The search for good meat in America

Americans love meat.

Actually I would go so far as to suggest that even more American than the proverbial Apple Pie would be a nice thick juicy steak.

However, I have to go one further and suggest that sadly it isn’t a lovely, marbled piece of well-aged Beef that most defines America…

It’s a Burger.

And what a burger it is. What a piece of work.

A huge amount of money, time and energy have gone into the business of producing burgers. The business of transforming a noble protein into garbage. The business of taking a simple, classic and satisfying dish and turning it into what amounts to a weapon of mass-destruction. Now this may sound like alarmist nonsense to some of you. However, consider some of the facts.

Whether you know it or not factory farming produces nearly all of the animal products (I hesitate to call a lot of it food) in the United States. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, puts it thus, "Americans have to pretend factory farms don't exist. They turn their eyes away, because there's no alternative, there's no choice". These methods of intensive meat production cause harm on many levels. Even if one discounts any considerations regarding animal welfare, the processes and products have serious consequences and the results are harmful to humans.

Fact. It can be proved and it has been. It could even destroy the planet.

Factory-reared livestock no longer stroll and graze on rolling green pastures. They are intensively raised in sheds, cages or pens and fed (mostly) GM grain and soy. Cattle alone account for 70% of annual US grain-production. Just to produce the fertilizer for that grain adds 40 million tons of CO2 to the US national carbon-footprint. Then all those tractors, combine harvesters and transport trucks etc add another 60 million tons. The basic tasks of animal-husbandry as well as milk production account for another 30 million tons. These figures don’t take into account the amount of CO2 that would have been absorbed by those rolling pastures and the effect of de-forestation for the purposes of cattle production. And then there’s methane.

Methane is another ‘greenhouse gas’, for those clueless throwbacks who don’t know (or Republicans in Congress, but I repeat myself) these are the emissions which hang around in the atmosphere soaking up the heat from the Sun and thereby causing Global Warming. CO2 is pretty bad for this but Methane is a monster! Methane is regarded as "20 to 30 times more effective at absorbing infrared radiation" than Carbon Dioxide. In total, an estimated 104 million tons of methane is released annually by cattle alone.

That could equate to the ecological nastiness of 24 YEARS of CO2 damage, caused in a single year, EVERY YEAR. For burgers. And not even tasty ones.

"The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific."

(Al Gore – An inconvenient truth)

Wouldn’t a straightforward way to tackle one of the underlying sources be to reject factory-produced meat and meat products? This involves a simple decision to eat less meat, pay more for it, but to eat better as a result.

But these are long-term issues that might not kill anyone for ages…..

Forget the big, planet-size problems. What about the really tiny virus-sized ones?

In the scientific study, ‘The effect of commercial production and product formulation stresses on the heat resistance of Escherichia coli O157:H7 (NCTC 12900) in beef burgers’ the production method of processing, storing and cooking burgers was replicated under laboratory conditions.

This study found that commercial processing and product formulation have profound effects on the heat resistance of E. coli O157:H7 in beef burgers.

Put in simple terms it shows that the way burgers are made, stored and served commercially, actually makes this killer bug stronger.

So how bad can E. coli be? Well, in May 2000, 1,300 cases of gastroenteritis were reported and six people died as the result of E. coli contaminating drinking water in Walkerton, Ontario. So it can kill you. Oh and by the way health authorities investigating that very case determined that the most likely source was cattle manure runoff.

Manure from dairy cows is also thought to have contributed to the disastrous Cryptosporidium contamination of Milwaukee's drinking water in 1993, which killed more than 100 people, made 400,000 sick and resulted in $37 million in lost wages and productivity.

This should tell you something about commercial food processing. Not only are the products unpalatable, they are dangerous. The food that results from these processes is unappetizing, unhealthy and unnecessary. And as a completely unforeseen by-product they are ‘beefing-up’ E. coli (sorry, couldn’t resist)

So there you have it. Cheap beef kills people. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes not at all. Sometimes it’ll just make you wish you were dead. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

Spiders - the internet anthropod

I had a conversation the other day about spiders..and I'm happy to say this had nothing to do with this little beauty on the left here - the brown recluse spider. A trisksy anthropod if ever there was one.

No, I was chatting with a mate of mine John, a web maestro - it turns out that an internet spider is a program that goes from site to site locating information on websites. It finds a series of keywords to classify a site and then follows any site links that point to other websites, hops across to it verifying keywords and so forth across the "interweb" (do you remember when people actually said that? Me and my IT buddies used to snigger).

Which is why I'm here.

For the small business these spiders are essential to generating internet ranking - which is a whole series of blog entries in its own right. For people to find your company's website you have to have ranking or else your site gets lost in the ether.

To cut a long story short you have a website for your business, that links to your Facebook page, your forum your youtube content and now your blog. I hope you find my insights into food and owning a small business interest if not, well there are always the spider!