Meat, everyone loves meat. Well, except for vegetarians. I for one am a meat lover; if you asked me to choose between a healthy salad and an oily heart attack burger, I would go for the burger. I eat fast food once in a while, and I do like the burgers. At times, I would wonder where the meat comes from since it tastes different from burgers that come from actual restaurants. Many people other than me eat fast food daily and have become a habit for them. In addition, due to the rise in costumers, fast food industries opened many more restaurants, which led to a higher demand of meat. Due to this high demand for meat, meat industries are starting to use various ways to produce meat quickly. However, speeding up the processes can cause meat to be contaminated and cause a rise in the risk of E.coli being in the meat.
It all begins with what kind of environment the cow is living in and how it’s being fed, which determines the health of the cattle. In the past when calves are born, they feed off their mother’s milk and later on graze on grass for pretty much the rest of their lives; and in the winter, they would feed on hay. Now in the present, cows are packed into feedlots, get little exercise and practically live in their own manure. Cattle living in this type of situation make them more prone to all sorts of diseases and illnesses. While they are packed in the feedlots, they are fed foods that are high in protein in order to fatten and muscle out the cattle, which causes the cattle to grow and mature at a faster rate. According to Kamb, “In farming communities, a variety of protein sources were readily available, from soybeans or peanuts or cottonseed. Or, from chicken feces, poultry feathers, cow blood or other parts of pigs, hor...
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...a happy cow always tastes better.
Works Cited
Schlosser, Eric. "What's In The Meat." Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2005. 203. Print.
Kamb, Lewis. "Cattle Feed Is Often a Sum of Animal Parts - Seattlepi.com." Seattle News, Sports, Events, Entertainment | Seattlepi.com - Seattlepi.com. 27 Jan. 2004. Web. 12 Apr. 2011. .
Blatt, Harvey. "What Is This Stuff We're Eating?" America's Food: What You Don't Know about What You Eat. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. 202. Print.
Powered By Produce (PBP). "Ground Beef: Cook The Shit Out Of It… Literally." Powered By Produce: A Blog About Food. 24 Feb. 2011. Web. 13 Apr. 2011. .
“U.S. Meat Production,” PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Washington, D.C. 2014. Print. Web 1 Apr. 2014.
In today's society, organic food is a giant new thing in which food is produced without any chemicals. In other words, the product must be 100 percent natural. A major food source of the American people is meat, and the way that it is produced today is a major issue. In feedlots, where cattle are fed grain to grow before being slaughtered, the conditions are terrible and horrifying. Cattle are confined to a limited amount of space and not allowed to roam freely. Also in these cattle growing yards, the risk of disease is much higher in these animals than out on the open range grazing on the grass. Beef critics say that there are no cattle breeds that posses the amounts of marbling present to make a good steak. It is a true statement to say that these critics are very indeed wrong. Also, Many people also do not know that that the meat from cattle that are fed grain, is high in fat content and has too much marbling. Grass-fed beef is much leaner than grain-fed beef, has less fats, and is produced all naturally. Therefore, grass-fed beef is much healthier and safer to eat than grain-fed beef.
... flesh are then ground into a paste-like matter, which is cleansed with the previously mentioned ammonia to rid it of E. coli. The meat filler product is purchased by many fast food restaurants, such as McDonald’s. The Beef Products executive predicts that his product will be in 100% of hamburgers within the next five years.
In the book published in 2006, the Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural history of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, is a non-fiction book about American eating habits and the food dilemma that many Americans are facing today. Pollan begins the book by discussing the dilemma of the omnivore like ourselves, a creature with many choices of food. Pollan decides to learn the root to the food dilemma by examining the three primary food chains: industrial food chain, the organic food chain, and the hunter-gathering food chain. His journey begins by first exploring the industrialized food industry. Pollan examines the industry by following both corn and cow from the beginning through the industrialized process. The work on the corn fields of George Naylor shows him that the industrial system has made corn appears nearly in all products in the supermarket (Pollan 33-37). Pollen then decides to purchase a steer which allows him to see the industrialized monoculture of beef production and how mass production produces food to serve the society. Following his journey, Pollan and his family eat a meal at McDonald's restaurant. Pollan realizes that he and very few people actually understand how such a meal is created. By examining the different food paths available to modern man and by analyzing those paths, Pollan argues that there is a basic relation between nature and the human. The food choice and what we eat represents a connection with our natural world. The industrial food ruins that ecological connections. In fact, the modern agribusiness has lost touch with the natural cycles of farming. Pollan presents the book with a question in the beginning: "What should we have for dinner?" (Pollan 1) This question posed a combination of p...
In the article “The End of Food,” Lizzie Widdicombe describes an advancement of our food culture through a new product developed by three young men living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. After failing to produce new inexpensive cellphone towers on a hundred seventy thousand dollar investment, the three men went on to try and develop software with their remaining funding. While trying to maximize their funding’s longevity, they realized that their biggest budget impediment was food. In fact, it reached the point where their diet comprised of mostly fast food, and eventually they despised the fact that they had to spend so much time and money on eating. Due to this hardship, Rob Rhinehart, one of the entrepreneurs, came up with the
...y cattle are responsible for the largest amount of manure production amongst farm animals (see Table 1) (para. ).
...eats contact. Finally, families who eat spinal or nervous tissue of cows can greatly reduce their risks of developing mad cow disease by not purchasing such items. The beef industry is willingly under surveillance, making all attempts to produce safe and healthy products. American residents should be assured that all necessary precautions have been taken to keep Mad Cow Disease out of the United States and consumer-friendly beef on market shelves. An excerpt from the FDA Consumer Magazine leaves the nation with this very “important message from both the Harvard and GAO studies. . . We must continue to work hard to make a good system even better. The FDA and the states will continue their aggressive inspection program and will continue to work closely with all components of the cattle and feed communities to help make a, thankfully, low public risk even lower.”
Speed, in a word, or, in the industry’s preferred term, “efficiency.” Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for a half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth… what gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs. (71)
Meatpacking has become the most dangerous job in America. Unlike poultry plants, in which almost all tasks are performed by machines, most of the work in a slaughterhouse is done by hand. Hazards of the job include injuries from the various machines and knives, strain to the body from poor working conditions, and even methamphetamine use in order to keep up with the production line. Women face the added threat of sexual harassment. This chapter opens with an anecdote about the largest recall of food in the nation’s history. In 1997 approximately 35 million pounds of ground beef was recalled by Hudson Foods because a strain of E Coli was found in the food. However, by the time the beef was recalled, 25 million pounds had already been eaten. Schlosser notes that the nature of food poisoning is changing. Prior to the rise of large meatpacking plants, people would become ill from bad food in small, localized arenas. Now, because meat is distributed all over the nation, an outbreak of food poisoning in one town may indicate nation-wide epidemic. Every day in the United States, 200, 000 people are sickened by a food borne
- Bush meat is regarded as one of the most beneficial wildlife resources available to local communities. Demand is high and is increasing at alarming rates
Harvey, Blatt. America’s Food: What You Don’t Know About What You Eat. 1st ed. Cambridge:
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.
Another factor contributing to the shrinking profit margins of beef producers was the overall consistency and quality of the meat. Products such as pork and chicken were beginning to be packaged by Tyson and Perdue as ready to eat meals (Mohr, 1999).
In April 2008 the In Vitro Consortium first met at the Norwegian Food Research Institute. The consortium is “an international alliance of environmentally concerned scientists striving to facilitate the establishment of a large scale process industry for the production of muscle tissue for human consumption through concerted R&D efforts and attraction of funding fuels to these efforts.”Meat in both its production and its consumption has a number of destructive effects on not only the environment and humans but also live stock. Some of these effects are antibiotic resistant bacteria due to the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, meat-borne pathogens (e. coli), and diseases associated with diets rich in animal fats (diabetes). Meat consumption all over the world is increasing making meat a global issue. As a result many researchers have been trying to create meat substitutes to minimize the impact of consumption. Substitutes, to date, have been made from soybeans, peas, or even from animal tissues grown in a culture.
Cows go through a cycle of impregnation, birth and milking. 9.3 million cows are used to produce milk while they're impregnated. "Cows spend their lives indoors, typically on hard, abrasive concrete floors, frequently connected to a milking apparatus" (Farm Sanctuary). Cows are slaughtered for beef in the United States. These cows used for human consumption live for an average of 5 years because they are exhausted after all the intense torturing. "Young calves endure a long and stressful journey to a feedlot, where they are fattened on an unnatural diet until they reach "market weight" and are sent to slaughter" (Farm Sanctuary). Animal abuse in the food industry has allowed the companies to get more money because of the food they