I HAVE A BEEF WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, and it isn’t just about the unhealthy condition of our nation’s meat supply.

Two years ago, I wrote an editorial criticizing the U.S. government’s decision to allow processing facilities to use radiation to kill pathogens in meat [“Sterilizing Filth,” July 1999].

I and many others were alarmed. Rather than making food safer, the policy served to perpetuate the root causes of the problem, specifically the unhealthy methods used to raise livestock and the unsanitary conditions of factory farms and meat processing plants. This is where the USDA should concentrate its efforts. Sadly, just 1% of its budget goes to food inspection.

There are serious unanswered questions about the safety of irradiated food. The process reduces the nutritional value of food in ways that traditional radiant heating does not—it takes an especially heavy toll on vital enzymes—and produces “unique radiolytic products,” which can be carcinogenic.

Irradiation hasn’t caught on yet because consumers are resistant to it. The meat industry is lobbying hard to allow irradiated meat to be sold without being labeled as such, because it knows labels will turn consumers off. The most recent front in this battle is an amendment slipped into the latest farm bill that redefines pasteurization to include any process the government has approved to improve food safety. Thus, irradiated foods could be labeled “cold pasteurized” (cold because irradiation does not appreciably raise the temperature of food, as traditional pasteurization does). Why isn’t the USDA opposing this blatant attempt to deceive consumers?

The rise of factory farms
Factory farming and ranching practices make agriculture the largest source of water pollution in the nation, and they are the main contributors to the ruin of once fertile farmland and the destruction of coastal fisheries.

Cattle evolved to subsist on a diet of grass, and they thrive on land that can’t be used to grow crops. However, in the U.S. cattle are raised on corn, not grass. In a March 31 article in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan described corn as an 80-million acre monoculture “that consumes more chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop… You can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ‘dead zone’.” Pollan also pointed out that the amount of petrochemicals needed to grow the corn to bring a steer up to its slaughter weight of 1,250 pounds requires 284 gallons of oil. “We have succeeded,” he observed, “in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.”

Additionally, the enormous quantities of pesticides used in corn production—indeed, in all large-scale agricultural production—have been strongly linked with a number of health conditions, including cancer. In the late 1980s, following the discovery of increased levels of pesticides in breast cancer tumors, Israel banned their use on crops grown for animal feed. A subsequent 10-year study found that the breast cancer rate in Israel fell 34% for women under 40 and 8% overall, while in the rest of the world the breast cancer rate increased 4%.

Mad cow
It came as a shock to most people during the “mad cow” scare of two years ago that along with vast amounts of corn, ranchers were feeding steers the remains of diseased, dying or dead cattle. The Department of Agriculture insisted that the use of “rendered” animals as feed in the U.S. was perfectly safe thanks to its ban on feed imports from countries in which mad cow had been found, and because the USDA was testing for signs of the disease in domestic livestock. It took public outrage—and plummeting beef sales—to force the USDA to ban the practice of turning cows into cannibals. But did the agency succeed?

In fact, cattle are still fed other cattle, in the form of beef fat (“blood products” are also allowed). And they are still legally fed other animals as long as these are not ruminants (cud-chewing mammals such as cows and sheep). So cattle are still chowing down on pig and chicken parts, including feathers and manure. The problem is, some of the animals fed to cattle were raised on cattle carcasses, so cattle are still indirectly eating their kin.

Mad cow is the popular name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The name of the disease—which creates holes in the brain, giving it a sponge-like appearance—changes according to the species infected. In sheep, the disease is called scrapies. In deer and elk it is called chronic wasting disease, and it is estimated that as much as 15% of the U.S. deer population is infected. In humans, mad cow is called Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD). The Centers for Disease Control claims the 250 cases of CJD diagnosed each year are due to spontaneous mutations. However, in 1989 researchers at the University of Pittsburgh who performed autopsies on 54 deceased dementia patients found that three, or 5.5%, actually had CJD. That same year, Yale University studied 46 cases of dementia and determined that six, or 13%, were CJD. There are currently 2 million people with Alzheimer’s in the U.S. If 5% of them have CJD, that’s 100,000 cases.

Leaders in nutrition?
In addition to corn, fat and animal products, cattle in the U.S. are fed huge quantities of antibiotics. When we eat this antibiotic-laden beef, we upset the balance of our intestinal bacteria, our body’s main defense against disease. Not only does this leave us vulnerable, but widespread use of antibiotics is breeding drug-resistant superbacteria, so that when we are sick, doctors have fewer means at their disposal to make us well.

Feeding cattle antibiotics is necessary, ranchers say, because a corn diet wreaks havoc with a steer’s digestive system. Without the quarter-pound of antibiotics cattle are fed every day, many would develop fatal health conditions. Additional antibiotics are necessary to prevent associated liver damage (still, 13 percent of steers have abscessed livers).

Cattle are also given hormones, used to accelerate weight gain: $1.50 worth of hormones translates into about 40 pounds, a $25 return at auction. The Environmental Protection Agency recently found these chemicals in waterways downstream from feedlots, along with fish displaying abnormal sex characteristics.

A corn diet also changes the essential fatty acid profile of beef cattle. Grass-fed beef has the preferred high ratio of omega-3 to omega-6, whereas corn-fed beef has higher levels of omega-6, associated with heart disease and cancer. [See “Chewing the Fat,” page 36.] Ironically, the USDA’s grading system rewards producers whose meat contains the highest percentage of unhealthy fats.

Microwave hazards
If the USDA is concerned about the nutritional content of food, why hasn’t it researched the effects of microwave cooking? Microwave ovens are ubiquitous, and we’ve been assured that they are safe. But there is no proof of this. In fact, the only definitive U.S. studies show that microwaves destroy nutrients and immune factors in mother’s milk and should not be used to warm blood transfusions (discovered after an Oklahoma woman was killed by microwave-heated blood during an operation).

Microwave ovens heat food in an entirely different way than conventional ovens do: In a microwave, electromagnetic pulses change the polarity of atoms billions of times per second. This creates the friction that causes heat. But what else is going on? Two years ago, high school student Claire Nelson won the American Chemical Society’s top science prize for discovering that microwaving cooking oil together with plastic wrap caused a carcinogen in the wrap to migrate into the oil at thousands of times the Food and Drug Administration’s safe limit. Nelson got the idea for the test when she was in the seventh grade, and she completed her research while a sophomore. With all of its resources, why isn’t the USDA following up on these alarming facts?

Biotechnology
The Department of Agriculture proudly states that it plays a leading role in “new crop technologies,” meaning, of course, genetic engineering.

What is the problem with genetically engineered crops? That is an impossible topic to cover in one essay. Various countries in the European Union have performed studies that generated enough questionable data to convince them to ban genetically engineered food. Further, splicing foreign genes into the DNA of a food by nature causes unpredictable mutations and side effects. Carcinogens, toxins, allergens and even new “super viruses” can be created. Biotechnology proponents claim that the new varieties are tested to be sure that they contain none of these—but spontaneous mutations have been found in varieties subsequent to their testing. In other words, short-term testing is meaningless: There is no guarantee that toxic mutations won’t continue.

Connect the dots
Can you see the connection between corporate-owned “farms” raising genetically engineered crops; huge amounts of petrochemicals used to fertilize crops and protect them from pests; factory-farmed livestock dependent on this “cheap” source of feed (and on pharmaceuticals); radiation used to control the pathogens endemic to the system; and the inevitable resistance to environmental regulations by each of the industries involved?

This is madness. Our entire modern food system, overseen by the USDA, is unsustainable. Yes, it makes our food cheap, but at what cost? Americans are the most overfed, undernourished people in the history of the world. The policies embraced by the USDA are destroying our crops, our livestock, our land and water, ourselves and our families.

Where does that leave the American consumer? Private citizens have nowhere near the influence on government—in this case the USDA—that agribusiness, chemical, manufacturing and energy corporations do. These industries spend billions of dollars on politicians’ votes. But as consumers, we have billions of dollars to spend too, and we can influence the quality of the food we eat by voting with the way we shop.

Buy food that is produced locally, and buy organic—avoid foods that have been sprayed with poison. Avoid foods with synthetic ingredients. Avoid foods that have been exposed to nuclear radiation. And avoid foods that have had the DNA of other species inserted into them.

In 1900, just 3% of Americans were diagnosed with cancer. Today, the American Cancer Society estimates that close to 40% of women and 50% of men will get it. There is universal agreement among researchers that diet plays a major role in almost all types of cancer. The poisoning of our food supply is a phenomenon of the last half of the 20th century: Who can doubt there’s a connection?

© Alternative Medicine, 2002

This article was published in a previous edition of Alternative Medicine Magazine and appears on the website www.alternativemedicine.com and is reprinted here by kind permission of Burton Goldberg.