Afterword: the meaning of mad cow

Fast Food Nation was published on April 26, 2001, as an outbreak of foot‑and‑mouth disease spread across Great Britain, providing ghastly televised images of sheep and cattle burning in funeral pyres. At the same time, European governments were beginning to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cattle potentially infected with mad cow disease (BSE). These two calamities no doubt generated interest in the book and its critique of industrialized agriculture. Long after mad cow and foot‑and‑mouth receded from the news, however, Fast Food Nation continued to attract readers. Its success should not be attributed to my literary style, my storytelling ability, or the novelty of my arguments. Had the same book been published a decade ago, with the same words in the same order, it probably wouldn’t have attracted much attention. Not just in the United States, but throughout western Europe and Japan, people are beginning to question the massive, homogenizing systems that produce, distribute, and market their food. The unexpected popularity of Fast Food Nation , I believe, has a simple, yet profound, explanation. The times are changing.

Aside from a brief mention on page 202, Fast Food Nation did not address mad cow disease or its implications. When I started working on the book a few years ago, the threat of BSE in the United States seemed largely hypothetical. E. coli 0157:H7, on the other hand, was sickening tens of thousands of Americans every year. Those illnesses were often linked to the consumption of tainted ground beef, and the meatpacking industry’s refusal to deal effectively with the problem of fecal contamination seemed a good example of the weaknesses in America’s food safety system. The harms caused by E. coli 0157:H7 have not diminished since the publication of Fast Food Nation . But mad cow disease now poses an even greater potential threat to anyone who loves hamburgers – and to the companies that sell them. Among other things, this afterword provides a brief account of the risks that BSE may pose, the government efforts to reduce those risks, and the remarkable power that the major fast food chains wield over the meatpacking industry. Mad cow disease is important today, not just as a deadly foodborne illness, but also as a powerful symbol of all that is wrong about the industrialization of farm animals.

On March 29, 1996, the Food and Drug Administration announced that in order to prevent an outbreak of BSE in the United States, the agency would “expedite” new rules prohibiting the use of certain animal proteins in cattle feed. American consumer groups had been demanding tough feed restrictions for years and were planning to sue the FDA if it refused to take action. Nine days earlier, Stephen Dorrell, the British health minister, had surprised Parliament by acknowledging for the first time that mad cow disease might cross the species barrier and infect human beings – a possibility that his government had vehemently denied for years. Great Britain was soon engulfed in a mad cow panic. Ten young people had developed a previously unknown ailment, called new variant Creutzfeldt‑Jakob disease (vCJD), that literally destroyed their brains. The disease was tentatively linked to the consumption of tainted beef. Cattle that had eaten feed containing the remains of infected animals now seemed responsible for transmitting the pathogen to human beings. Some of the young people with vCJD, Science magazine noted, had been “keen consumers of beef burgers.” The McDonald’s Corporation promptly announced that it was suspending the purchase of British beef.

The FDA’s vow to act quickly soon encountered resistance from the American cattle, meatpacking, meat‑processing, feed‑manufacturing, and rendering industries. Animal protein was an inexpensive feed additive that promoted growth, and slaughterhouses produced huge volumes of waste that needed to go somewhere. At the time, American cattle were eating about 2 billion pounds of animal protein every year – mainly the remains of other cattle. About three‑quarters of all American cattle were being fed animal protein, and dairy cattle were the most likely to eat it in significant amounts. They were also the most likely to wind up as fast food hamburgers one day.

The National Renderers Association, the American Feed Industry Association, the Fats & Protein Research Foundation, and the Animal Protein Producers Industry opposed an FDA ban. Spokesmen for the rendering industry asserted that the link between mad cow disease and human illness was “totally unsupported by any scientific evidence.” They said that a ban on feeding dead cattle to cattle would be “unfeasible, impractical, and unenforceable.” They thought any feed change should remain voluntary; strict new FDA regulations would bring little real benefit and cause great economic harm. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association opposed a total ban on animal proteins, suggesting instead that feed restrictions should be limited to certain organs known to transmit mad cow: brains, spinal cords, eyeballs. The American Meat Institute called for muscle meat to be exempted from any FDA ban, along with fats, blood, blood products, and intestinal material. The National Pork Producers Council said there was absolutely no harm in allowing cattle to continue eating dead pigs.

Consumer groups and public health officials wanted strict controls on what livestock could be fed. The Consumers Union demanded a total ban on the feeding of “all mammal remains to all food animals.” Such a ban was now being imposed in Great Britain; scientists there had demonstrated in 1990 that pigs could be infected, through injection, with a variant of mad cow disease. Moreover, a British ban on the feeding of ruminants (goats, sheep, cattle, elk, deer) to other ruminants had not been entirely successful at halting the spread of BSE. Prohibited material intended for poultry and hogs had, one way or another, still wound up being fed to cattle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that, at a bare minimum, the feeding of ruminants to ruminants had to be outlawed in order to prevent an outbreak of BSE.

On August 4, 1997, almost a year and a half after the FDA promised a speedy response to the threat of mad cow, new animal‑feed restrictions took effect. “The United States has no BSE,” the agency declared, “and the final rule provides the necessary feed controls… should BSE occur here.” The FDA described its new ban as “mammalian‑to‑ruminant, with exceptions.’ Dead sheep, goats, cattle, deer, mink, elk, dogs and cats could no longer be fed to cattle. Rendering plants and feed mills would have to prevent these banned ingredients from mingling with feedstuffs that cattle were still allowed to eat: dead horses, pigs, and poultry; cattle blood, gelatin, and tallow; and plate waste collected from restaurants, regardless of what kind of meat those leftovers contained. Extensive records had to be kept on the disposition of various animal proteins, and feeds that were now prohibited for cattle had to be clearly labeled as such. There were no new restrictions, however, on what could be fed to poultry, hogs, zoo animals, or pets. Indeed, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the National Food Processors Association, and the Pet Food Institute successfully lobbied against any new labeling requirement for pet foods. These industry groups rightly worried that the FDA’s proposed warning label – “Do not feed to ruminants” – might alarm consumers about what their pets were actually being fed.

The dire predictions of the meat, feed, and rendering industries – their claims that new FDA rules would create havoc and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars – proved unfounded. Cattle remains that had previously been fed to cattle were instead fed to pets, hogs, and poultry. Aside from slightly higher transportation costs, the new feed restrictions had a negligible economic effect. One rendering industry supplier told Meat Marketing & Technology magazine that the whole rule‑making process had proven to be “a remarkable example of cooperation between the industry and the FDA.” That cooperation, another rendering executive said, had “protected the beef industry and the rendering industry” without creating “a mood in the country that recycled protein ingredients would be harmful.” The trade journal noted that some of the wording of the new FDA rules had been taken “verbatim” from the rendering industry’s own recommendations.

In the United States, mad cow gradually receded from the headlines – until January, 2001. For more than a decade, countries in the European Union had assured the public that BSE had not been detected in their cattle. Which was true, because relatively few of their cattle had been tested for the disease. Once widespread testing began in Europe, the actual scale of the mad cow epidemic started to become clear. Switzerland was the first to begin routine testing; the number of BSE cases there soon doubled. Then Denmark began testing and discovered its first infected animal, followed by new cases in Spain and Germany. After widespread testing began in France, the number of BSE cases there increased fivefold. On January 1, 2001, the European Union launched a program that required BSE testing for all cattle older than 30 months. Intended to calm fears of mad cow, the EU program had the opposite effect, as more and more infected cattle were discovered. On January 15, the first case of BSE was found in Italy. The infected animal was discovered at a slaughterhouse near Modena that supplied ground beef to McDonald’s restaurants in a number of European countries.

The fear of mad cow disease caused beef sales in the EU to plummet by as much as 50 percent, and news from the United States was hardly reassuring to consumers there. A federal investigation of American feed mills and rendering plants found that many companies had not been taking the threat of mad cow – or the FDA’s new feed regulations – very seriously. More than one‑quarter of the firms handling “prohibited” feed neglected to add a label warning that it should never be given to cattle. One‑fifth of the firms handling both prohibited feeds and feeds approved for cattle had no system in place to prevent commingling or cross‑contamination. And about one out of every ten rendering firms was completely unaware that the FDA had passed feed restrictions to prevent the spread of mad cow. In Colorado, more than one‑quarter of the cattle‑feed producers had somehow never heard about the new rules.

The federal government’s apparent inability to keep prohibited feed away from cattle prompted the McDonald’s Corporation to take action. The company’s sales in Europe had already fallen by 10 percent, and American publicity about mad cow was raising doubts about the wisdom of eating any hamburgers, let alone Big Macs. Officials from the FDA and the USDA, as well as representatives from the leading meatpacking and rendering companies, were quietly invited to discuss the feed issue at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. On March 13, the McDonald’s Corporation announced that its ground beef suppliers would be required to supply documentation showing that FDA feed rules were being strictly followed – or McDonald’s would no longer buy their beef.

IBP, Excel, and ConAgra immediately agreed to follow McDonald’s directive, vowing that no cattle would be purchased without proper certification. Every rancher and feedlot would have to supply signed affidavits promising that banned feeds had never been given to their cattle. The American Meat Institute, which routinely fought against any mandatory food‑safety measures proposed by the federal government, made no complaint about these new rules. “If McDonald’s is requiring something of their suppliers, it has a pretty profound effect,” said an AMI spokeswoman. What the FDA had failed to achieve – after nearly five years of industry consultation and halfhearted regulation – the McDonald’s Corporation accomplished in a matter of weeks. “Because we have the world’s biggest shopping cart,” a McDonald’s spokesman explained, “we can use that leadership to provide more focus and more order throughout the beef system.”