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Eat that? Agriculture secretary's reassurance rings hollow in light of current industrial beef processing, Stop the Madness

Editorial

June 19, 2008, 8:42PM

Eat that? Agriculture secretary's reassurance rings hollow in light of current industrial beef processing

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer recently assured Americans that USDA inspectors check "every single" processed American beef carcass. Charitably put, his statement is highly misleading. USDA inspections are perfunctory and fall far short of checks performed by other countries' meat watchdogs.

The issue arose after South Korea agreed this April to lift most of the restrictions it had placed on U.S. beef imports. That prompted intense protests by South Koreans who say they fear mad cow disease in U.S. beef. They want their government to negotiate a tougher deal or to scrap it.

In Texas last week touring meat processing plants, Secretary Schafer defended domestic meats as safe.

"Every single carcass that's processed is inspected by a USDA inspector," Schafer told reporters in San Antonio. "That beef is stamped A-OK, and we want to assure our consumers here in the United States, as well as our consumers ... in foreign countries, that we provide a good, clean, safe, abundant food supply here."

But what exactly is entailed in that inspection? According to the USDA, a government inspector is on site whenever cows are slaughtered and processed. The inspectors are supposed to look at every carcass and determine whether the meat is fit for human consumption. Basically, they have a look and maybe a sniff and a feel. That's it.

But even that cursory process might be more than consumers are actually getting. The Web abounds with reports, including firsthand accounts and interviews with reputable news organizations, in which USDA inspectors complain that they can't possibly carry out their job in a meaningful way. There are too few of them to deal with the number of cattle slaughtered each hour in modern meat-processing facilities.

The speed with which cattle are killed, skinned and cut up in these plants makes the job dangerous for the meat processors, to say nothing of inspectors who attempt to get close enough to a side of beef for a poke and a sniff. The high speed of operations sometimes does not allow cows to be properly stunned and bled to death by the time the skinning and cutting begins. That's not only cruel and inhumane, but also detrimental to food safety. Struggling animals mean meat falling on filthy floors, improper evisceration that spills feces onto meat and greater opportunities for cross-carcass contamination.

The shortage of inspectors also means that a USDA employee cannot always be available to inspect animals before they are killed to ensure that so-called downer cows are not processed. Cattle that cannot walk into the slaughterhouse because they are diseased or injured are more likely to be animals that carry bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease.

In February, the Humane Society of the United States released videotapes showing meat workers shocking nonambulatory cows, bumping them with forklifts and otherwise abusing them to force them onto their legs long enough to be certified for slaughter.

That's why many American consumers are voting with their pocketbooks for better meats. They are turning to local farmer's markets for cruelty-free meats from pasture-raised animals, forgoing meat from industrially raised cows, chickens and pigs that spend their lives packed into filthy cages, fed unhealthy diets and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones.

Increasingly available at local farmer's markets is beef from cows that are butchered humanely and in small numbers. As one farmer at Houston's Bayou City Farmer's Market put it one recent Saturday morning, "These are cows who have just one bad day."

Given the alternative practiced in processing plants, it's no wonder many foreign buyers of U.S. meat products are skeptical. Industrial beef producers employ practices that can be, in a word, repulsive. Until 1997, the United States permitted feeding cattle on beef waste products. It tested very few animals for mad cow disease, even though Europe was testing 10 million of its cattle each year, and the Japanese were testing each one. USDA allowed downer cattle into the food supply, a practice now banned. A 2004 ban on feeding cow's blood mixed with formula to calves and chicken droppings to cows was never put into practice.

According to The New York Times, the Agriculture Department has been fighting a lawsuit from a Kansas beef producer over the department's refusal to allow it to test for mad cow disease so that the producer can resume beef shipments to Japan.

None of this is reassuring. Instead of spouting empty rhetoric that U.S. beef is "the safest in the world," the USDA owes it to consumers to guarantee that meat meant for their dinner plates is processed without unnecessary cruelty and with standards that will produce a clean product that's safe to eat.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/5847220.html

Op-Ed Contributor Stop the Madness

By MICHAEL HANSEN Published: June 20, 2008

THE Korean beef market, once the third-largest importer of American beef, has shut its doors to the United States. Why? Because Koreans are worried about eating meat tainted with mad cow disease, which can be fatal to humans. Recent attempts by Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, to reopen the market have brought tens of thousands of demonstrators to the streets in protest.

American beef producers could easily allay those fears by subjecting every cow at slaughter to the so-called rapid test, which costs about $20 per carcass and screens for this brain-wasting disease in a few hours rather than days. But the United States Department of Agriculture won’t allow that.

In 2004, Creekstone Farms in Arkansas City, Kan., wanted to test the cattle it slaughters to comply with the wishes of its Korean and Japanese customers. But the department ruled that the rapid test could only be used as part of its own mad cow surveillance program, which randomly checks about 1 in 1,000 dead and slaughtered cattle in the United States every year. The sale of the kits to private companies is prohibited under an obscure 1913 law that allows the department to prohibit veterinary products that it considers “worthless.”

Creekstone sued the government in 2006, arguing in court that the Agriculture Department could not deem worthless a test that it used in its own surveillance program. The court agreed, but the department appealed. A decision is expected soon.

It is hard to understand why the Agriculture Department wants to stand in the way. Yes, the test has limitations: it can miss a case of mad cow disease, also called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in the very early stages of incubation. But it can catch the disease in later stages, before animals show symptoms. Between 2001 and 2006, the European Union used the test to turn up 1,117 cases of mad cow disease in seemingly healthy cattle approved for slaughter.

Ideally, the Agriculture Department would follow the rules set up in Europe and Japan that require every cow over a certain age to be tested before being slaughtered. At the very least the department should not prevent private companies from testing.

Companies that use the rapid test should also be allowed to label their meat as having been “tested for mad cow” for American consumers who would like this extra level of protection. A Consumers Union national survey done in January 2004 found that 71 percent of adults who eat beef would pay more to support testing, and of those, 95 percent were willing to spend 10 cents more per pound for tested meat.

In the Creekstone case, the Agriculture Department argued that the tests should be prohibited because if one company started using them, consumer demand would drive all companies to use them, and that would add to the price of beef. But would that be such a bad thing? Isn’t this how the laws of supply and demand are supposed to work?

Most Americans, like Koreans, understand that testing for mad cow could save lives — and they’d like to have that option.

Michael Hansen is a senior scientist at Consumers Union.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/opinion/20hansen.html?hp


full text ;


USDA TO KOREA AND THE WORLD, EAT THAT AND LIKE IT

http://usdavskorea.blogspot.com/2008/06/usda-to-korea-and-world-eat-that-and.html


EAT THAT !


Terry S. Singeltary Sr. P.O. Box 42 Bacliff, Texas USA 77518

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