Critics complain that the government’s rules on animal feed and the slaughtering process fall way short in protecting consumers from disease. No one really seems to be checking to see if meat processors are even following the rules to protect consumers.
The tissues most likely to transmit deadly disease to consumers come from slaughtered animal brains and spinal cords. The way farm animals are slaughtered may aggravate the problem.
Animal brains are not supposed to be in any part of any food or food product for human consumption, yet brain matter may get scattered throughout the animal carcass during slaughter.
The first step in the slaughtering process is to stun the farm animal with a stun gun causing a force so explosive that it may splatter brain tissue into the animal’s blood vessels, possibly circulating brain tissue throughout the animal with scary implications.
Furthermore, the meat that cannot be cut away from the bone by the “de-boners” during the slaughter process ends up at the “grinders”, better known as the Advanced Meat Recovery Plants (AMR). Grinding meat remnants from the bone, including the spinal cord, boosts a meat processor’s meat yield by up to 300 million pounds of meat a year giving a windfall profit to the meat processors. That next cheap cut of luncheon meat you eat or low cost serving from a fast food restaurant may have come from an AMR plant. To date, AMR meat does not have to be listed on any food packaging ingredient labels.
Consequently, bits of spinal cord tissue may end up in the processed meats you eat. U.S. government meat inspections found bits of spinal cord in two of the eleven meat samples tested. Due to the very nature of the grinding process, can we ever process meat free of spinal cord tissue?
Concerning animal feed, the U.S. government’s own rules prohibit the feeding of cattle and sheep remains to living farm cattle and sheep being raised for human consumption. However, the remains of pigs, horses and chickens, including the blood and gelatin from ANY kind of animal may still be used as a source of super-cheap animal feed.
Yet, there is a loophole. To date, animals known to possibly carry mad cow disease, like sheep with scrapie disease, are still allowed to be fed to pigs, chickens and even processed into pet food.
Critics charge the agents causing mad cow disease, and other deadly diseases, are able to jump from species to species through food. Remember, people dying of mad cow disease is not a common occurrence but when people die of some diseases the disease that killed them is not always known and neither is the cause so more people could be dying of mad cow disease than we may ever know about.
Has the U.S. government possibly perpetuated a risk where none needs to be? Since other countries worldwide have already banned the use of any animal remains in animal feed, critics charge American meat-eating consumers should be getting the same protection.
SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCES: CONSUMER REPORTS MAGAZINE AUGUST 1997 and NUTRITION ACTION HEALTH LETTER AUGUST 1997