The Meaty Truth (14 page)

Even more shocking than this protect-the-corporation mindset is that the USDA has zero authority to initiate a recall of food. For years, the only authority the USDA and FDA had was to politely ask the company with said contaminated product to recall it. How can our government agencies that regulate our food do their job if they have zero enforcement policies? This is akin to a police officer asking a drunk driver to kindly turn himself or herself in to the station without having any legal right to arrest the drunk driver. This is the same public tragedy. The FDA, however, just gained the right to recall food with the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010. The USDA has still not received the same authorization.

For years, researchers and scientists have warned that our meat production and slaughter system creates an ideal environment to spread the next big pandemic that will wipe out massive populations. Today the risk for contamination is magnified, as meat and dairy production is largely controlled by a few corporations that ship their products across the nation. When you combine this centralization, feed additives, cramped conditions at factory farms, and quick pace at the slaughterhouses with lax conditions, you have a recipe for disaster and sh!t in your food.

Learning from the Past? Not with HACCP or HIMP

The slaughterhouse conditions today are reminiscent of the famous muckraking book,
The Jungle,
by Upton Sinclair, which prompted the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act of 1906 to clean up the sickening conditions in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants. While there might not be rats running around today, there sure as hell is manure flying.

Yet, since the passage of this act, Congress has done little, if anything, to pass laws that better regulate our food supply. In the time of President Roosevelt’s presidency, 190 measures were proposed to regulate food safety. In the past decade, there has only been a handful of significant pieces of legislation introduced. To put this in perspective, the poultry industry today slaughters more birds in one day than it did during the entire year of 1930, and we have almost the same level of legislation.
³⁸

Back in 1998, the USDA opted to allow the corporations to regulate themselves and report their own cases of foodborne outbreaks under the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program.
³⁹
By adopting HACCP, corporations are assumed to be producing safe food. The USDA’s seal of approval is applied to our food products
without
inspection. The public was never given the memo of this change. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has issued numerous reports over the years stating that the USDA’s and FSIS’s lack of adequate oversight and prevention of foodborne illnesses. The USDA has continuously not reported when a company fails to meet their HACCP plan requirements.
⁴⁰
In one district, an FSIS inspector did not issue noncompliance reports for all fifteen of the plants that had violations. FSIS inspectors do not even ensure that the companies’ HACCP plans are based on sound science.

Yet the USDA is moving in a worrying direction toward even more lax standards with their HIMP, or HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project. This policy would not only increase chicken speed lines by as much as 25 percent, but also replace USDA staff with employees from the processing plants. According to the USDA, this will better bolster
salmonella
detection.
⁴¹
Who are they kidding? This would mean that ten thousand chickens and turkeys would be processed per hour and overseen by a corporate employee. No one can look at and inspect up to ninety chickens a minute. It is simply impossible. Not to mention under the new guidelines, the employees can only see the backs of the chickens, not the fronts, which are the breast meat.
⁴²

A former USDA poultry inspector who was involved in one of the first pilot programs in Atlanta stated that when she began her career forty-four years ago, inspectors “looked inside every bird, inside and outside, from every side. All they do on the pilot is they sit and watch the birds go flying by.”
⁴³
We are definitely having a hard time seeing how this is going to produce a “safer” food product. Adding to this lack of inspection, we highly doubt employees are going to be encouraged to speak up about food-safety and quality issues. According to inside sources that have filed
affidavits to the GAO, the actual implementation of HIMP would be a “total nightmare.”

Dozens of agencies have written to the USDA about its flawed “successful” pilot program at twenty-five plants and urged them not to proceed and expand. According to the Government Accountability Office, the results of the USDA’s pilot program lack such substantial reporting that the pilot cannot be determined to be a success.
⁴⁴

Allowing the corporations to police themselves is a proven, dangerous policy. Corporations are businesses interested in making money and cutting costs. They should be required to pay and test for foodborne pathogens. Yet why would a corporation take on extraneous costs if it can get away with it without doing so and only coast through a few outbreaks here and there? Workers from slaughterhouses have come forward and stated that there are two books: one that is shown to the USDA for inspections and the other that is kept private. The two books tell very different stories about the level of sickness, contamination, and disease.

In 2002, Senator Tom Harkin tried to undo some of the damage and bolster pathogen testing to reduce risk of contamination, but his bill did not pass. Only recently in 2009 did the Food Safety Enhancement Act pass, which is considered to be the first major law addressing food safety since 1938! This law allows the FDA to take measures to prevent foodborne illness rather than just react to it as they have done for over seventy years. Prevention—what a novel idea.

Why are we not outraged like our ancestors in the early 1900s about the conditions in which our food is produced? We are allowing companies to politically influence and jeopardize our food, health, and safety. Problematically, most people do not understand what goes on behind the closed doors of the slaughterhouse and the “farms.” Our food quality is jeopardized and lives are at risk, yet we are kept in the dark about how our food is produced and unaware of the industry’s standards, all for a “cheap” piece of meat. According to Representative John Dingell, “A lot more people are going to have a bellyache and die” before our broken food-safety system improves.
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America, we deserve and can do better.

Know your Sh!t Solutions:

1) Eliminate meat from your diet or cut down on factory-farmed meat. This especially includes chicken.

2) Miss the meaty flavors? Try Gardein, Beyond Meat, Tofurky, or Field Roast. They taste like meat without the crap inside. You can buy these at any grocery store nationwide.

3) Visit these fabulous websites to jumpstart your meatless meals:
www.forksoverknives.com
,
www.chefchloe.com
,
www.vegnews.com
,
www.vegetariantimes.com
,
www.ohsheglows.com
,
www.kblog.lunchboxbunch.com
.

CHAPTER 6

The All-American Meal: Eating Sh!t and Drinking Pus

“Dairy products shouldn’t occupy a prominent place in our diet, nor should they be the centerpiece of the national strategy to prevent osteoporosis.”

~Dr. Walter Willett, Harvard University

W
hile eating pizza and old-fashioned vanilla ice cream is considered a quintessential American tradition, eating pus is not. Yet this happens at almost every meal, as the average American eats about six hundred pounds of milk, cheese, and butter per year.
¹
Americans consume more dairy products than any other food, including meat. When we realize that there is
pus
in every dairy product we eat, along with as many
as 420 other chemicals, including rocket fuel, thirty-five types of hormones, and genetically modified growth hormones, dairy isn’t so tasty after all. That’s right,
pus
—as in the same pus that oozes from acne zits and infections, flame retardants, and about seventeen antibiotic cocktails are in our milk, butter, and cheese. We are confident that every doctor would agree that these ingredients will not make our bones big and strong. The same industrial methods and lax governmental regulations that are allowing feces to be packed with our meat are also allowing natural and added toxins from dairy cows into our milk and dairy products. It becomes not just unpalatable to think about—dairy is causing major health issues (think cancer, arthritis, and heart disease) and sucking up our tax dollars.

Got Pus?

Cow’s milk is touted as an angelic superfood that we cannot live without. Dairy is not just revered for its so-called superpowers to make us healthy and strong, but also as a comfort food in the form of milk, cookies, and cheese. From a young age, we have been indoctrinated to have dairy products and milk at every meal. Every school-aged child is served a carton of milk at lunch and encouraged to drink three glasses a day. But the brightly colored containers that depict happy cows on green pastures or jumping over the moon with joy are devoid of any evidence of the industry practices used to produce milk products and the list of harmful ingredients those packages contain.
²

What the dairy industry fails to tell us is that with every sip of milk we are swallowing
pus
. Think of that next time you pour milk over your cereal. Pus contains bacteria, white blood cells, and tissue debris. It oozes from infection sites and is one of the body’s defense mechanisms against infection. Pus is extremely resilient. It cannot be boiled, steamed, or frozen out of the milk. Even though we cannot see it,
we drink it
.

The USDA and the dairy industry are well aware that there is pus in our milk and dairy products. The USDA has kindly limited the amount of pus “allowed” in each liter of milk. The USDA refers to pus in milk as the somatic cell count, or SCC, which is the measurement of white blood cells
per milliliter of milk.
³
To be specific, there are about 135 million pus cells in every eight-ounce glass of milk. Let’s be real here. Debating the pus limit or talking about how many millions of cells are in one glass is futile. The pus limit should be zero. Pus is gross, disgusting, and should not be allowed in our food and drink. Agreed?

The more important questions are where does all this pus come from and why is it allowed in dairy? Pus gets into our milk from cruel and unnecessary dairy practices used to produce more milk out of each cow, which results in excessive milking, unsanitary conditions, and the injection of growth hormones. Just like the meat industry, dairy has gone from pasture-based farming to housing thousands of cows in confined, crowded, factory-like conditions. In California, the leading dairy-producing state, 95 percent of dairy products come from dairy factories.
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Today’s dairy cows spend their short lives hooked up to machines that consistently milk them throughout the day. As one can’t get milk without a baby, these cows also spend the majority of their years pregnant and giving birth. Although this milk is intended for their babies, as is every mother’s milk, these cows never feed their babies. Instead we drink their babies’ milk. Seems a little greedy, especially since we wouldn’t let any other animals steal milk from our babies.

This harsh life takes a toll on the dairy cows that now barely live to see their sixth birthdays. Dairy cows used to live to be about twenty years old. These days, dairy cows are slaughtered at around five to seven years of age, because they are crippled from calcium depletion, cannot stand due to painful foot infections, or have been so overmilked they are no longer producing the desired quantities. Since dairy cows are so exhausted and riddled with infection by the time they are slaughtered for food, they make up our lower-grade meats, such as hamburger meat. We eat these beaten-down creatures.

rBGH: Milking the Pus for All It’s Worth

Today dairy cows produce about one hundred pounds of milk a day.
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In 2012, individual dairy cows produced about 21,697 pounds of milk that year.
This is a 120 percent increase from just thirty years ago.
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The dairy cows aren’t magically producing more milk. Monsanto—the company known for its genetically modified corn and soybeans—came up with a growth-hormone stimulant called recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), also referred to as recombinant bovine somatotrophine (rBST), that increases the Insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, in cows, so they can produce more milk. Cows injected with the growth stimulant produce up to 25 percent more milk per day. Despite studies that showed that rBGH was a public-health risk, as IGF-1 is directly associated with increased cancer, the FDA approved the use of rBGH, which is marketed under the name of Prosilac, in 1993.
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Prosilac and rBGH is one of the main reasons there are pus, blood, and antibiotics in our milk.

While Monsanto claims that rBST is perfectly safe because BST is a hormone already found in cows, studies from the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare tell a very different story. They found that rBGH increases the risk of the infection mastitis, which increases the amount of pus in milk. Monsanto’s original trials of the drug also showed that their toxic effects increased lesions and mastitis. While “an increased risk of mastitis” is listed as a side effect on the Prosilac label, Monsanto continues to deny any health risks associated with its wonder drug.
⁸
Apparently distorting the truth can be profitable.

Mastitis is a very painful udder infection that produces liters of milk laced with pus, blood, and bacteria. About half of the dairy cows in America suffer from mastitis. Since mastitis requires antibiotic treatment, milk also contains a slew of antibiotic residues from up to twenty different antibiotics used to treat the infection. As the USDA only tests for about six antibiotic residues, more antibiotics than we care to think about are making their way onto our menus. When tested, dairy cows that became meat had residues from more than six antibiotics in their milk.