The Meaty Truth (13 page)

The increase in
salmonella
is becoming an increasing health cost to society. Like
E. coli
, studies indicate that
salmonella
can also cause long-term health effects, such as continuous and persistent irritable bowel syndrome.
Salmonella
can also start as food poisoning and leave the unknowing consumer with reactive arthritis, which is a chronic and permanent, debilitating form of arthritis.
²¹

European countries have declared it illegal to sell
salmonella-
tainted meat. This could be why Europe boasts such a low rate of contamination. Similarly, since the United States declared
E. coli
an adulterant, its prevalence has decreased by about 30 percent.
²²

However,
salmonella
poisoning is still not illegal. That’s right. It is legal to sell
salmonella
-tainted meat. While only 65 percent of meat is contaminated
with
E. coli
, about 80 percent to 97 percent of poultry is contaminated with
salmonella
.
²³
The most recent Foster Farms
salmonella
outbreak in 2013 that sickened over five hundred people glaringly shows that
salmonella
outbreaks are on the rise and there is a drastic need for reform.
²⁴

One would think the USDA would respond to this growing concern and also make
salmonella
illegal. Making it illegal to sell meat that could cripple and kill our children is apparently a hard concept for the USDA to grasp. Instead, the USDA has chosen to throw its hands in the air and claim that “there are numerous sources of contamination which might contribute to the overall problem.” According to them, it is “unjustified to single out the meat industry and ask that the Department require it to identify its raw products as being hazardous to health.”
^25
,
26
With this logic, we would never put warning labels on anything that has another, albeit far-fetched, possibility of laying claim to responsibility.

To the USDA’s credit, they did try to regulate
salmonella
in the past. For example, in 1999 the USDA shut down a Supreme Beef plant in Texas. The plant had failed USDA testing three times, and as much as 45 percent of its meat was contaminated. The meat from Supreme Beef made up almost half of the national school lunch program. When the USDA shut the plant down, Supreme Beef challenged the decision, arguing that “
salmonella
shouldn’t be regarded as an adulterant of ground beef.”
²⁷
Its argument was that since
salmonella
is so commonly found in food, it isn’t an adulterant and should be considered normal. Essentially, since the meat corporations have contaminated their meat and do not take measures to prevent this, the frequent and consistent contamination means that our meat isn’t tainted and we need to accept this as normal. Are they kidding?

Shockingly, the Appeals court upheld the decision that the USDA could
not
shut down a plant for contamination. The powerful meat industries have made it possible to legally sell contaminated meat.

So what’s the real reason that the industries oppose regulation and we don’t have policies to declare
salmonella
as illegal? Apparently it’s too expensive to sell meat not covered in feces. We aren’t kidding. That’s the
real reason. According to one industry spokesperson, “To get to zero is a real challenge . . . If we did nothing but testing for
salmonella
and non-0157s, there wouldn’t be anything left to eat.”
²⁸
Others claim, “It’s virtually impossible to have zero
salmonella,
according to the large-scale production conditions used here in the U.S., which help keep the price of poultry down. If you want chicken with no
salmonella
, it’s going to cost a lot more money to produce.”
²⁹
Who else is game for paying more money for a better-quality product?

For any other industry, these answers would be wholly unacceptable. Imagine if car companies said it was too expensive to add seat belts to their cars, so we should all drive at our own risk. Or what if airlines said it was just too expensive to check and make sure that all of the equipment was functioning properly before takeoff? We wouldn’t stand for it. We would either find alternative transportation or demand change. America, why are we not fighting for the same rights with our food?

Campylobacter is Paralyzing

Campylobacter
is one of the most common foodborne pathogens, causing 2.5 million illnesses and costing the United States over one billion dollars in medical costs and lost productivity per year. Similar to
salmonella
,
Campylobacter
is typically found on chicken carcasses, as it is produced in the stomach linings of warm-blooded birds and some mammals. Studies have found that between 68 percent and 88 percent of chickens sold in grocery stores were contaminated with
Campylobacter
.
Campylobacter
is easily transmitted, as it only takes about five hundred bacterium or one tiny drop of chicken juice to cause infection. It can also survive in water and dairy lagoons.

While
Campylobacter
is not as fatal as
E. coli
can be, it is most serious when it affects children. It affects children twice as much as adults and can cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune reaction that can result in acute, permanent paralysis and even death. Guillain-Barré syndrome is like multiple sclerosis on speed—instead of taking years to cripple you, it takes a matter of days. Infection can start in a matter of hours after
consumption. First, you start to lose feeling in your hands and feet. Then suddenly you can’t walk, talk, or move. Next, you can’t breathe and have to be put on a ventilator. Although Guillain-Barré syndrome generally runs a two-week course, it can leave its victim with lifelong disabilities or prove fatal if not caught in time. As many as 40 percent of
Campylobacter
cases lead to Guillain-Barré syndrome.
³⁰
Why play Russian roulette with our health? With the amount of chicken that Americans consume weekly, we are increasing our chances of being struck down by one of these diseases when our luck runs out.

These Feed Ingredients Make Us Crazy

There are two ways sh!t gets into your meat and poultry: through the animal-feed ingredients and through lax standards in slaughterhouses and unsanitary conditions where the animals are raised.

Food-safety issues are related to how animals are raised as well as what they are fed. The animals you eat and drink milk from are being fed the waste of up to two hundred other dead animals. Using manure in feed is a type of “recycling” process to get rid of the excessive amount of manure.
³¹
Cows are fed chicken litter that is known to have residues of arsenic, antibiotics, and parasites such as tapeworms,
salmonella
, and
Campylobacter
.

The list of approved ingredients in feed is anything but a natural diet that cows, pigs, and chickens should be eating. These ingredients include: grains; massive amounts of pesticides; herbicides and insecticides used to produce the grain; by-products of slaughtered animals, which include unborn calf carcasses; by-products of dead animals (roadkill, euthanized animals, blood meal, diseased animals); animal fat and tallow; contaminated and adulterated food waste or food not fit for human consumption; antibiotics; drugs, such as arsenic in chickens; added minerals; and, last but not least, animal manure from other animals. The FDA also allows downed (meaning too sick to walk) and diseased animals to be slaughtered and fed to others.

While the FDA decides if feed ingredients are safe or not, it is clear that allowing feces as well as the remains of rotting, dead animals into
meat is never safe. You don’t need a government authority to tell you that this is a health risk. This practice only leads to disaster.

Mad cow disease is one dire example. It is produced when animals are forced to be carnivorous and eat the remains of other dead animals. While the European countries banned these practices, the FDA still allows chickens and pigs to eat rendered animal parts as well as blood products that can be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. The FDA continues to allow this practice even after the first case of mad cow disease appeared in America in 2003 and the most recent case was reported in April 2012.
³²

As consumers, we assume that our governmental organizations are doing everything possible to warn consumers of possible infection and even take steps to prevent mad cow disease and other infections. While this disease is hard to detect and can have an incubation period of eight to ten years, the USDA doesn’t find it worthwhile to test for mad cow disease. The USDA only tests about one-tenth of the cows slaughtered and imported for this brain-degenerative disease. An Arkansas court even banned meatpacker tests for mad cow disease—supporting the USDA’s refusal to sell mad cow disease testing kits to an Arkansas meatpacker who wanted to test every one of his cows to assure his consumers that his meat was safe.
³³
Can you imagine the government not allowing one packing company to test each and every cow! What could possibly motivate such blatant oversight? Could it be that the USDA is not concerned with what is best for public health and animals but rather fearful of having to test all cows and discovering more problems than it wants to deal with?

Packing Our Food with Feces

A government official, who chooses to remain anonymous, stated that a modern feedlot is akin to the crowded conditions during the Middle Ages in Europe where raw sewage ran down the streets.
³⁴
Animals are frequently eating their meals while standing knee-deep in their own feces and urine. Pathogens such as
E. coli, Campylobacter
, and
salmonella
are produced in the animals’ digestive systems and stomach linings and then excreted in manure and feces. Since foodborne illnesses are passed in manure, the cramped, filthy, stench-ridden, and inhumane conditions in factory farms and on feedlots are killing people and animals along with destroying ecosystems. With these conditions, combined with the lightning-fast pace of slaughterhouses that do not allow for proper cleaning and killing, it is no surprise that feces gets into meat products.

Since cows, pigs, and chickens live in their own waste, they arrive at the slaughterhouses caked in feces. This makes for easy pathogen transfer of
E. coli
, which can live in manure for up to ninety days.
³⁵

The pace of killing in the slaughterhouse is laser fast and extreme. As many as three hundred chickens are slaughtered per second. One cow is killed every twelve seconds. Think about how many cows died as you have read this chapter. There is no time to trim the sh!t off of the meat, let alone take the time to make sure there isn’t cross-contamination between the pulled-out guts of a sick cow and those of a healthy cow.

Two tasks that can contribute to the most feces in your meat are the removal of hides caked in manure and the removal of the animal’s digestive system, where pathogens are produced. As cows and pigs swing in the air from one foot, machines strip the feces-covered hides away from the animals. Yet at the breakneck pace, manure can fly. It can remain on the carcasses or be flung to other carcasses.

Second, the “gutting” table can contaminate the meat supply with pathogens when guts spill everywhere. One worker is expected to gut about sixty cows an hour. During Eric Schlosser’s investigation for his bestselling book,
Fast Food Nation,
he found that gutting requires skill; it can take workers up to six months to learn how to pull out the guts and tie the intestines without spilling manure everywhere. Even when workers acquire this skill, Schlosser found that workers could only gut about two hundred consecutive cattle without spillage. As slaughterhouse workers have a 100 percent annual turnover rate, the prospect of gutting without spilling is not high. One IBP slaughterhouse in Lexington, Nebraska,
reported that the hourly spillage rate of guts and manure was about 20 percent or every one in five carcasses.
³⁶
Not good enough, friends.

If spilling guts isn’t bad enough, the rate of contamination that makes its way to your kitchen counter is amplified by the lack of clean utensils used to cut the animals apart. One knife can contaminate literally hundreds of carcasses.

E. coli
is more prevalent during the summer months, infecting about 50 percent of animals on feedlots compared to 1 percent during the winter. It is safe to assume that between one in every four animals infected with
E. coli
are killed at a slaughterhouse every hour. One animal infected with pathogens can contaminate about thirty-two thousand pounds of meat. Contrary to popular belief, your hamburger is not made from one cow but the meat from between forty to one hundred different cows. This is not a very comforting thought.

Centralizing Contamination

Food recalls are a direct indication that our food is contaminated. In fact, foodborne illness was ranked as the number-eight productivity killer in the United States.
³⁷
A simple Google search indicates that there is a high level of contamination, as not a month goes by without some sort of meat, dairy, peanut, fruit, or egg recall due to foodborne pathogens.

To be perfectly clear, spinach and tomatoes do not produce
E. coli
or
salmonella
. When the media alarms us with recalls of spinach, tomatoes, cantaloupe, or even peanut butter, it is because pathogens from untreated manure used as fertilizer or spilled from factory farms and slaughterhouse waste have made their way into those food supplies.

The problem is that most of the food is not sent back to the plant, because contaminated food is only found out after the fact. When an outbreak happens, it can take months to discover the source, because of the lack of testing and oversight. Surprisingly, the USDA is not required to disclose where the tainted meat comes from in order to protect the corporations’ reputations. The USDA cannot even disclose exactly to which supermarkets the meat was shipped. According to the meat corporations, disclosing where the tainted food products are sold is proprietary information and could harm their companies.