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:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------------

 
.>
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

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask]
if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------