| by Jessica FitzPatrick | 11/14/06 | 211 views |
Natural juices flow over the tongue as canines remember how to rip meat.
When I go out to a restaurant, there’s one item my eyes are always drawn towards: steak. I’m a fan of all types of meat; roast beef, taco meat, London broil, and even the summer backyard grilled hamburger. However nothing gets my taste buds excited quite like Filet Mingion. Shamelessly I have proclaimed myself a meat and potatoes girl, or at least I did until I took an Anthropology of Food course.
Not having grown up in a cave, I knew that cattle were killed in order to put beef entrees on my plate. Yet I did not know how potentially harmful the meat could be. Like most naïve eaters, I had assumed that with USDA and the FDA approval, along with the advice at the bottom of most menus to order my meat cooked to the proper level (about 70 degrees, or to a medium rating) my food was perfectly safe. I had assumed wrong.
My revelation came from the local media’s fascination with E. coli, and several sources I read during my course on Anthropology of Food. These sources included Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, which I recommend to the morbidly curious people concerned with health or those looking for a good horror story. The image Schlosser presented is scary, and made even the self-proclaimed “meat-girl” wary of touching a hamburger anytime in the near future.
Schlosser depicts the slaughterhouses as the bloodiest step of meat production. He shows them as horrific places with bloody floors where live animals enter, cross a point of no return, and exit as plastic wrapped cooking meat. However, it becomes more atrocious when one considers that the faster the animals move from the point of being alive to the point of being an ingredient, the more profit is made. This not only sounds morbid, but has disastrous consequences. It is only natural that slaughterhouse employees would become overwhelmed with imposingly high production line speeds. When they are overwhelmed, it is easy for them to make a mistake. For instance, accidentally slicing through a dead cow’s intestines, spewing stomach acid and manure over the rest of the meat, their knife, the floor, the belt, and themselves. It is a messy error—one can imagine the smell of shit mixing with freshly killed flesh, something straight out of a horror film.
What is worse is that such contamination can cause thousands of pounds of meat products to be contaminated with feces, instigating an outbreak of bacterial diseases such as E. coli O157:H7 or Listeria. Even if the cow with the actual leak is pulled off the line, there is a high chance that in order to prevent a backflow of cattle carcasses, the worker’s knife or the slash location will retain traces of feces. It only takes about five organisms of E. coli, from manure, to kill a person. This small number can easily enter previously pure meat.
One would imagine being able to sigh with relief before savoring a burger if the meat is able to escape the slaughter line. After all, that is where the cattle are killed, gutted and sliced into cuts. With such physical processes going on it would seem safe to attribute all risks to this part of the chain. Sadly, it is not so; the meat has a few more tests to face. For some of the meat, the greatest test is the grinder. Pieces of meat and fat from multiple cows go into the grinder; depending on the size of the plant, parts from 40 or 60 cows are combined, ground out and packaged together. If one of the cows was contaminated, that potentially deadly bacteria can be divided among hundreds of hamburger patties and ground beef parcels.
Even if the slaughterhouse is perfectly sterile, cows can contract diseases from their upbringing, often viewed as the happier time of their lives. Now that farmers force cattle to consume grain-based feed, they help the spread of E. coli. Cows belong to the type of grazing animals equipped with a rumen, one of four stomach structures, which allows them to digest grass. From their flat, grinding teeth to their multiple-stomach digestive layout, cows are meant to be lean, grass munching machines. When farmers decide to offer cattle diets primarily based on grains, they go against the natural diet of cows, opting instead for a more calorie dense food that will quite literally ‘beef up’ their herd quickly. The shorter the growing period before slaughter, the quicker the cash from selling the processed meat can be collected. Not surprisingly, defying Mother Nature in favor of money has its consequences: cows that are fed grass or hay have less stomach acidity and are less likely to contract E. coli than feedlot cows.
Many good horror tales have a cannibal; this one is no different. The concoctions of animal scraps, everything from dead poultry, sheep, pigs, and even other dead cattle parts, end up being ‘recycled’ back into the cattle’s feed. Such tissues, if contaminated, increase the risk of disease. It was this practice that caused the hysteria over Mad Cow’s Disease. One would think a diet switch would be in order. Not so; the grain and leftover animals are far cheaper and easier to use than grass when attempting to turn out beef products. Besides, we Americans apparently prefer ‘marbled’ beef; beef laced with fat, or as the ranchers prefer, “flavor”. This should come as no surprise since we enjoy fat in everything else. It is also easily achieved if cattle do not have to wander and graze, but merely shoulder their way to grain troughs for premixed ‘food’.
As if this is not chilling enough, the United States of America has no power to recall known contaminated meat products. They can advise large corporations to recall meat, they can publicly announce there has been contaminated meat found at a slaughterhouse, and they can broadcast about general areas, such as states, that may be in danger. However, they cannot announce where that meat has been sold unless—and here is the truly delicious part—the store or restaurant that bought the products allows it. The restaurant or fast food franchise can cook and sell as many hamburgers as they want and the supermarket can sell multiple packages of potentially harmful meat. They will be paid in an unequal exchange: American dollars for an extremely unhealthy, but misleading, product. Sometimes citizens ignorantly buy their own death sentence, innocently mistaking it for a quick lunch.
Most people contaminated with E. coli simply suffer diarrhea—unpleasant, but livable. After a few days of running to the bathroom, they shake it off. Far worse are those few with extreme cases of E. coli O157:H7, the hemolytic uremic syndrome, which has no cure. Symptoms include the failure of major organs, strokes, and brain damage, which can kill or permanently debilitate a consumer, particularly a young child or elderly person.
Yet, Americans still love meat. The hamburger is one of our most cherished and iconic foods. I am not so naïve that I am going to recommend the halting of hamburger production or of eating beef. For one thing I would be sorely disappointed when browsing menus. Another, more obvious reason is it would never happen; even deadly beef makes too much money for this to be feasible. The same goes for having smaller local cattle ranches and more detail-oriented butcher shops. However, I challenge our concepts of how to obtain such meats. By reintroducing cattle to grasses, slowing down production lines, and forcing beef industries to be more responsible for their actions, the meat we love to eat would be less intimidating. I’d like to be able to wield a steak knife for cutting convenience, not in paranoid fear of the potentially deadly monstrosity on my plate. I do not wish to envision the wrapper on my burger carrying the warning “this could be the burger that kills you”. It would ruin my appetite.
pictures from this article:
     
|
University of Delaware
)
)
)
