What’s Wrong with Conventional Food Processing
Filed under Conventional Food
Trail of E. Coli Shows Flaws in Inspection of Ground Beef – Meat processing is a scary industry. Crowded feed lots where animals stand in their own manure greatly increase the chances that E. coli will contaminate the meat. Poor conditions in the slaughter houses, who are pushed to process more and more animals/hour, provide the perfect conditions for allowing the contaminate to spread:
“The cattle often arrive with smears of feedlot feces that harbor the E. coli pathogen, and the hide must be removed carefully to keep it off the meat. This is especially critical for trimmings sliced from the outer surface of the carcass.
“Federal inspectors based at the plant are supposed to monitor the hide removal, but much can go wrong. Workers slicing away the hide can inadvertently spread feces to the meat, and large clamps that hold the hide during processing sometimes slip and smear the meat with feces, the workers and inspectors say.”
I don’t take PETA’s extreme views (and I eat meat, preferably humanely-raised meat) but they have some footage that will make you wonder if you ever want to eat meat again. I have a friend who bought a meat grinder and grinds her own meat. I am thinking about doing the same,or at a minimum asking the butcher to grind a cut of beef for me while I shop. Far safer.
One telling factor mentioned in the article is that the distributors who decide to test for themselves before grinding end up with no one supplying them. Costco is one of the few who insists on it, and Tyson will no longer supply them. Comforting, huh? Others have given up trying to test:
“The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. ‘They would not sell to us,’ said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. ‘If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.’”
Here’s the other problem:
“Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department [USDA] whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets … Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. ‘I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,’ Dr. Petersen said.”
The fox is guarding the hen house.
Cheap Food Isn’t Really Cheap
Filed under Sustainable Food
We live in a time when food is less expensive than it has probably ever been, yet the cost of that food is higher than ever. From HFCS to factory-farmed meat, the food we eat is shortening our life-spans and making us sick. Check out some of these articles for more information about where your food really comes from.
So much of our food ends up being a rearrangement of corn. – Food, Inc.
Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food – “Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us — ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair’s landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can’t even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals … A food system — from seed to 7‑Eleven — that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America’s obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills.”
What the World Eats (part 1) – From Time Magazine, this visual representation of a week’s worth of food for families around the world will impact you as you see the discrepancy in the amount of produce consumed elsewhere vs. the amount we eat in the US (yes, I know it doesn’t represent everyone, but I daresay it isn’t far from the truth).
Food, Inc. – How much do we know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families? Though our food appears the same—a tomato still looks like a tomato—it has been radically transformed. In Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry – an industry that has often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihoods of American farmers, the safety of workers and our own environment. They reveal how a handful of corporations control our nation’s food supply. Though the companies try to maintain the myth that our food still comes from farms with red barns and white picket fences, our food is actually raised on massive “factory farms” and processed in mega industrial plants. The animals grow fatter faster and are designed to fit the machines that slaughter them. Tomatoes are bred to be shipped without bruising and to stay edible for months. The system is highly productive, and Americans are spending less on food than ever before. But at what cost?
Imagine what it would be if, as a national policy, we said we would be only successful if we had fewer people going to the hospital next year than last year? The idea then would be to have such nutritionally dense, unadulterated food that people who ate it actually felt better, had more energy and weren’t sick as much … now, see, that’s a noble goal.
– Joel Salatin, owner/farmer of Polyface Farms in Virginia, who lets his livestock graze on grass, the way nature intended.
Power Steer by Michael Pollan – Michael decided that if he was going to eat beef, he had a responsibility to know where it came from. Follow his journey from calf to steak in this article that was originally published in the NYT.
My interest in the steer was not strictly financial, however, or even gustatory, though I plan to retrieve some steaks from the Kansas packing plant where No. 534, as he is known, has an appointment with the stunner in June. No, my primary interest in this animal was educational. I wanted to find out how a modern, industrial steak is produced in America these days, from insemination to slaughter.
The Organic Octopus – Think supporting organic processed foods is a blow to traditional food companies? Think again.
Where to find local sustainable food
- EatWild.com – directory of farmers who use sustainable farming methods
- Eat Well Good – local sustainable organic food sources
- Local Harvest – input your zip code and a map of your area will be returned with with local farm listings (note that CSAs are on a different search tab)
- Sustainable Table – resources for getting started eating sustainable food
- Carma’s Traditional Nutrition Resource page – variety of listings and information
