Over the weekend, the New York Times served us a gripping and heart-rending tale of how tens of thousands of cattle, millions of pounds of beef, hundreds of miles of transport, and acres of food processing plants all came together to produce devastating illness in one person, Stephanie Smith. Ms. Smith developed an unusually dire case of E. coli 0157H7 infection after eating a contaminated, pre-packaged ground beef patty, prepared at home.
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The Times did a fine job of highlighting the lapses and vulnerabilities in food processing and food inspection that account for food-borne illness in general, and the destruction of Ms. Smith's life in particular. No need for me to revisit those here. But the paper limited its investigative assault to aspects of the food supply and its oversight. The true problem resides one layer deeper than that: in the food demand.
Because we eat quite a lot of meat, quite a lot of meat must be produced. Large volume meat production means large farms, large herds, and large, centralized, highly-efficient processing plants. All of this translates into relative neglect of any individual steer, and a relative inability to inspect the quality of every steak.
More importantly, it means feed animals are raised as an industrial commodity, rather than as creatures. Their natural diets are disregarded, and they are fed whatever leads to the greatest profit. The origins of E. coli 0157H7 are not mysterious; they relate to changes in the feed of cattle. Cattle eating grasses have a healthy gastrointestinal tract that is not conducive to the growth of this mutant germ. Cattle who are fed grains and ground up bits of other animals—including their own species at times—develop abnormal conditions in their GI tract, such as a change in pH. It is this environment that gave us the bug that destroyed the health and perhaps the life of Stephanie Smith.
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Go as far as the Times article takes you, and you will be left to believe we need a higher standard of corporate responsibility, more vigilant inspection by federal authorities. Go one step beyond, and you will see we need to rethink our food. As long as we indulge our appetites for so much meat, hamburgers will be dangerous to our own health, as well as that of the planet. And they will challenge any semblance of morality in the treatment of our fellow creatures their large-scale consumption inevitably requires, and apparently condones. Perhaps you believe a more vigilant FDA, and a more responsible Cargill can compensate for this, but I do not.
Instead, I believe we need to fix this at the source, ourselves—by eating more plants and fewer hamburgers. The real reason hamburgers are dangerous is because we eat too many of them.
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