The High Cost of Cheap Meat

By
Jay Porter
– Monday, 5 October 2009Posted in: All Posts

FOL Doug sent the link to this BoingBoing post, highlighting an NYT story about a young woman who became a casualty of the industrial food system, in this case of Cargill in particular.

Innocent people being killed or maimed by corporate food is hardly news anymore. What makes this story interesting is the provenance is what is sold as premium “ground beef” — in this case, “Chef’s Selection Angus Beef” — in the US:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

As a society, we’ve insisted that meat be impossibly cheap and abundant. Cargill’s methods of producing cheap meat follow naturally from our priorities. The only way for us to opt out of these horrors is for us to value food that is raised right, even if it’s expensive.