Meat Standards: Fast Food Beats Schools

(Dec. 9) -- If you have kids, here's something to mull the next time you're deciding whether to pack them a lunch: USA Today has a report out Wednesday morning showing that fast-food standards for meat exceed those for public schools. McDonald's and Burger King, it turns out, test ground beef for bacteria "five to 10 times more often" than the U.S. Department of Agriculture tests beef headed for school cafeterias. Schools also receive chicken from "old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food."

The story makes for some cringe-inducing reading, in the grand tradition of meat-industry muckraking that dates back to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." It's also the latest reminder that despite the public health and ethical quandaries that come with using animals for food, Americans aren't ready to truly reassess their eating habits.

Certainly, the topic of tainted meat remains a media standby. In October, for instance, a New York Times story detailed how a young woman became paralyzed from E. coli that officials traced to a frozen hamburger composed of scraps of beef from several different slaughterhouses. In pure statistical terms, the chances of dying from E. coli remain small. Typically, there are only a handful of deaths per year in the United States, though, as the Times reported, "tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by the pathogen." Proper cooking that raises meat's temperature to 160 degrees kills E. coli, but just a few stray raw or under-heated cells can cause illness.



The USA Today story makes no mention of school children dying from the less-tested meat. But what about the animals themselves? Recent documentaries (Food, Inc.) and books (Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals") either make the case for raising, killing and processing animals more humanely or forgoing animal consumption altogether. They point out the horrors of industrial meat operations. But humans use animals for a variety of purposes -- testing medicines as well as cosmetics -- which is why organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals take an absolutist stand.

Yet it's unclear whether even self-proclaimed animal rightists are attuned to all the ethical issues involved. For instance, in a New York Times Magazine article, Michael Pollan notes that were we all to convert to veganism, there would be a tremendous uptick in the deaths of field mice, woodchucks and other animals trampled by farmers' tractors. "Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops," Pollan writes. "Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat."

Stories like the one in Wednesday's USA Today help keep some important questions in the foreground. But even with the recent increased scrutiny on the food industry, there remains no serious discussion of these issues on the national level. Sinclair's novel was published just over 100 years ago, and it seems likely to remain as trenchant a century from now as it is today.