Hello, everyone...  It is interesting that this subject should come up...
Considering that there is a story on Dateline NBC here in the US about
contaminated meat...
     Ginny

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From: "Movement for restoration of democracy in Gambia [NY]"
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To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: please read


How good it is, to hear you guys demand Hallal Meat, but you are missing the
big picture of GENETIC TAMPERING, RENDERING [THE SCIENCE OF FEEDING DEAD
ANIMALS TO OTHER ANIMALS...do you remember Oprah winfrey's fight against the
USA Cattlemen's Association?], BGH/RBGH [ growth hormones to produce more
millk in cattles], MAD COW, FOOT & MOUTH...DOES THIS RING A BELL. The
disgusting thing about the Hallal deceptive advertising, especially in New
York, is that, any Tom, Dick or Suzie can put up a Halal sign at his/her
meat
market, but a drunken Kafir does the slaying of these animals. Therefore, be
wise and selective on patronising and consumption of meat and meat
by-products.
Please read on the following:
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.>
Volume IX, Number III
<A HREF="http://www.emagazine.com/may-june_1998/_0598contents.html">May-June
1998</A>CONTACTSThe Trouble With Meat
Food & Water
RR1, Box 68D
Walden, VT 05873World Resources Institute
1709 New York Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20006
Tel. (202) 662-2542Worldwatch Institute
1776 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036
Tel. (202) 452-1999Building a Livable Future
Center for a Livable Future
111 Market Place, Suite 840
Baltimore, MD 21202
Tel. (410) 223-1608     COVER STORY
The Trouble With Meat
Why Oprah Was Right, The Texas Cattlemen Were Wrong,
And The Crisis Facing The American Hamburger Isn't Over
By Jim Motavalli>In 1992, when he was 11 years old, Damion Heersink of the
southeastern Alabama town of Dothan attended a Boy Scout campout, and
unwittingly ate a quarter-sized piece of uncooked hamburger. It's certainly
not unusual for kids to eat hamburgers: American kids eat an average of five
of them a week, mostly in fast-food restaurants. But Damion's hamburger was
contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, a particularly virulent but by no means
uncommon bacteria that is caused by fecal contamination of meat, and
aggravated by the grinding process that produces hamburger.Damion was one of
the lucky ones. Although he became very sick and endured a lengthy
hospitalization, he lived. His mother, Mary Heersink, who has become an
articulate spokesperson for Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), a national
group
lobbying for reform of food safety laws, says, "We're very lucky to have him
alive; if he hadn't had very aggressive treatment [due to the work of his
physician father and a family friend who specializes in E. coli cases], he
would have died." Because of his illness, Damion lost 30 percent of his lung
tissue, and the lining of his heart. His immune system was shattered,
leaving
him at constant risk of infection. His verbal ability was impaired, his
kidney function limited, and he will be susceptible to hypertension later in
life.> >Lauren Beth Rudolph died after eating a cheeseburger laced with E.
coli
0157:H7 (right).
© Index Stock PhotographyLauren Beth Rudolph, a six-year-old from Carslbad,
California with blond bangs and an engaging smile, wasn't as lucky as
Damion,
who is now filling out college applications. In late 1992, Lauren Beth ate a
fast-food cheeseburger laced with E. coli. Like Damion, she was attacked by
hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a wasting disease that invades nearly every
organ in the body and destroys the blood's ability to clot. But unlike
Damion, she couldn't fight it off, and became one of the 10 percent of E.
coli victims who die from severe HUS, which itself kills an estimated 500
people a year. Lauren Beth succumbed to a heart attack a few days before the
beginning of 1993, a year which would be marked by a massive outbreak of E.
coli and the deaths of three children at Seattle, Washington Jack in the Box
restaurants. Almost unknown and unidentified as a risk factor in meat until
the early 1980s, E. coli O157:H7 has become the leading cause of kidney
failure in American children. In 1997 alone, some 25 million pounds of
hamburger were found to be E. coli infected and recalled.Unfortunately, the
grim reality of E. coli infection is not an isolated stain on the reputation
of an otherwise hygenic American meat supply. E. coli, along with other
meat-borne pathogens like Salmonella ententidis and Campylobacter, both
found
in poultry, can be traced to our highly productive "factory farms."
Genetically "optimized" pigs, cattle, sheep, turkeys and chickens are raised
in tightly packed confinement systems--an ideal breeding ground for
bacteria.
And the looming problem is made far worse by the filthy conditions in
America's slaughterhouses, where the profit motive has accelerated line
speeds and made effective government meat inspection nearly impossible.The
industry's answer to contaminated meat isn't basic reform of its production
methods. It prefers cheaper alternatives, like chemical "dehairing" of
cattle
and the use of Superglue to seal up chickens' hindquarters--both to remove
sources of the fecal contamination that carries bacteria. And last December,
the industry won Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to attack the
contamination problem through large-scale irradiation of meat with gamma
rays
from nuclear byproducts cobalt-60 and cesium-137. Critics say the benefits
of
what the food industry prefers to call "cold pasteurization" (it does kill
E.
coli, for instance), are outweighed by its dangers, and that a far more
comprehensive program is necessary to protect the meat supply.Michael Colby,
executive director of the Vermont-based Food & Water, says, "They're
allowing
the filth to flourish, then zapping it with radiation that's the equivalent
of tens of millions of chest X-rays. The process reduces both the vitamin
content and the nutritional value of the meat." Caroline Smith DeWaal of the
Center for Science in the Public Interest agrees that "irradiation is
definitely being oversold as a solution to food safety problems. We need to
make sure the filth is removed earlier in the process." The industry is
trying to silence its critics (including Colby, who received a warning
letter) through the "food disparagement" laws that are on the books in 13
states. These laws made it possible to prosecute talk show host Oprah
Winfrey
for saying that the threat of "mad cow" disease had stopped her from eating
hamburgers.Meat: A Global AddictionIt's important to look at the American
way
of producing and consuming meat, because it is, increasingly, a model for
the
rest of the world. Despite numerous health advisories, from the American
Cancer Society to the American Dietary Association, that counsel consumers
to
limit their intake of high-fat animal protein, U.S. per capita consumption
of
beef and pork has steadily risen since 1970, and poultry consumption has
almost tripled. A record 8.5 billion chickens were slaughtered in 1997
alone.>
Some 70 percent of the world's eight billion acres of dry range land has
become at least partly desertified as a result of grazing.

Diet is also firmly established as a leading factor in cancer risk: Dr.
Walter Willett of Harvard's Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology cites
more than 200 studies that suggest there is a reduced cancer risk in people
who cut back on animal products and eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. And
while we may have come to believe that heart disease is a natural and
expected end to life, the incidence of this number one killer of Americans
is
much lower in countries that adhere to a low-fat diet with minimal animal
products. Alan Durning, director of Northwest Environmental Watch, puts it
simply, "If you think about individual lifestyle choices Americans can make,
eating less meat should be in the top 10." Currently, the Chinese have only
five percent of the heart disease risk of western societies, but those
figures are likely to change as the Chinese diet increasingly resembles our
own.
Even with "mad cow" outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in
Great Britain, world meat production rose 1.6 percent in 1996, to 195
million
tons. Global production and per capita consumption have doubled since 1950.
Meat-based diets are on the rise most spectacularly in Asia, whose rising
affluence led to a doubling of meat consumption between 1970 and 1992. Japan
is now the number one export market for U.S. beef and pork, and it has also
experienced outbreaks of meat-borne disease, including an E. coli O157:H7
epidemic in 1996 that killed at least seven people and injured 8,700.
Although U.S. beef was not held responsible for the outbreak, the resulting
furor seriously damaged U.S. sales to Japan.Meat production in China, which
experienced a 40 percent jump in per capita income between 1990 and 1994,
has
risen faster than anywhere else in the world. China, the most populous
country in the world, now accounts for a quarter of the world's production
and consumption of meat. Last year, China's Xinhua news agency reported that
there are 1,000 foreign or joint-venture meat processing projects underway
in
the country. "Extensive international cooperation is needed to push the meat
industry to a new stage of development," said Vice Minister of Internal
Trade
He Jihai at a world meat conference in Beijing.>In 1997, 8.5 billion
chickens
were slaughtered on automated--and
often contaminated--production lines like this one.But that "new stage" of
intensive agriculture may bring with it some western-style problems. Last
December, the government of Hong Kong ordered the slaughter of more than one
million chickens, the former colony's whole population, after a strain of
influenza virus killed four people. Eighty percent of Hong Kong's poultry
comes from farms in mainland China. Building a Livable Future

>Dr. Robert Lawrence, one of the founders of the Center for a Livable Future
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, puts an ironic twist on an old
dinner table admonishment. Instead of telling kids to eat all their food
because of "the starving children in China," the modern version is, "Don't
put all that food on your plate--think of all the starving future
generations." The notion that a period of food scarcity might be ahead, and
that our wasteful, unhealthy, factory-farmed, meat-based diet is at the root
of the problem, provided the impetus for the new center's founding last
year.
Dr. Polly Walker, the center's director, compares the task of changing
people's diets to that of getting Americans to recycle. "Recycling didn't
change the standard of living, but it changed the way people did things,"
she
says. "It was assumed then that Americans would never clean and sort their
containers, but now it's a natural part of living."Walker sees the center's
work as "getting at the nexis of consumption, environment, land use and
modern farming methods. The purpose is to affect policy and change public
opinion." To that end, the center held its first conference, "Equity, Health
and the Earth's Resources: Food Security and Social Justice," at the school
last November. In a talk entitled, "What is a Healthy Diet?" Dr. T. Colin
Campbell of Cornell University discussed his work with The China Health
Project, which has studied the diets of Chinese peasants since the early
1980s. His conclusion: the more plant-based foods in the diet, the lower the
incidence of disease. "The Chinese who eat the least fat and animal products
have substantially lower rates of cancer, heart attack and several other
chronic, degenerative diseases," Dr. Campbell says. Ironically, Chinese
cities are trying to play catch up with the west: Shanghai, for instance,
has
Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and McDonald's.While it's not an animal
rights group, the center concludes that modern intensive animal agriculture
methods "harm animals unnecessarily and produce food inefficiently." Henry
Spira, the veteran activist who is coordinator of Animal Rights
International
in New York, says the center's work "is important because it focuses on
solving problems," he says. "It's not just a bunch of academics talking.
It's
a think tank, but also a 'do' tank."--Jim Motavalli


A global switch to meat-based diets and factory farming methods is very much
an environmental issue, both because of widespread land degradation as a
result of overgrazing and the increasing diversion of world grain supplies
and productive farm land to feed a burgeoning population of domesticated
animals. China, for instance, fed 17 percent of its grain to livestock in
1985; by 1994, that figure had risen to 23 percent. In the U.S.--the
model--70 percent of the grain produced is fed to animals. As Dr. Robert
Lawrence of the new Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (see sidebar)
points out, "The inefficiency of converting eight or nine kilograms of grain
protein into one kilogram of animal protein for human consumption would by
itself be sufficient argument against continuation of our present dietary
habits."Lester Brown of The Worldwatch Institute, whose report on likely
grain shortages in China caused an international furor in 1996, says,
"What's
happening in China teaches us that, despite rising affluence, our likely
world population of 10 billion people won't be able to live as high on the
food chain as the average American. There simply won't be enough food. Much
of the animal overgrazing we first reported in a 1991 paper is worse now
than
it was then. The pressures on the world's rangelands are more serious than
those on oceanic fisheries. We're pushing our natural systems to their
limits
and beyond, with the likely result that we'll see the growing impoverishment
of rural areas."It isn't only developing countries that may be forced to
reverse the current world trend toward heavier meat consumption. Brown's
position is bolstered by a 1995 report from the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, which said that Americans will probably be eating
far
less meat and dairy products by 2050. U.S. croplands, the report said, have
reached the limits of production, even as the U.S. population is projected
to
double in 50 years. The result, says association member David Pimentel of
Cornell University, is that the U.S. could cease to be a food exporter by
2025, and the American diet, now 31 percent animal products, could drop to
only 15 percent.In 1996, the World Food Summit in Rome took a decidedly
pessimistic tone about world food production, warning of an "unthinkable
Malthusian nightmare" if global output is not doubled in the next 30 years
to
meet an expanding population and an increasing demand for meat. According to
the British Independent, more than 800 million people do not get enough food
to meet their basic needs, and 82 countries--half of them in Africa--neither
grow enough food for their population nor can afford to import it.Waste and
DangerChina may be developing U.S.-style factory farming, but such intensive
methods are still unknown in the Third World, where raising animals for
slaughter is a much more haphazard affair. Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, for
instance, has no slaughterhouse at all, and animals are usually killed by
meat vendors themselves, often under totally unhygienic conditions. (One
popular site is located behind the toilets of a local pub.) Tanzania's
agricultural ministry has warned of outbreaks of typhoid, cholera and
tuberculosis if uncontrolled slaughter continues.Cattle, sheep and goats
graze half of the planet's land area, which is increasingly becoming
depleted
as a result. The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of the
world's eight billion acres of dry range land is at least moderately
desertified. As Worldwatch reports, persistent grazing makes bare ground
impermeable to rain, which then runs off, carrying topsoil with it. The
picture is not much better in wetter regions, because cattle have to compete
with farmers and are crowded into small areas, accelerating erosion and
degradation.Another major problem is animal wastes, which wash off farms and
into rivers and streams, polluting everything from groundwater in the Czech
Republic to the Chesapeake Bay. In the U.S., years of dumping hog waste into
North Carolina rivers has led to the bizarre spectacle of Pfiesteria
piscicida, a see

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