By Wylie Harris
Text of Radio Piece
Aired on Touchstone Radio, KEOS 89.1
First aired January 27, 2004
Listen online at: http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd33-07.html
Since the discovery of mad cow disease in Washington state, the USDA has been performing a high-wire act. As its mouth assures consumers that the existing inspection systems give the U.S. the safest beef in the world, its hands quarantine the 14 % of the cattle it's been able to trace so far that entered the U.S. with the diseased one, and slaughter whole herds containing potentially exposed calves. Negotiators sent to lift foreign bans on U.S. beef are in similar straits, as the U.S. continues its own bans of beef from other countries where the disease, known as BSE, has appeared.
While it's true that there's no need to panic over BSE's first appearance in the U.S., the entire beef processing and packing industry is structured to foster rather than limit the risk of BSE, along with other health and environmental hazards. Efforts to downplay that fact are muting the call for needed change in the industry. This is particularly ironic given that the production end of the chain is well positioned to offer a much safer and saner alternative.
Ninety percent of U.S. beef cattle come from feedlots holding 500 or more animals. Tissues from ruminant animals – thought to be the source of BSE – have been banned from cattle feed since 1997, but the ban is enforced primarily by inspecting feedlot records, rather than the feed itself. Meanwhile, the need to prevent disease among the tightly confined animals leads to the widespread use of antibiotics, favoring the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of E. coli and other bacteria. Upon leaving the feedlots, 63 % of beef cattle are slaughtered and processed in 14 processing plants, each of which handles over a million animals a day. The sheer size of these plants means that any episode of contamination will be a mass one. This is why ConAgra's July 2002 recall of contaminated beef totaled 19 million pounds, and why a recent study found that half of the meat on supermarket shelves contained antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
But before they ever set hooves in a feedlot, over half the beef cattle in the U.S. begin life in herds smaller than 100 animals, eating mostly pasture grass. If they're not fed processed feeds, there's no known way for them to be exposed to BSE. And if they don't spend time in a feedlot, and are slaughtered in one of the small local plants that still dot the Plains, the resulting beef is much likelier to be free of BSE and bacteria, and leaner and healthier to boot. Manure spread around pastures doesn't accumulate into an environmental hazard the way it does in feedlots, and consumer dollars spent on locally raised and processed beef are a much-needed economic shot in the arm for rural communities. If the health, environmental, and economic benefits of pasture-raised beef sound good to you, you can start doing your part to change the beef industry by locating a local supplier at www.eatwellguide.org.