04.12.12

Old pink meat product

Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle at 11:59 am by George Smith

My lunch, revolting to some. Two hot dogs — actually cheaper turkey franks — and one for late in the afternoon. Since I’ve been doing the slime thing I wanted to let readers know: Of course I’m a hypocrite on meat. You have to be in this country.

I’m 90 percent sure turkey franks are made in a way similar to pink slime, from the worst cuts of the bird, stuff that used to be thrown away. Then sanitized, perhaps with ammonia, to kill all the salmonella and listeria.

And while I’ve been known to eat a raw hot dog in a pinch, mostly I boil them thoroughly. Once I even had something called a “Hot Dogger” that cooked by electrocution, making the hot dog part of a completed circuit you ran off the wall. (Did you ever have something like it? I would like to know.)

However, I’m also completely encouraged by the idea that one day, maybe soon, someone like Jamie Oliver will do a number on this, too, just the way pink slime was treated.

It will be a good thing because it’s the television coverage, complete with producer’s eye for unforced footage of mothers and kids going “Yuck!” and shrinking back in revulsion that galvanized consumer choice.

And if something is tossed off the market and more people keep thinking about the US agri-meat system, one in which toxic microbial growth is guaranteed, that’s very good.

As posted yesterday, the meat industry produces incomprehensible amounts of manure. The shit not only contaminates the cows on the outside when they stand in it, but also on the inside, when they are fed from grains cultivated in fields fertilized or tainted by runoff from it.

While bad practice, maybe — and it’s a small maybe — this wouldn’t have mattered so much but for one thing, toxic E. coli. It was not native to the cow intestine but now finds a home there and the way the meat industry does things is responsible. That’s the science of it.

It came about because the mass of excrement in proximity to the animal and meat processing makes for an excellent mixing process. And it cannot be ameliorated, therefore Rube Goldberg sanitation processing of the meat has become a feasible profit source.

So the technologies invented to cope with it are all band-aids, lousy inventions and jerry-bilt methods to diminish the numbers of dangerous microbes in the product — after the fact.

That’s the long and short of it.

From a security standpoint a bioterrorist can’t do as effective job as centrally placed business malfeasance in the food industry. It’s a topic the blog has discussed in the past when mentioning mass food poisonings caused by widespread bacterial contaminations in the last ten years.

Invariably, we have made and allowed an infrastructure in food processing which allows for casualties, presently factored out as an acceptable minor cost of doing business if the human losses are not too bad. If the profit margin is great enough a certain level of collateral damage in the way of foodborne illness and resulting fines are acceptable.

De facto, that makes the businessmen and companies fingered in food poisoning outbreaks better incidental bioterrorists than anyone purposeful.

For instance, in a multi-mail from the DailyKos last week:

Here’s the story. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) currently inspects all chicken and turkey carcasses for things like bruises, bile and feces before they are sent to further processing. However, the UDSA [sic] is now considering a pilot program that would eliminate that inspection and allow poultry processing plants to do whatever they want.

From now until April 26, the USDA is holding a public comment period on whether to go forward with this pilot program. During this comment period, we plan to submit tens of thousands of comments in opposition. Already, over 40,000 members of the Daily Kos community have signed our petition to the USDA …

I’m not a big believer in on-line petitions.

It wasn’t social networking that knee-capped the makers of pink slime. It was television, specifically Jamie Oliver and 60 Minutes, and well-placed articles in the New York Times.

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