Much of Recalled Meat Sent to Schools
To read beef recall story: Tainted beef makes it to schools.
To read other students comments on recent news stories
While it is known that the largest beef recall in the history of the United States occured last week, millions of pounds still went consumed without any effect on health. With a total of 143 pounds of recalled meat being sent throughout the country, a third of this total was sent to schools, with at least 20 million pounds consumed.
Personally, I think there is not enough focus on the treatment of cattle in this situation. Because there are no obvious health problems from the consumption of this meat, there needs to be more focus on the treatment of animals. When members of the Humane Society sent undercover tapes of workers kicking sick, crippled cattle, there was a national outcry over what we were about to be eating. It's shocking to me that people are more consumed with their food than what happened to their food before they ate it. It seems obvious that there would have been no recall if the animals were treated well to begin with.
Yet another thing that I find shocking is that members of the Humane Society, NOT a government organization, had to do the undercover work to unveil the situation at hand. What does this say about the USDA and the Food and Health Organization? Obviously they aren't doing their part in protecting the health of cattle and other food items that have posed as problems in the past. With the plant from California producing about a fifth of the meat in federal lunch programs, there needs to be a strict eye on their process and safety regulations to ensure the health of both the population and our livestock.
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California Beef Recall
I think that one of the issues with the California beef recall is that not enough people are concerned with where their meets and poultry are coming from. This lack of interest allows people like the California Slaughterhouse to treat the animals however they want because there is little intervention or inquiry. If we were more interested in humane slaughter house conditions then issues of mistreatment wouldn’t appear. But it seems that the public would rather ignore the process of observing how their beef is getting to them. I don’t think that people pay attention to what happens in slaughterhouses, if they did there would probably be a lot more vegetarians I the world. I have noticed that people try to ignore the middle procedure; most don’t want to think about how there hamburger was once a living mammal like themselves.
Great points
You both make great points: Why is it the Humane Society that is bringing this to the surface? Why is not more attention given to the treatment of cattle -- not only out of a sense of morality but also out of a sense of promoting good health? And what do consumers know about what they are eating?
An interesting addition to this piece would be to chronicle your own eating habits...what meat do you eat and where does it come from?
I agree, to an extent, with Aaron that we tend to "ignore the process of observing how beef is getting to us..." but it's more that we aren't active consumers AND the information is not readily available to us.
Since some of you are taking journalism courses, the next questions are "What should the press be doing about this? What is their role in finding out more about our food, how it's created/raised/prepared?" And how is journalism affected by corporate interests, ie., would newsrooms have second thoughts nowadays about doing an expose on a major beef company if, say, it were a major employer in the area and, perhaps, a big advertsier, and a major player in the local economy?
Now the easy answer is to say, "The media, of course, would be inhibited by such outside pressures." But how? From experience I can say that such pressure is never direct -- it is indirect. And those pressures are INCREASING as more and more media companies shrink staff in an effort to maintain profits.
But I'll also say that many many newsrooms do NOT back down but are, in some ways, at a loss as to how to get at the truth in stories like that. For instance, it's against journalistic ethics to use hidden cameras, or to pose as someone else or to trespass on private property.
So what should the press do?
geoff gevalt
ywp editor