A large problem that has arose in our country is Country of Origin (COO) meat labeling. Imported meat is not labeled with its origin and has become a great problem because of the lack of universal packaging and processing laws. The United States imports meat from 26 foreign countries. This means when you buy a package of hamburger from your local grocery store it could contain meat from anywhere in the world.
Other countries meat isn’t the same quality as US meat. Some meat comes from countries such as china where it is legal to feed livestock ground up bone meal from scraped animals. In which that bone meal can carry such diseases such as mad cow disease or a variety of other ailments. Other variances to US policy are things such as pesticides (rodent killer), insecticides (bug killer), and herbicides (weed killer). And when these poisons are used around livestock, they eat them also and are incorporated into the meat you buy at the supermarket. Furthermore, some foreign countries have no sanitation in the way livestock are produced. Some are grown on disease and urine infected water and food. So without labeling of meat origins, the consumer does not know what they are buying which should be immediately changed.
The opposition to meat labeling laws claims it is “too much regulation and cost to gyrate through unnecessary protocols just to label the meat”. But obviously the opposition really has no defense and just doesn’t want their product to plummet once the truth is shown to the consumer. Once labels are applied to meat countries with notorious standards and unsanitary practices will be justly shut out of the market.
...in the market. Diversified mid-sized family farms used to produce most of our meat, but now, only a few companies control the livestock industry. This has resulted in driving family farmers out of the market and replacing them with massive confined feeding operations that subject the animals to terrible living conditions that subject our food to contamination. Major food corporations are only concerned with minimizing overhead in order to deliver the consumer cheap food, regardless of the health implications.
There are a variety of foods that people believe come from the United States because they have not taken the time to research and broaden their horizons. This makes it very difficult to detect which products are American made and which are imported. Timmerman fell into this misconception himself when he went to China to discover the truth behind apple juice. He said that “the labels going on the apple juice [weren’t] Indian Summer labels…[but] they [were] the labels of a major grocery store chain” (Timmerman 204). It is very hard to believe labels like these because, although they may say “product of the USA”, they may contain other preservatives or concentrates produced in another country. If that is the case, then that product is not solely a “product of the USA” because it has bits and pieces of other countries inside it as well. Without taking the initiative to look into what is going into the food people consume, they will be completely naive and in the dark about these facts. Plato says “the prisoners would in every
The beginning of Meat Inspection Act seemed to be at 1904, after “The Jungle” of Sinclair published. In fact, it started twenty years earlier, the regular law, used to satisfy Europe, the largest meat export market, but in 1865 Congress passed an act to prevent the importation of diseased cattle and pigs. Because of disease, European like Italian, French, and English restricted or banned the importation meat, and they turned to another supplier. Some bills were introduced but they failed to gather sufficient support. May 1884, Bureau of Animal Industry was established, it was doing good job in fighting Europe restrictions, helping the packers, but not helping the domestic consumers. March 1891, the first major meat inspection law was passed; some country removed the prohibitions on importing American pork. It distressed the European packing industry as well. So, they imposed more standards. Government had to do more action; major percent meat slaughtered was inspected. Some of companies exploited the law, but most of them, especially big companies agreed with the committee in 1902. In 1904, Smith, who was a great information aid to Sinclair, published a series of articles in The Lancet...
Imperialism is defined as “policy or practice by which a country increases its power by gaining control over other areas of the world” (“Imperialism,” par.1). Although the food companies are not a country, they have increased their power over the population by gaining control over the food production business. These companies often mistreat their production animals, workers and even the consumers. The animals are not kept in clean or safe areas which leads to an uproar in diseases. The workers and consumers often pay the price for these control factors. If the workers of these companies try to expose these companies’ practices, the companies control them by suing those that try to expose their practices. The food production companies also attempt to control the consumer’s knowledge of their products as Eric Schlosser states in Food Inc., “These companies fight, tooth and nail, against labeling. The fast food industry fought against giving you the calorie information. They fought against telling you if there is trans-fat in your food. The meat packing industry for years prevented country-of-origin labeling. They fought not to label genetically modified foods; and now 70% of processed food in the supermarket has some genetically modified ingredient.” These companies want to make their profit and the way they do this may not be appealing to consumer’s
While conducting my research, I found it pretty alarming that allergy labeling on products wasn’t mandated by the government until ten years ago. If allergens were not required to be clearly labeled on the products we consume, people with nut or gluten allergies for example, would have extreme difficulty in purchasing food products. Studies show that around 30,000 people require emergency room care in the United States due to allergy related incidents and around 150 deaths occur as a result of allergic reactions to food, in addition, approximately 2% of adults in the US and 5% of children have food allergies. Judging by these allergy demographics, it’s safe to assume that if allergen labeling was not mandated for consumer products, we’d see a tremendous amount of hospital treatment and deaths in the US and all over the world.
The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was an attempt to regulate the meatpacking industry and to assure consumers that the meat they were eating was safe. In brief, this act made compulsory the careful inspection of meat before its consummation, established sanitary standards for slaughterhouses and processing plants, and required continuous U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection of meat processing and packaging. Yet, the most important objectives set by the law are the prevention of adulterated or misbranded livestock and products from being commercialized and sold as food, and the making sure that meat and all its products are processed and prepared in the adequate sanitary and hygienic conditions (Reeves 35). Imported meat and its various products are no exception to these conditions; they must be inspected under equivalent foreign standards.
One objection Norcross states in his essay is that “perhaps most consumers are unaware of the treatment of animals, before they appear in neatly wrapped packages on supermarket s...
The meat packing industry in the U.S is one of the top industries that make an example of bringing corruption to new heights. According to the article “Corrupt American Food Industry is too powerful”, the meat packing industry obtains far more power than what should be acquired. The people of America have the right to know what process the meat they are consuming goes through in order for it to sit in their refrigerators. The American people should have the right to know what kind of cruel difficulties come into play when it comes down to the meat industry. The largest meat packing industries make their money by slaughtering animals, and harming living beings behind closed doors. “Welcome to the land of the free, where we consider prioritizing money over clean resources and human and animal welfare” (Ray1) is used to demonstrate the way the meat packing industry within the Unites States operates (1).
Though, It's not all about how much meat we consume, It's about how the animals are treated before being slaughtered and put into packages for our dinner plates. For example when Pollan states, "Half of the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of
In conclusion it is obvious to see that rights and responsibilities were not carried out by the meatpacking industry. They were greed driven business men who “poisoned for profit” as president Roosevelt said. The meatpackers had a right to make their product but did not take the responsibility to do it in a manner that was safe to the consumer. Thanks to people like Upton Sinclair and Theodore Roosevelt, the meat industry today takes the responsibility to make a safe quality product of the public.
A lot of beef on the market today is from a GMO. The GMO is the Super Cow (Belgian Blue). These cows are made by farmers messing with a gene. The cows have double the muscle mass but live a painful life. When the cow die since they are so big they have a lot of hazards waste. This began in the 1800s when farmers started experimenting with cows and made them. When cattle breeders look for cattle they get the biggest ones and breed them in hope they would be bigger. Since people have been messing with genes some get a defect in which there muscles don't stop growing and this can be painful to the cow. The farmers purposely mess with the genes. The gene they interfere with is the myostatin. This gene is responsible for telling the body to stop growing muscle. The cows go through a lot of pain when there muscles don't stop growing. The purpose to all this super cow stuff is to create more meat. This way of getting more meat is growing in the U.S.. This has been a process has gone on for about a century.They have picked certain cows to breed so there offspring with have more meat and the farmer will make more money.
In Lee Ann Fisher Baron’s “Junk Science,” she claims that the “food industry with the help of federal regulators” sometimes use “[a science that] bypasses [the] system of peer review. Presented directly to the public by…‘experts’ or ‘activists,’ often with little or no supporting evidence, this ‘junk science’ undermines the ability…[for] everyday consumers to make rational decisions” (921). Yet Americans still have a lot of faith in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to a 2013 Pew Research study, 65% of Americans are “very favorable” or “mostly favorable” of the FDA. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, the FDA has a moral obligation to be truthful and transparent. The bottom line of the FDA’s myriad of responsibilities is to help protect the health of Americans. Deciding what to eat is a critical part of living healthily, and consumers must be able to trust that this massive government agency is informing them properly of the contents of food. While the FDA does an excellent job in many areas, it has flaws in other areas. One of its flaws is allowing the food industry to print food labels that are deceptive, unclear, or simply not true (known as misbranding). This is quite the hot topic because a Google search for “Should I trust food labels” returns well over 20 million results, many of which are blog posts from online writers begging their readers not to trust food labels. HowStuffWorks, a division of Discovery Communications, published an online article whose author claims that “[the food industry] will put what they want on labels. They know the game….” While the food industry is partially at blame for misbranding, the FDA is allowing it to happen. If a mother tells her children that it is oka...
If we label articles such as cleaning supplies and nail polish remover that will do harm when ingested then why do we not label foods that can cause serious illness of death? Each day thousands of adults and children are diagnosed with disabling conditions such as heart disease and diabetes and the rates are rapidly increasing. Many of these lifelong impairments are directly related to the diets that we attest to as a society. Foods with GMO’s, hydrogenated oils, artificial sugars (aspartame), high fructose corn syrup, and monosodium glutamate ought to be clearly labeled on the front of its packaging for the consumer to recognize.
What the American culture is used to is eating three meals with a few snacks in between a day, and two out of the three meals usually involve eating meat. Most people don’t realize the risks of eating meat. Today’s medical experts say that avoiding meat helps you avoid saturated fat. They have found out from studies that women who eat meat daily have a fifty percent greater risk of developing heart disease than vegetarian women and a sixty-eight percent greater risk in men (staff writer). People may not know about serious diseases meat can obtain such as, mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease. In the September 1999 issue of the Emerging Infectious Diseases, approximately 76 million food borne illnesses- resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths occur in the United States each year from improperly cooked or diseased meat (Licher). That is a lot! You can also get salmonella poisoning from meat. People think that the problems come from eating red meat and are opting for fish over steak, but new evidence proves that fish can cause health problems too, risks that can’t be cooked away. This is a growing problem called histamine poisoning (Peck). Children are learning at a younger age that they don’t like meat, maybe because they don’t like the taste, or maybe it’s because they have a fear of eating their favorite cartoon or movie hero. For example, the pig from the movie “babe”.
Meat is a coroner stone to the majority of American’s diets. I would venture to say the majority of American’s eat meat for their three meals a day. Eating meat isn’t all bad, it actually brings a good source of protein to one’s diet, in a moderate amount. In 2012 a study was done and found that the U.S. total meat consumption was 52.1 billion pounds. That comes out to be 270.7 pounds per person. We still eat more meat than just about any other country, besides Luxembourg (A Nation of Meat Eaters). Eating red meat is bad for humans because of the negative health effects, the environmental issues it causes, and the inhumane treatment of the animals.