Cross-posted from The Green Fork.
Two cornerstones of American culture collided Monday night on CNN:
Larry King and cheap processed meat. Or should I say colluded? After all, they've got a lot in common: both smush together scraps of debatable value and dubious origin and extrude them as suitable fodder for our more credulous compatriots. And both have the potential to poison us, whether by tainting our food supply with pathogens or contaminating our national conversation with lackeys and lobbyists.
The topic of King's show was the question "Does a healthy diet include meat?" It seemed strangely fitting to have the King of the MSM (mainstream media) explore the industry that gave us another MSM: mechanically separated meat, "a paste-like meat product produced by forcing beef, pork, turkey or chicken bones, with attached edible meat, under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue."
This method enabled meat processors to minimize waste, use less expensive ingredients and thereby offer us cheaper hot dogs and other processed meat products.
MSM was declared safe for human consumption in 1982. In 2004, the USDA decided that it wasn't, stating that "mechanically separated beef is considered inedible and is prohibited for use as human food."
Why the change? Three words: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, aka BSE or mad cow disease. So, no more MSM in your ballpark frank. Now, you just have to worry about E.Coli in your ground beef, as Michael Moss's scathing New York Times exposé showed. Or do you?
King posed this question to a panel that included: Patrick Boyle, president and CEO of American Meat Institute; Bill Marler, the nation's leading foodborne illness attorney; bacon-loving celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain; and Jonathan Safran Foer, the acclaimed novelist who advocates vegetarianism in his soon-to-be published Eating Animals. King also brought on two nutrition professors, one pro-meat, one anti, a food safety advocate who lost her son to an E. Coli-tainted burger, and a mother whose 7 year-old daughter died after visiting her E. Coli-sickened grandpa in the hospital. Who knew that you could contract E. Coli by coming into contact with someone who's got it?
Anthony Bourdain defended meat eating on the grounds that we're designed to be carnivores:
Bourdain: ...we have eyes in the front of our head. We have fingernails. We have eye, teeth and long legs. We were designed from the get-go, we have evolved, so that we could chase down smaller, stupider creatures, kill them and eat them.
Bourdain: I think the standard practices of outfits like Cargill and some of the larger meat processors and grinders in this country are unconscionable and border on the criminal.
Foer: I'm not all that interested in what humans seem designed to eat or what is quote, unquote natural, because the entirety of human progress is defying what's natural. If we're so concerned with what was natural, we wouldn't be in this TV studio right now having this conversation.The thing that's really important that Anthony said is that there's a certain kind of meat, which is produced on factory farms, that is in every single way unconscionable. It's unconscionable to feed to our children because of the health. It's unconscionable because it's the single worst thing we can to do to the environment by a long shot. And it's unconscionable because of what we're doing to animals who are raised on factory farms.
What Anthony didn't say, and I wish he had, is that upwards of 99 percent of the animals that are raised for meat in this country come from factory farms. When we're talking about meat, when we're talking about the meat they sell in grocery stores, when we're talking about the meat we order in restaurants, we are effectively talking about factory farms.
Bourdain: My major area of concern is the chopped meat. You know, supermarket quality fast food quality, pre-chopped meat. Those practices, if you read the Times article that came out recently on this most recent E. Coli outbreak, it's truly terrifying. The stuff they're putting in these burgers would not be recognized by any American as meat...
Boyle: I think some of the comments have been grossly uninformed about the industry and our products. This industry, the member companies of the American Meat Institute, of which Cargill is one, have invested tens of millions of dollars over the last ten years in research programs to make our products safer....
...And hamburger is compromised of trim from more expensive pieces of meat like tenderloins and roasts. It's perfectly safe, perfectly wholesome. It's produced under the continuous inspection of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.One other comment if I might, Larry. The whole comment about factory farming, from my perspective, that's a negative reference to high volume, low cost, efficient meat and poultry processing facilities, that give Americans an abundant variety of safe and wholesome products at a very reasonable price. The lowest price in terms of disposable income spent in any developed country in the world.
Dr. Campbell: ...a whole foods plant-based diet really has all the nutrients that we actually need at optimum levels of intake.
And what we learned early in my career, that instead of protein, especially animal protein, being a good nutrient, so to speak, and creating good health, what we learned is that we could actually turn on cancer development by simply increasing the level of animal protein intake above the amount of protein that we really needed. We could turn it off by simply taking it away......the conclusion was that the closer we get to consuming a whole foods, plant-based diet the healthier we're going to be on all accounts.
Dr. Rodriguez: I believe that when you're looking at living a long, healthful life, that certainly animal proteins, which are the foundation of life and what we do, can fit in that healthful approach. And some of the recent studies, again, from my lab and others, peer reviewed science, using whole foods that include beef, dairy, eggs in the diet, have shown that there is some benefits to the muscle, without any detriment to cholesterol levels, benefits, perhaps, to Diabetes management and high blood pressure.
Dr. Rodriguez warned that we should think twice about reducing our consumption of animal products:
Dr. Rodriguez: ...when you make a choice to eliminate those animal products from your diet, it becomes a challenge, particularly for certain vulnerable populations, such as infants and children, to get those nutrients in.
Cross-posted from The Green Fork.
Follow Kerry Trueman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kerrytrueman
Kathy Freston: Eating Animals: Why Eating Matters
If ever there was a book that could profoundly affect our lives at the most fundamental level, this one is it.
Proud to be a Vegan. I will not allow my body to be a graveyard...I can smell a corpse muncher almost 100 feet away.. They really have a terrible smell to them.....
Go Vegan!
(words in CAPITOL were edited out of CNN transcript.)
KING: Dr. Campbell, are you tilting at wind mills? (SEE, NO FOLLOW-UP QUESTION FROM LARRY!)
I am also very disturbed that Kerry Trueman, as well, doesn't mention this question nor expands on the subject matter of my qestion. When will you reporters get some backbone and start investigating this subject? STOP fearing the BEEF INDUSTRY!
Continued...
KING: We have a call in San Diego, hello.
CALLER: Hello?
KING: Yes, go ahead. CALLER: I would like to know how the American meat industry can (could) possibly assure the American public that all meat is safe and free from Mad Cow, BSE, when, in fact, here in the United States, we test less than one percent of all of our cattle annually? Why don't we do it like Japan and other countries, and test 100 percent of our cattle?
KING: Patrick? BOYLE: Well, Excellent question. Uh we, We do extensive testing here in the United States for BSE. We have been looking for, for BSE since the early 1990s. Uh, It took us well over a decade to find one in Washington State. And that, that cow happened to walk across the border from Canada. But, Since we found that first one, we've done extensive testing. But we target our tests. We target it on the high-risk animals. Basically, older animals in our cattle population. The nature of the BSE disease is that it does not evidence itself until about five or a six-year period. So it doesn't make any sense, like Japan, for example, to test animals of all ages. BECAUSE You're not going to find it unless you look at the high-risk population of cattle. And that's what we've done very successfully AND INTENTIONALLY here in the United States.
I asked this question because I want the public to know that, along with the other diseases caused by the direct consumption of eating meat discussed on the show, there is a very real threat of mad cow being in our food supply, especially when here in the US we only test LESS THAN 1% ANNUALLY of our entire cattle population, for BSE! This is criminal and the public should be outraged!
I personally communicate with people who've had family members died of mad cow (vCJD) and all other forms of CJD (sCJD, iCJD, fCJD), which numbers are on the rise in the US and elsewhere. I firmly believe that the only way industry/gov't is getting away with keeping this from the public is because this disease (prion diseases) lay dorment in humans for anywhere from 10-50 years...by the time we fall ill, there will be NO recourse or way to specifically tie it to a particular meat product!
Continued...
Most people care about their health, the planet, and certainly don't want animals to suffer. Yet, most people eat animals on a daily basis. So, while I think it's great that we're opening up public dialogue about the dangers of meat consumption, I think we need to look beneath the surface to understand the underlying mentality that allows for such contradictions in our values and behaviors and enables such atrocities to occur in the first place. We need to examine the widespread belief system, carnism, that conditions us to eat meat from the moment we're weaned and discourages us from reflecting on this behavior. I think that the dialogue about whether to eat meat needs to include a conversation about the system that socializes us to act against our own interest -- and the interest of the animals and planet. Only when we look beneath the surface and deconstruct the complex mentality of meat, to examine the system of carnism, can we have a comprehensive discussion about the true perils of eating meat.
the question i want asked is why is michael vick history's greatest monster for fighting a couple dozen dogs while the factory farms in this country make his evil look like amateur hour and no one cares.
Life expectancy from cave-times thru, well, 1900 or so probably averaged about 45 yo (maybe much less in B.C. times), so having LOTS of kids...and having them before the women were 10 years away from their expected deaths...was rather important to us EXISTING.
Humans are wired to eat meat. Even the most ardent vegan will salivize like Pavlov's puppies when they're hungry & they smell cooking meat.
So I figure when society finally lock-downs our ability to control more urgent 'bad' genetic traits..like killing/beating the crap outta people who you don't know and/or who don't look/believe like you, forcefully satisfying our urges to procreate...you know, the trivial stuff....THEN we can discuss how/why we should suppress yet another biological urge.