Cows, capitalism, and cover-ups: The politics and economics of mad cow disease

Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 2001 by Best, Steven

Shockingly, the animals that are ground up for recycling include "downer" animals too sick to move, euthanized animals from animal shelters, and road kill. Slaughterhouses, rendering plants, feed companies, farmers, and others profit from animal protein, but rendering industries are also the nasty necessity of gluttonous carnivorous societies. The contaminated products they pump back into the human food supply shows that when enough people bite into meat, meat bites back.

While Britain has used rendering processes on a large scale at least since the 1930s, the industry adopted new techniques in the 1980s to mix ever-more animal remains together. This achieved greater efficiency and profit, but also facilitated the spread of TSEs from infected sheep and cattle. Moreover, the recent innovation of deboning machines to pluck as much flesh from animal carcasses as possible allowed for highly infective spinal cord material to be blended into meat.6 It is also a fact that slaughterhouse machines which fire steel bolts into cattle brains to knock them unconscious before killing them splatters contaminated brain material throughout the animal's body and bloodstream.7

While new rendering and deboning technologies facilitated the spread of TSEs, the BSE outbreak in Britain is not simply a "technological misfortune" as claimed by a Scientific American writer, as if technologies drive themselves rather than being developed and deployed by specific social interests.8 The current global TSE crisis is the inevitable result of (1) deregulation policies of the 1980s that gave the secret and unregulated rendering industry carte blanch; (2) the profit imperative that seeks to use every cell and molecule of an animal corpse, diseased or not, and pursues the cheapest possible and highest growth-promoting feed sources; and (3) the unholy alliance between science, government, and meat industries that disseminated a flood of disinformation, deceptive assurances, and outright lies about the safety of meat.

Profit and the Faustian Pact

'This [BSE scandal] is one of the most disgraceful episodes in this country's history." Dr. Richard Lacey

"We are probably seeing the start of an epidemic (of BSE] in Europe, and although it is impossible to predict its size, it will be bigger that we expect." Stephen Dealer, British microbiologist

"I can't think of anything worse than watching the rapid deterioration of the husband and father you love, losing his faculties, all because someone wants to make a profit out of cheap cattle feed." Sandra Barrett, widow of British nvCJD victim

In the search for ever-cheaper feed, factory farms throughout the world have shifted from grass and hay to newspapers, sawdust, wood chips, cardboard boxes, cement dust, waste water from nuclear power plants, maggot-infested grains, food contaminated by roaches and rodents, human and animal sewage sludge, and, last but not least, the bodies, brains, bones, organs, and entrails of sheep and cattle.9

In Britain, the epicenter for the emergence and global spread of BSE, soybeans would have been an excellent and safe alternative to rendered protein, but British farmers didn't grow them much, and it would have cost them $1,500 extra a year. Not a lot to pay, in hindsight, to have averted a global disaster, but apparently too much for a bottom line mentality and some financially challenged farmers.10 An easy solution to the economic costs of beans and infected cattle would have been full government compensation. For years, however, the British government refused to recognize the dangers of rendered feed and, once they did, they only offered to pay half the cost of beans to the farmers, thereby insuring that most would not comply with the ban on exporting cattle.11 The critical mistake of failing to support farmers in obtaining alternative animal feed and compensating fully for livestock losses would be repeated throughout the world. 12