risk. And without wholesale industry and regulatory reform�neither of which appears likely or even possible, it may never be.

Can we really reform health care without reforming the methods used to make our food.  I use ground beef but I get it from an independent butcher where I can watch him grind the sirloin.  I can afford the added expense but many can't and many more don't.