I like red meat. Nothing tastes as wonderful as a barbecued porterhouse steak, a great big hunk of dead cow seared quickly and then savored over a low flame and served in its own juices and maybe with a pinch of salt but no sugary sauces to mask the juicy tender subtlety of dead cow. Sorry, cows, that's just the way I feel. And I feel that way despite my growing belief that cows may be the smartest creatures in the entire U.S. Beef industry.
Some years ago a meat packing plant in Texas actually sued the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA had threatened to pull their inspectors and shut down the plant because of repeated and excessive amounts of e-coli found in the companies final beef product - most of which went into the Federal funded school lunch program. Lawyers for the plant argued in court, and before the press that the U.S.D.A. did not specifically have the authority to regulate bacterial levels in beef. Besides, the owner told a local newspaper, the problem was not his plant. The problem was the darn cattle. The e-coli came in with them.
It was the perfect example of ideological stupidity, produced by charging about while wearing intellectual blinders. The owner seemed to have forgotten he was in the business of selling beef. And the more people who believed his beef even might be infected with e-coli the less beef he sold. His legal arguments were technically correct, as the judge agreed, but were still short sighted enough to qualify as blind to his own self interest. But such poor eyesight seems to be endemic in the U.S. beef industry. They seem at times a bunch of mad cowboys intent upon a breakneck charge over the nearest economic cliff while riding generically blind ideological ponies. These cowboys should not be herding cattle they should be herding lemmings. To this day there remains substantial resistance within the U.S. beef industry to universal testing of cattle for Mad Cow Disease.
This is a $78 billion goose here that lays about $35 billion dollars worth of golden eggs each yer. And the most quoted argument in opposition to testing each and every one of the 33 million beef carcasses processed last year for Bovine Spongiform Encelphalopathy (BSE), is that it would cost the industry one billion dollars. One billion - 35 billion. Am I missing something here? Is it just me or is that about the dumbest argument since "I won't wear seat belts because I might not be able to get out of the car after the accident I prefer the risk of being thrown from the car DURING the accident."
In 2002, before the first BSE infected cow was detected in the U.S, we exported 9% of our beef, worth about $2.6 billion. Last year, after just 2 cases of BSE detected in the previous four years that export percentage was down to 2.5%, valued at a mere $552 million. That looks to me like a $2 billion loss to avoid a $1 billion expense. And the reason Asia (primarily Japan and Korea) have stopped importing U.S. Beef is we don't test every cow. Before the arrival of BSE the average price of U.S. beef was $4.32 a pound. Just one year later it was down to $3.75 a pound.
Even adjusted for the cyclical shifts in beef production (it takes a couple of years for a calf to become a Porterhouse), the numbers seem obvious. Is there something in the Red State water supply that prevents people from noticing that four minus one equals one more than four minus two?
Does anyone in the vast Red states actually think BSE is going away? This year the USDA budget allows for the testing of only 40,000 cattle - forty thousand out of 33 million. Does anyone actually think that a border that can't stop big things like human beings and baggies of cocaine is going to stop something as tiny and numerous as errant proteins, called prions - the cause of both BSE and Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (the human form.). Prions have now been detected in the liver, kidney and pancreas of rodents, whose commercial feeds still contain bits and pieces of other rodent brains and spinal cords. That is how you spread BSE and HCJ.
And if you are a vegetarian, you can stop smirking at us doomed meat eaters. Beef "by products" are used extensively in make up, and the FDA has determined that those nasty errant proteins can be transferred just as easily through the skin, through an open cuta popped pimple or a little eyeliner in the eye, as through the intestines. So, die, lettuce eaters, die with the rest of us, poisoned because the people who grow our beef are just too stupid to avoid being slaughtered in marketplace.
You know, this could have been what killed off the dinosaurs; errant proteins and no business sense whatsoever.