There's Shit in the Meat

From Karen Dawns book, Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals

In the film Fast Food Nation, an executive at a fictional fast-food chain explains to Greg Kinnear's character that there is a problem with fecal counts - in other words, "There's shit in the meat." The film and Eric Schlosser's nonfiction book, on which the film is based, explain that due to the rate at which cattle are slaughtered in modern plants, workers cannot remove intestines with the necessary care, and often, at least daily, feces spray all over the rest of the meat. Leaking intestines aren't the only cause of fecal splatter. The animals spend their lives in stinking feedlots covered in their own waste--when they are cut up that waste goes everywhere.

In his book, Schlosser tells us that a single fast-food hamburger can contain meat from hundreds of different cows. And one animal infected with E. coli can contaminate thirty-two thousand pounds of ground beef. He cites a USDA nationwide study of ground beef taken at processing plants, which found that 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material.

Rather than clean up the feedlots and slaughterhouses, the meatpacking industry and USDA want to start irradiating meat. Irradiated meat is zapped with gamma rays or X-rays. The rays do not kill microorganisms, but instead change their DNA so that they cannot reproduce. The industry hopes to allay public concerns about eating anything irradiated by changing the name and calling the process "cold pasteurization." But the public would still eat shit --irradiated shit.

In 2006, America had a spinach scare. Spinach from an organic farm in California carried E.coli. It sickened many people and killed one elderly woman. An op-ed in the New York Times explained that the spinach farm wasn't the culprit. That particular strain of E. coli thrived in the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain on industrial farms; up to 80 percent of dairy cattle carry it. Their infected manure contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to neighboring farms that grow vegetables.