Dog eat dog

AS OF THIS WRITING, about a hundred people have died from vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease. Although every one of those deaths was tragic and unnecessary, they must be viewed in a larger perspective. Roughly the same number of people die every day in the United States from automobile accidents – and yet we do not live in fear of cars. At the moment there is no cure for vCJD, and it is impossible to predict how many people will get the disease by eating tainted meat. A great deal of scientific uncertainty still surrounds various attributes of the pathogen, such as the degree of infectivity among humans and the size of an infectious dose. About 800,000 cattle with mad cow disease were unwittingly eaten by people in Great Britain. One crucial determinant of the eventual death toll is the average incubation period for vCJD. That statistic is currently unknown. If it takes about ten years for most infected people to develop the disease, then we are now in the middle of the epidemic, and perhaps a thousand or so will die. If the average incubation period is twenty, thirty, or forty years – as the latest science suggests – then the epidemic is just beginning, and hundreds of thousands may die. Time will tell.

Regardless of whether mad cow causes a small outbreak among humans or a deadly modern plague, it will haunt the beef industry for years, much as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl changed attitudes toward nuclear power. The spread of BSE in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE‑infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health risk was strenuously denied, in order to protect exports of British beef. Scientists who disagreed with the official line were publicly attacked and kept off government committees investigating BSE. Official denials of the truth delayed important health measures and led to some absurdities. The British decision to keep some of the most infective cattle parts (brains, spleens, spinal materials, thymus glands, and intestines) out of the human food supply was prompted not by health or agricultural officials, but by a leading manufacturer of pet foods. Worried by mounting evidence that mad cow disease might have the ability to cross species barriers, Pedigree Master Foods decided to keep cattle offal out of its products and told the Ministry of Agriculture that it was a good idea to do the same with food intended for human consumption. Meanwhile, British children were being served some of the nation’s cheapest meats – hamburgers, sausages, and mince pies full of potentially contaminated offal – because the 1980 Education Act had eliminated government subsidies for nutritious school meals.

A great many British pets were eating safer food than the British people, until November of 1989, when the government banned the sale of cattle offal and its use in the manufacture of ground beef. Seven months later, the worst fears of Pedigree Master Foods were confirmed; a Siamese cat named Max died in Bristol from a feline variant of BSE, after eating contaminated cat food. The death of “Mad Max,” as the tabloids dubbed him, proved that mad cow could indeed cross the species barrier. Nevertheless, the British government denied for six more years that the disease posed any risk to human beings.

Governments throughout Europe ignored the interests of consumers while protecting those of agribusiness. A recent report by the French senate found that from 1988 to 2000 the agriculture ministry in that country minimized the danger of mad cow and “constantly sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary measures.” Health officials were repeatedly ignored in order to block decisions that “might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the agri‑foodstuffs industry.” Great Britain banned the feeding of ruminants to ruminants in 1988, but continued to export animal feed potentially contaminated with BSE for another eight years – shipping about 150 million pounds of the stuff to dozens of countries and thereby turning a local outbreak of mad cow into one with worldwide ramifications. Other countries in the European Union imported the cheap British feed and then exported it to North Africa and the Middle East.

The recent outbreak of mad cow disease in Japan was most likely caused by infected feed from Europe. Japanese agricultural officials displayed remarkable incompetence in responding to the threat of BSE. Five years after the British government acknowledged the link between BSE and serious illness in human beings, Japanese farmers were still feeding meat‑and‑bonemeal to their cattle, without violating any law. When the Scientific Steering Commission of the European Commission warned in June of 2001 that such practices created a high risk of a BSE outbreak, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) strongly denied the risk and blocked publication of the EU report. Three months later, a Japanese cow tested positive for BSE. A senior MAFF official assured the public that the animal’s carcass had been “disposed of.” In fact, MAFF had inadvertently allowed the tainted meat to be rendered into animal feed.

Today nations with BSE must not only confront the prospect of slaughtering millions of potentially infected cattle, but must also figure out what to do with their remains. In Great Britain, about a billion pounds of rendered cattle sit at waste sites, vast mounds of fine brown powder, awaiting incineration. In Japan, plans are being made to blend rendered cattle with concrete – and use the mixture as a building material. In Denmark, a company is now erecting the world’s first power plant that generates electricity by burning cattle.

Thanks to the McDonald’s Corporation, the FDA’s animal feed restrictions are most likely being obeyed in the United States. But those prohibitions may not be strict enough to prevent the spread of BSE. The feeding of all animal proteins to all farm animals has been banned throughout the European Union. Such a ban was justified as a means of preventing hog and poultry feed from winding up in cattle troughs. The ban will also, however, halt the transmission of mad cow through new and unexpected means. John Collinge – a professor at London’s Imperial College School of Medicine and a prominent member of the British government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee – believes that BSE may easily cross the species barrier and survive undetected in animals that outwardly show no symptoms of the disease. If pigs or poultry were to be found silently carrying mad cow, the FDA’s feed restrictions would prove futile. The continued use of cattle blood in cattle feed seems especially unwise. “All cannibalistic recycling is potentially dangerous,” Collinge warns, “and I have said that repeatedly.”

The USDA, the FDA, and the American Meat Institute oppose any additional prohibition on what can be fed to livestock. They argue that new restrictions are unnecessary, because mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States. Their argument on behalf of continuing to feed animal proteins to livestock is a risky form of denial, an exercise in wishful thinking. By the time Great Britain discovered its first two cows with BSE, at least 60,000 other cattle there were already infected. The claim that mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States is accurate, as of this writing. The USDA, however, has not tried very hard to find it. “If you don’t look, you won’t find,” says Dr Perluigi Gambetti, a BSE expert who heads the National Prion Disease Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University. “Unless we test more, we will never know if we have it here.” Since 1990, approximately 375 million cattle have been slaughtered in the United States, and about 15,000 of them were tested for mad cow. Belgium, with a cattle herd roughly one‑thirtieth the size of ours, plans to test 400,000 for mad cow disease every year.

The current FDA feed rules are primarily concerned with efficiency and utility, not public health. They allow cattle to be fed pigs, pigs to be fed cattle, cattle to be fed poultry, and poultry to be fed cattle. They allow dogs and cats to be fed dogs and cats. Although leading American manufacturers promise never to put rendered pets into their pet food, it is still legal to do so. A Canadian company, Sanimal Inc., was putting 40,000 pounds of dead dogs and dead cats into its dog and cat food every week, until discontinuing the practice in June, 2001. “This food is healthy and good,” said the company’s vice president of procurement, responding to critics, “but some people don’t like to see meat meal that contains any pets.”

Perhaps the most effective action taken by the federal government to prevent the introduction of BSE to the United States – a 1989 ban on imports of livestock and feed from Great Britain – was the one action that threatened no economic harm to the American meat industry. The ban on imports, like any protectionist measure, helped American producers. But a strict FDA prohibition of all animal protein in animal feeds would reduce some of the profit that American agribusiness firms can derive from vertical integration. At the moment, the most common source of animal protein in poultry feed isn’t hogs or cattle. It’s poultry. Tyson Foods takes leftover chicken meat and skin and intestines from its poultry slaughterhouses, ships them to Tyson feed plants, adds them to chicken feed, and then provides the feed to Tyson growers, so that baby chicks can eat their ancestors. The Tyson feed mill in Buzzard Bluff, Arkansas, processes about 10 million pounds of chicken parts every week.

The mad cow epidemic has greatly reduced beef consumption in Europe and Japan, devastating farmers who raise cattle. Livestock practices that once seemed to be cost‑efficient turned out to be disastrously inefficient. Feelings of anger and betrayal among consumers have prompted a fundamental reappraisal of agricultural policies. Food safety, animal welfare, and environmental concerns are gaining precedence over the traditional agribusiness emphasis on production levels. The Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Austria are seeking basic, structural changes in how European food is produced. Even Great Britain now seems to be questioning its reliance on high‑volume, industrialized farming. For years the Labour government of Tony Blair had forged close ties with leading food processing, supermarket, and fast food companies. Blair’s handling of the foot‑and‑mouth epidemic seemed more influenced by the export needs of Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, than by the latest scientific evidence on the efficacy of vaccines. His unapologetic defense of a £15,000 political donation from the McDonald’s Corporation prompted critics to call the majority party “McLabour.” His appointee to serve as Rural Recovery Coordinator, Chris Haskins, headed a large food processing firm, ran a dairy that supplied the milk for McDonald’s milkshakes, and publicly belittled the prospects for small farms and organic agriculture. Nevertheless, even Lord Haskins proposed a shift of EU agricultural policy in October of 2001, arguing that subsidies should be awarded to farms whose production methods do not harm the environment.

The German government has taken the lead on this issue in the EU, calling for the de‑industrialization of agriculture and planning to make 20 percent of its farmland organic by the year 2010. “Things will no longer be the way they are,” declared Renate Kuenast, who serves as the German minister for agriculture – and for consumer protection. Kuenast says that Germans must develop the same reverence for their food that they’ve always had for their beer. Under a German law that dates back to the early sixteenth century, no additives can be put into beer, which must be made using only water, hops, and barley. Vowing to outlaw the use of antibiotics and other additives in animal feed, Kuenast offers a revolutionary alternative: “Our cows should get only water, grain, and grass.”

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century – a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science. The same mindset that would add 4‑methylacetophenone and solvent to your milkshake would also feed pigs to cows. Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable – and humble. It should know its limits. People can be fed without being fattened or deceived. This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense, a sense of humor about brand essences and loyalties, a view of food as more than just fuel. Things don’t have to be the way they are. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.