What You Need to Know About The Beef You Eat

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According to a May 21, 2007, article in The Wall Street Journal, reliance on junk food has shot up in recent years because the cost of feed corn has doubled due to the increased use of corn for ethanol production. According to the article, one farmer now feeds his cattle a ration that is 17 percent stale candy and 3 percent stale “party mix.” Another feeds a 100 percent byproduct diet, including French fries, tater tots and potato peels.

Some byproduct feedstuffs are high in protein and are considered a welcome addition to a high-grain diet. This list includes chicken feathers, salvaged pet food, ground-up laying hens (known as “spent hen meal”) and urea, a non-protein source of nitrogen synthesized from ammonia and carbon dioxide that is widely used as fertilizer. Urea can sicken cattle if not mixed carefully with feed.

The USDA does not require producers to tell you what the animals were fed.

An Industry Gone Mad

Beyond the obvious “yuck” factor, there is a compelling reason to restrict the use of byproduct feedstuffs in cattle production: It can spread mad cow disease, the most frightening disease in the history of the cattle industry. Until 1997, many of the cattle in the United States and Europe were fed blood, meat and bone meal from other cattle. Scraps of meat and bone left over from the slaughtering process were rendered (heat-treated), ground into meal and then fed back to the cattle. In essence, cattle were being fed to cattle, turning herbivores into carnivores — and cannibals.

No one realized that abnormal proteins called prions could survive the rendering process and transmit a deadly brain-wasting disease called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease. Now research strongly suggests that people who ingest meat from BSE-infected cattle can be inflicted with a related and deadly brain disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). As of July 2007, there have been three cases in the United States in people who are believed to have contracted the disease in other countries, and 201 cases worldwide, most of them (166) in the United Kingdom. Only 13 of the people who have contracted the disease since 1990 are still alive.

An Attempt to Clean Up the Feed Supply

Mad cow disease helped pull in the reins on an industry that was getting out of control. In 1997, the FDA ruled that the rendered products of cattle, sheep, deer and goats could no longer be fed to other ruminants. They also took steps to remove from the food supply the types of meat tissue most likely to carry BSE, including the small intestine, spinal cord, brain and other nervous tissue.

In 2004, the agency also banned the practice of feeding mammalian blood products to cattle, because new research showed that blood also can transmit BSE. Blood was a common ingredient in the milk “replacer” fed to dairy calves. Feeding poultry litter was banned as well. Poultry litter is a polite term for the blanket of manure, shavings, spilled feed, dead birds and feathers that accumulates on the floor of large poultry operations. It can be a hidden source of BSE-infected beef, because the FDA still allows meat and bone meal from cattle to be fed to chickens.

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