Adding in additional substances to the cows corn diet, such as remnant cow parts, has led to e-coli out breaks in humans and continued to spread mad cow disease. One such victim of e-coli poisoning was Kevin Kowalcyk at the age of two. He ingested e-coli O 157 H7 in a contaminated hamburger he ate in 2001; which developed into hemolytic-uremic syndrome and resulted in his death twelve days later. Unfortunately the beef was not recalled until 16 days after his death. This was probably due to the fact that cattle at CAFO’s spend all their time held up in concentrated pens standing in their own feces.
Many fruits and vegetables have a certain time of year that they are plentiful however they are now modified to ripen before their season. The majority of the meats in the meat department are boneless. Hamburgers have E. coli and it has proven to be fatal. Soy and corn are patented and owned by the world’s largest genetically modified organism company in the world Monsanto. Farmers are persecuted and sued for accidentally infringing on Monsanto’s seed “rights”.
This law was created after a young boy developed E. coli and died twelve days after. The hamburger meat he ate was infected with the disease and was not recalled until a good time after; but it was too late. Devastation drove his mother to push the passage of this law. This law did not pass because courts said the USDA did not have such authority. It was said that passing the law was not favored because it would add on to the costs of the industry.
As said by Manoj in an article Ethical and Environmental Reasons for being a Vegetarian, each year 90% of the grain produced in America is used for feeding the livestock such as cows, pigs, lambs and chicken. Every sixteen pounds of grain only gives us one pound of beef. That grain can be used to create bread, cereal, and other food products that can be used to help feed the nation and the nations poor. Along with this, a diet of grains, vegetables and beans will support about 20% more people than a diet of meat will. If we primarily produce vegetables and grains, this will drive down prices, making the food cheaper and more attainable to the nations poor and the planet would be about to support the population.
There are many “ranchers in the Dakota Beef program [that] are pioneers in the organic food movement and have been advocates of the need to treat cattle humanely, to reduce stress and to improve the quality of the beef they produce” (The Nibble). This illustrates how the Dakota Beef Company employees treat their cows nicely and when they kill them, they kill the cows as humanely as possible. According to the workers, this improves the quality of the beef because it reduces the stress the cows have in living in horrible conditions. The company advertises that they never use hormones, antibiotics, or any harmful chemicals “and [they] believe in the importance of sustainable farming, respecting the land and animals, to provide healthy food for [people’s families]” (Dakota Beef Company). Dakota Beef Company’s cows are all organic because they did not add any hormones, antibiotics, or any harmful chemicals to them.
In the early 1990s, the Beef Industry Council launched a new advertising campaign. A series of commercials showed sizzling steaks while a voiceover proclaimed “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner” (Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion & Research Board, 2012), and a walk through any grocery store’s meat department shows that slogan is still effectively shaping the American dinner table. But before these neatly-wrapped packages of meat go from the store to the table, they are part of a living animal. In his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan endeavors to illustrate the process of how a cow becomes a steak.
Once you start doing that the cows that are being eaten are the sickly one or the one’s who die on the farm and are sent to a rendering plant to be made into a powder mix that is in turn feed right back to the livestock. If the animal used to make the powder was a infected animal then the animal who consumes that animal will become sick also which in turn causes the meat we will be eating to become tainted. We still don’t know of the far reaching effects to eating a cow that’s infected with some sort of disease, scientist are just now starting to link Alzheimer’s disease and dementia to possible side effect to meat consumption. And what was once an honorable profession being a farmer is now nothing more than an assembly line of death and disease, if we don’t change something and fast we wont even be able to feed our growing population by the mid 2000 because over 50 percent of our farm land is being used just to feed our livestock for human consumption. The feed to meat ratio is way out of whack it takes 50pounds of feed to produce one pound of meat, at that rate we will never have enough crops to feed the worlds people and our food supply.
A pound of lamb could have easily been a goat, canned meats were usually and still are to this day a smorgasbord of normally unusable animal parts, and for a period of time beef was substituted with horse. Again, the industry and the government didn’t care as long as they were making money, nor did they care about the conditions for their workers. As a general rule, workers never had more than a ten year career span due to physical breakdown, amputation, mutilation, disease, or ultimately death. From facing such afflictions such as blood disorders, deadly boils, intestinal issues from inhalants and environment, and disfigurement to self-amputation, mutilation, spinal curvature from confined spaces, and death either by work environment or industrial accident, it is pretty safe to say that employees of this industry during this period had it just as bad if not worse than the
I agree with what he had said from my personal experience. When my father got married with my stepmother I got to have a new brother and he couldn’t stand the flavor of cheese and would not eat any food with it. As Katz said, this had to do with strong flavors affecting the culture. My new brother was not familiar with the strong flavor of cheese like in Mexico so he couldn’t stand it. A year passed and as he got familiar with the Mexican culture he started to eat and enjoy cheese.
The government or other organization that are concerned should and need to develop new set of policies that don’t subsidize over production and over eating. Pollan argues that corn is being used as substitutes for all other foods. This is why foods at fast-food outlets are cheap, because they are already paid for. “Farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day” (Pollan-20th Paragraph) Pollan gives out a tone between formal and informal towards his audience. With historical references mixed with a conversational tone.