Let the Cows Come Home!

Photo courtesy PETA

Just before this past Thanksgiving, my 10-year-old son, a longtime, self-proclaimed vegetarian, surprised me by announcing that he was considering eating poultry and beef. “But I’ll only eat it if it wasn’t a cannibal and it ran free and happy until it, you know, died,” he added. The fact that my son understands the difference between factory farming and sustainable agriculture surprised me almost as much as his sudden openness to becoming a carnivore.

Instilling in children the importance of knowing where their food comes from and what it cost the Earth to put it on their plate is laudable, especially considering that when I was a child, “clean your plate” was the response to virtually any question I asked or comment I made about what I was eating. Knowing whether your hamburger began its life on cleared rainforest or in a factory farm is no longer simply about political consciousness—it could save your life.

The confirmation of bovine spongiform encephalitis (bse) or mad cow disease in the us last December—which, incidentally, caused my son and me to reconsider his plans to change his diet—has set just about everyone on edge, and makes knowing the source of your food ever more vital. Thanks to the confirmed appearance of BSE at home—and not simply Europe (where more than 200,000 cows have been slaughtered, according to Orion magazine, due to confirmed or suspected incidents of bse) or Canada—people are reconsidering what they eat.

“Shoppers should always ask: Who raised this meat, how was it fed, and under what conditions was it processed?” reads a January 6 action alert issued by the Weston A. Price Foundation for Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts. The foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1999 to disseminate the findings of the late dentist and nutrition pioneer Dr. Weston Price, whose 1970s photographic and scientific study of native people’s teeth and diet, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, is still considered the bible of nutritionists. The action alert points out that factory farming is to blame: “bse is not found in herds where the operators focus on balancing the nutrients in the soil and do not use synthetic pesticides.”

Environmentalists, health experts, and family farmers, among others, have been warning the public for the past 20 years about the dangers of eating factory-farmed and plant-packed meat and poultry. In the early 1970s there were less than 800 beef factory farms in the us, with the top four beef packers controlling 29 percent of cattle. By 2001, 18 beef plants had taken over 80 percent of the beef processing market. But even extreme increases in the incidence of food-borne diseases associated with meat-packing plants, like E. coli (now at an annual national rate of 20,000 cases with 500 deaths) and salmonella (now reaching two million cases and approximately 2,000 deaths per year), weren’t enough to cause the greater public to take a closer look at their diet. (Or the usda to tighten its enforcement of the meatpacking industry, which operates as a basically self-regulating entity.)