Encouraged by Random Michelle, I have been listening to Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. It's essentially a dissertation on how the fast food industry has radically changed our eating habits, our food economy, and our food safety since the advent of the first McDonald's.
Thanks, Michelle. Thanks a lot. I'm thinking ignorance might have been bliss in this particular instance.
Reading this book has made me want to heave at the thought of all of those fast food meals I've eaten over the years, not to mention the pounds of beef and pork that have made their way through my digestive system. It's a fricken wonder I haven't dropped dead of Calicivirus, E. coli O157:H7 or any one of hundreds of foodborne illnesses that infect our meat supply on a daily basis. I feel like I've been transported back to 1907 and dropped into an Upton Sinclair novel.
I've been agonizing over eating meat for ethical reasons since I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and this book has added "personal safety" to the list of reasons on the "con" side of the equation. The fact that I'm eating beef or pork that routinely passes USDA inspection with fecal matter in it is a pretty compelling argument. Yuck.
39 comments:
Watch the stores you buy meat in, especially ground beef. Costco does independently test ground beef and will drop a packing house that trys to srong arm them into stopping. Better yet, buy chuck in as large a piece as you can find, and fabricate your own pot roasts and ground beef.
Wash it first in cool running water and refrigerate befoe ginding.
And how clean do you think that lettuce is, hmm?
I can understand the ethics side of it in terms of how animals are raised and slaughtered, or whether they should be. But in terms of the hygiene arguments, have you even considered what's in the air you breathe or water you drink? And, speaking as one who did his time behind the counter in fast food back in his late teens, forget what passes USDA inspection--the stuff could be subjected to nanometer-scale inspection and it wouldn't be "clean" by the time it made it to your table. You just don't want to think about it. NO, SERIOUSLY, STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. The end of that mental journey is a Howard Hughes joke.
You're welcome!
As far as concerns about food safety, what I would recommend is finding a local producer. Seek out your local farmers markets; see if you can find a real butcher.
The farmer's market here has: beef, poultry, pork, and goat.
Thing to keep in mind is that many small farmers may follower organic practices (and certainly practices that are preferable to large scale farming) but aren't certified organic due to the cost.
But yeah, now you know what I don't eat fast food, except in a few, rare instances where the company is known for their good policies, that include treating their employees well.
Warner, I'm looking into a local bison rancher to see where they get their animals slaughtered as an alternative. I didn't know Costco tested their own meat - thanks for the tip.
Eric, I told you - IGNORANCE IS BLISS AND THIS IS ALL MICHELLE'S FAULT. And you are so right about fast food sanitation...
Coincidentally, this showed up over at The Big Money today: a claim that fast-food meat is more scrupulously inspected than the USDA requires. Which could be true: it makes sense, considering that it only takes one tainted food incident/scandal to ruin a restaurant's reputation and/or trigger a flood of lawsuits.
Me, I just make it a point to send just about everything regarding food inspection to my own personal memory hole. Burn, baby, burn.
Eric, unfortunately I can't unknow what I've learned. Even though I would desperately like to be able to employ the "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" strategy.
Again, this examined life thing IS REALLY STARTING TO SUCK.
This is one reason my parents had their own cattle and chickens when I was growing up. They wanted to know where their food came from and how it was raised.
I know you can't buy a farm, but Michelle's suggestion of a local butcher is a great one.
What Michelle said - buy local if you can. Around here we can get beef, yak, reindeer, rabbit, sheep, goat, chicken, turkey - anything, practically... Even greens are starting to be a year-round thing here.
Look around, join a co-op or buy a share in one if you can. It might seem to cost a little more, but what is the cost to you in health or peace of mind to be eating freshies from someone you can actually come to know / trust?
I'm trying, y'all. You'd think it would be easier, looking at where I live, but it's really not.
I'm a regular at our farmer's market (which only runs in the summer), but I'm still looking for a source of meat I can live with.
I did hear about an organization while listening to NPR today (liberal that I am). It's called Humane Farm Animal Care, and they certify farms who treat their animals, well, humanely.
I have no issue with the ethics of eating animals. We're omnivores, after all, and I have no issue with it. My concern is that if we breed and raise animals for our consumption, we have a moral obligation to ensure they have an acceptable quality of life and a painless death before they end up on our plates. Hopefully the organization above will help me make choices that support my desire to eat animals in an ethical way.
I bought it, but haven't read it yet...
Excuse me for coming in out of nowhere and commenting... I don't normally do that but I did feel the need to do so.
I completely fail to understand how NOT thinking about a problem is helpful in any way. I also fail to understand how, when faced with a society who is being forced to eat, drink, and breathe toxic material, that we should just do nothing because the job involves fixing more than one or two things. When something like this is completely ingrained in society, I don't think the answer is to just accept it and move on while shoving chemicals and such that are obviously never meant to be in your body. Instead, I choose to think that the only rational choice is to make some kind of step forward, even if the only step you ever take is to stop eating said foods and maybe tell some people you know why you chose to do so. Ignorance is not bliss. For me anyway, activism, actually doing something, is bliss.
Again, sorry for jumping in feet first but I fail at keeping my opinions to myself.
Welcome, SimplyComplicated.
You don't need to apologize for falling out of nowhere to comment - that's pretty much what everyone on the Internet does, and new readers and points of view are always welcome here.
But because you are a newcomer here, you don't know the regulars. Eric is perhaps one of the most altruistic, activist people around. He spends his life and career defending those who cannot defend themselves, and is in fact one of the smartest individuals its ever been my privilege to know. He's perfectly capable of defending himself, of course, but if he drolly comments that he has a personal memory hole in regards to food inspection and environmental issues, then I would hazard a guess that it's because most people only have so much activism to go around. It's simply impossible to CARE about every single worthwhile concern and issue on the planet simultaneously, and Eric chooses the "defending the defenseless" aspect over food safety and environmental concerns.
Since deciding which issues to CARE ABOUT is, to a certain degree, a subjective judgment based on an individual's values, I can respect someone's decision to care about a specific issue and not another. In any event, I don't think anyone was seriously advocating the ostrich approach to food safety.
Of course, I could be completely full of shit and Eric does in fact advocate a LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU approach. :-)
Thanks, Janiece. I was okay, actually, just letting myself get kicked on this one, but yeah: there is the element that worrying about the sliders I ate at lunch takes a back seat to the conversation I just had with a client's mother.
SimplyComplicated: I am very much an advocate of thinking about as many things as possible and doing so as deeply as possible. That said, there is a point where you do have to stop thinking about some things or you really will go crazy. And I don't mean "fun, wacky, eccentric 'crazy'," I mean huddled in a ball rocking back-and-forth until somebody sends for an ambulance crazy.
Going back into M*A*S*H-unit humor mode again (we laugh because it's better than going nuts): personally, I don't have to worry about pesticides or hormones because they get neutralized by all the booze.
I've started to comment several times on both this entry and the one about the dolphins but, for some reason, couldn't seem to focus my thoughts enough to write a coherent comment. Probably because this is something that is so close to my heart, I don't want to come off sounding like a member of the Animal Liberation Front.
UCFers know that I'm a vegetarian. These days I'm actually about 98.5% vegan. The reason for that is my process of leading an examined life led me to decide thirteen years ago that I couldn't, in all good conscience, eat other animals. It didn't (and doesn't) matter to me that chickens, cows and pigs aren't sentient. They are fellow living creatures and that was enough to make me stop eating animals cold turkey (so to speak). I also stopped wearing leather.
Finding out about the practices of factory farms in '97 made me give up dairy and eggs for a good six years. Eventually I fell off the vegan wagon, but I'm mostly back on it again, and it works for me.
I finally read Fast Food Nation a few years ago and, while the parts about the factory farms were old news to me, the rest of the book was quite the eye opener.
For a long time, whenever there was a food-borne disease outbreak, it was always meat-related, which would make me feel like I made a good choice in not eating meat any longer. Then it hit spinach and I realized I had to pay more attention to the source of my veggies. Hello farmers markets! Luckily we have them for most of the year in Los Angeles and the produce is MUCH better than what I find in supermarkets.
Even now I'm constantly reexamining my choices, conflicted about medical animal testing and service animals such as the dolphins and bomb-sniffing dogs and the like - recognizing the need for such things but thinking that better systems must be developed so that these animals aren't put in danger.
My distaste for testing and eating meat and all of that doesn't mean I'm never in contact with meat, though. I made a choice to have cats as companion animals. While they had dry food for a long time, when my oldest cat was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago, I discovered that giving him only dry food wasn't good for him, so I've been feeding my three carnivorous cats canned food in addition to dry food (cutting back on the latter) for the last couple of years. I hate it with a passion and shudder whenever it gets on my hands, but I'm not about to deprive my cats of something they need to live quality lives just because I find it revolting.
I guess the upshot of all of this rambling is that even quasi-vegans still read books and watch documentaries that deal with such things, but not to emphasize what we already think we know. While it would be nice to think that I know all there is to know about it, so I can stop now, the truth is that I'd rather keep on learning.
BTW, if you want to read an inspiring book about mindful eating, I strongly recommend Harvest for Hope by Jane Goodall. Given to me by an omnivore friend for my birthday a few years ago, I found it to be one of the most eye-opening and, dare I say it, hopeful books I'd read in a long time. While I had, of course, heard of Jane Goodall, I had never read any of her work before. She is a warm, witty and wonderful writer.
I spent 10 summers working as a supervisor for a national food concession vendor at a local outdoor arena. Learned a whole lot more than I ever wanted to know about food prep, food storage, health issues and related inspections. The volunteers running the kitchens would get pissed because we constantly checked food status, frequently having to distroy a batch of something because it wasn't properly stored or cooked. They learned, we had no plans to get shut down or fail an inspection.
I am much more careful these days with what I eat and where I eat it from. While I do still eat fast food, I only purchase from places I can see into the kitchen & prep area. Odd yes, but I know what should and shouldn't be there and can tell a lot about a place by how the cooks/prep team handle the food simply because I've been on the other side of the counter.
I have been doing more local farmers & food when my limited budget allows. Have identified and buy from grocery chains that promote local produce. Also do a lot of label reading, especially meats.
The simple fact, and a large part of the problem, is you no longer know your local butcher, baker, or farmer, so you don't always know where your groceries come from. And I sure miss having a garden of my own to grow things.
I'm really sorry for the rambling. I said it was hard to focus my thoughts!
CE, you're fine. I was hoping you'd weigh in here, as I respect the fact that you're consistent in the application of your beliefs, and maintain them regardless of whether or not they're convenient.
Wendy, I never knew much about food prep and the rules surrounding it - with the exception of a stint as a soda jerk and some time as a waitress as a teen, I've never spent much time around food service. I'm learning, though.
I've never spent much time around food service. I'm learning, though.
Trust me. You really don't want to. I did more than my time in food service, and spent as much of that time as possible in the kitchen.
It's one of the reasons why (as I stated earlier) I try to eat at restaurants where the employees are treated well. How do you know something like that? Watch employee turnover. Do you hardly ever see the same waiter twice? Or have the waitresses be around for years and years? The front end staff will most likely reflect the back of the house staff.
A high turnover rate probably mean disgruntled employees, and that's bad. Staff that sticks around for years means they probably offer health insurance and vacation, which means employees have a vested interest in keeping their jobs.
Yeah, it's not foolproof, but it's a start.
And Carol Elaine, I was thrilled to discover I could find local eggs. At the farmer's market, they don't say "free range" they say "pasture raised" and I have no problems with eggs when the chickens are treated well.
Also, I've cleaned chicken coops and collected eggs before. It's why I can still eat poultry. ;)
Michelle, you're absolutely right about employee turnover. You normally get stable staffing at better restaurants. Several here in Atlanta have new servers & staff "shadow" the experienced crew to learn the ropes and actually introduce them to the guests when they greet you at your table. They'll also have new chef staff come out to your table if you compliment your meal to encourage them!
I've also done event planning with some establishments; many catering managers have offices just off the kitchen. It's no small matter of pride that they're comfortable inviting potential clients for a peak behind the swinging door! If you're lucky you might even get a tour & meet the kitchen staff. Squeaky clean is what you want to see, and I try to go either before or after the lunch rush to see how they handle crunch time.
One of the fast food exceptions is a KFC down the street that's had the same manager for a dozen years or so, he's so good he's used as a regional training store for their management program and his regular staff stays for years as well. You can see the whole kitchen from the counter and it's always so spotless you could eat off the floor. I'll tell them I'm taking my order home on the bus and they'll double wrap it to keep it hot.
Hmph. Now I'll have to have KFC for dinner soon.
Let me offer something of a counterargument to the health angle, along the lines of what Eric said, Janiece.
When bad meat makes people sick, it makes the national news. Some of that's because of national distribution, but mostly it's because the events are so rare.
Human beings evolved to digest a large number of pathogenic challenges. Eating shit is a normal part of our evolutionary heritage.
The book over-sensationalizes the hygiene issue. So the question is, how often do people get sick from food-borne pathogens (as opposed to obesity / diabetes etc., which is the major problem with fast food)?
Let me put it this way. Say a drug company marketed with this drug, oh, let's call it Relieve. And it was supposed to have less GI problems than Aleve or Motrin. But when you actually conducted the clinical trials, there were the same number of ulcers with Relieve. They played the song and dance that people got fewer tummy aches, but the incidence of the bad stuff was the same. You'd call horseshit on their marketing, right? The same thing works on the flip side with fast food safety.
While I'm not particularly pleased with the hygiene in factory food operations, I do call horseshit on the hyperbole in Fast Food Nation, based on the evidence of disease.
US Today (can you tell I'm traveling?) had a piece yesterday on how inspections of school lunches are not as stringent as fast food, and that the fast food industry tests for pathogens 10 fold frequently than the USDA does for school lunches (here's a related article). The writer was all up in arms over this, but my first question was "where's the beef"? What's the evidence that kids get sick more often on a per-meal-consumed basis than fast food customers? I don't think the evidence is there. Kids eat fucking dirt for Pete's sake.
The other problem with FFN is that it's out of date - I'm pretty sure at least some of those testing procedures mentioned in the news article came about after FFN was published. And as Eric said, the real problem with fast food hygiene is what happens in the kitchen, not the factory, and often the vegetables are more the culprit in food-borne illness because they're not cooked.
Speaking of lettuce, the second sickest I've ever gotten from food was from lettuce I ate in the Far East, and I suspect the fertilizer was human waste. (The sickest was from drinking lukewarm tea made from tap water in Bangkok. What can I say? I was tired, jet lagged, thirsty and a fucking idiot.)
Hah, I didn't see Eric's second post.
Damn, Eric, we've got to stop agreeing so much. :D
Several things.
1) Food poisoning is far more common than you'd think. Most people suffer from food poisoning and don't even know it, assuming they have a "stomach bug" of some sort. Thing is, the most common types of food poisoning aren't the ones that make the news, they're the ones that take three to ten days to develop, and they don't kill people or put people in the hospital, they just make people sick.
Second, for me, the food poisoning was only a minor point in the story. What was far more horrifying was how people and animals are treated by these corporations, and how these corporate farms are destroying the environments where they are located.
Far more time in the book was spent showing how the costs of fast food are much much higher than the "dollar value menu" price paid at the counter.
To claim that the book is outdated because testing for food poisoning has changed is to completely miss the point.
"The retail giant Costco, which makes its own ground beef, has been one of the few retailers to insist on such testing by its grinding facility as an added consumer protection. " from
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13ecoli.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=costco%20ground%20beef&st=cse
Yes the only time I notice food poisoning is when it hits the news. I can't really give figures.
However I both dry cure meat (preservation and consumption without cooking) to include pork, so I do follow figures on trichinosis. The last year reported there were about 12 in the US with most coming from wild game.
I also can using a pressure canner (I also use hot water when appropriate); the figures for botulism poisoning, the last reported year, were like 6 with one fatality (I think infant mortality was excluded here).
In both practices, from reading FDA and University output, one would think that if you make the slightest mistake you will die.
Total food borne disease deaths is a fraction of drunken driving deaths. I doubt it is 1%, yet which gets the national air time.
The difference in taste between properly raised animals and factory animals is incredible. Pork is almost as red as beef.
John, Michelle has already made my point.
My ethical dilemmas surrounding meat products are primarily related to the well-being of the animals and the workers who raise, slaughter and pack them. I've been agonizing over this for quite some time - I was a vegetarian for a time, until I realized the lack of protein in my diet made me chronically tired. I've been thinking about it more since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which helped me to grow my position to the statement I made on 12/9 at 1:43 p.m.. Reading Fast Food Nation has helped to inform and round out my concerns, and added some additional information regarding food safety and the treatment of fast food workers to the mill. While I didn't mention it here, Schlosser also details the food safety issues inherent in food handling in restaurants (particularly fast food restaurants).
Are you assuming that because I didn't explicitly call out the areas in which FFN used shaky assumptions, then that means I swallowed the book whole cloth and did not apply a discerning eye to any of the material? I thought you knew me better than that.
In any event, I'm using the material in this book (like I used the material in The Omnivore's Dilemma and other sources) to determine the best course of ethical action for me. Since I've been struggling with these issues for quite some time, I hardly think the material in FFN will single-handedly change my life, but it did provide additional data.
John, I can completely relate to the Bangkok story. Tap water to take the aspirin for a Tiger beer hangover.
Whew! Did that clean me out!
But I do have to say, I am one of those people that eats from carts in the street. Wherever they are. Community steaming vat of broth with sticks of stuff simmering in Korea? I'm there!
Woks of rice / noodles on the side of the street in Indonesia? Tas-TEE! Dish of Don't-Ask-Just-Eat in China? MAGNIFICENT and oh SO tastee!
So either I as an individual can process a lot of shit, or we as a species are much hardier than we think.
As far as the ethics go, I'm not too sure where I stand on that.
Janiece, I'll admit that I have to be extra vigilant in my protein consumption, because if I'm not it's way too easy for me not get enough protein, which makes me feel dizzy after a while. Thank heaven there are enough alternate sources of protein available (especially in Los Angeles) that it's not as difficult for me as it might be for someone in certain parts of the South or Midwest. Another reason I'm not leaving L.A. anytime soon.
Warner (aka ntsc), thank you for that link. It confirmed what I've long thought about Costco - it's a damned good company. I was also happy to read that Trader Joes is looking to have a third party do testing if needed, since TJ is probably my favorite grocery store.
John and Janiece, what FFN opened my eyes to was not the toll of factory farming on animals - I was already aware of that. It was the toll of the system of factory farming on the workers, especially in the slaughterhouses, and how working in slaughterhouses went from being a good, well-paying and relatively safe job to a barely-above-minimum-wage, incredibly dangerous job done primarily by illegal immigrants bussed in especially for that purpose, because they're considered expendable. I wasn't fond of the movie based on the book, as I think a documentary would have been more appropriate, but the thing it got absolutely right were the conditions of the slaughterhouses.
Aside from everything else in the book mentioned by Janiece, that alone is enough to make me think long and hard about blindly supporting a system that treats human beings as expendable. And yes, I rarely eat fast food.
Janiece is right - it is The Jungle all over again, but on a much larger scale.
I will attest to MG's proclivity to eating any food item, on any continent. I try hard to be open minded in terms of trying new foods when I'm out of the country, but I draw the line at Monkey-on-a-Stick. Not so, MG.
So either I as an individual can process a lot of shit, or we as a species are much hardier than we think.
Probably both, but a lot more of it's column B. We didn't knuckle-crawl out of the veldt and onto every continent except one (on which we've still managed to establish permanent camps) by being fragile creatures knocked out by every stomach bug. We did it by having the teeth, guts and brains to figure out how to turn nearly everything we can put our grubby paws on that isn't a rock into food.
I think sanitation is by far the weakest grounds to base food decisions on--food handling, whether on the factory floor or in your own kitchen, is going to simultaneously be worse than you imagine and better than you'd feared. Some folks will harp on the sanitary aspects because of the squick factor, but honestly, if you really want to go there (you don't), I'd be willing to bet the most conscientious consumer of thoroughly-washed veggies is still eating bugshit by the pound. (You're welcome.)
Personally, what I'd see as legitimate ethical diet concerns are:
1) Ethical concerns over how food animals are treated;
2) Ethical concerns over how humans who harvest or prepare food are treated;
3a) Health concerns over the use of pesticides and/or fertilizers which may have carcinogenic or teratogenic effects in humans and/or animals or that alter development in humans and/or animals by mimicking hormones;
3b) Environmental concerns relating to inadequate containment of farming activities (e.g. health effects of swine lagoon runoff); these concerns may overlap with 3a biochemistry issues or may raise sanitary issues (i.e. contamination of drinking water with tons of fecal matter);
4) Legal issues raised by failure to control the spread of intellectual property into the environment (e.g. the Monsanto "Roundup Ready" problem of legal actions taken against farmers whose crops were inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto proprietary DNA).
Note that some of these issues might be reason to give up certain foods, others might be a reason to only eat from certain suppliers.
I realize that others may offer other reasons, but I don't personally think other dogs will hunt. ('Tho I do realize I may have missed something.) E.g. concerns about "Frankenfoods" are not legitimate if they're based on the irrational fear of consuming certain kinds of DNA, though a boycott of Monsanto because of their legal or business practices is another issue entirely.
How's that for a heavy-handed manifesto from an asshole?
(Oh, one more note: it should probably be pointed out that #3a, above, refers to some concerns that are controversial or still under review, i.e. hormone-mimickry by some pesticides. That may well prove to be an unfounded concern, though there appears to be cause for reasonable suspicion to investigate further.)
Eric, I agree completely. I think the hygiene issue is raised because a lot of people realize that the ethical angle won't work for people who don;t give a crap. But it's similar to the thimerosol in vaccines issue. OMG! There's mercury in our vaccines. How many kids get sick as a result? As close to zero as makes no difference.
You are right to be careful with 3a, though, for the same reason. Where is the evidence that those pesticides do harm? The data is emerging, and it's best to hold judgment. But the question becomes one of dose. Just because we can detect ppb levels doesn't mean they're important. If our organisms were so fragile as to get killed by ppb levels of pathogens, we'd not have evolved. Cumulative effects? Maaaaaybe. I'm not betting on it, though. It's not been the case with other pathogens.
Mmmmm, monkey!
Just for the record, I will NOT be eating any monkey brains. Feet and hands remain fair game, however.
I do have some limits.
How's that for a heavy-handed manifesto from an asshole?
Pretty poor, actually. Next time use more points that cannot be supported using logical argument, and with fewer caveats. And throw in a reference to how eating meat makes Baby Jesus cry.
And throw in a reference to how eating meat makes Baby Jesus cry.
As the resident quasi-vegan, I thought that was my job.
I thought it was a well-known fact eating meat made Jesus cry, which is why I left it out:
And then Jesus sat amongst the disciples and belched, and reached for the Wet-Nap, and he turned to John, and to John he said:
"Oh. Oh my Father, me on a crutch, those were some damn good ribs, John. Crucify me now, I am stuffed."
And the tears did run down Jesus' cheeks, and the disciples marveled at this not, for verily the ribs were good.
And Thomas brought before Jesus the ear of corn that was wrapped in aluminum foil and thrown on the fire, and Jesus said:
"Oh, Father, I cannot eat another thing; but this I say unto you this day: if I could but have room for one more thing, I would eat, eat more of these ribs that John has barbecued for us this day."
And the disciples burped amongst themselves, and wanted blueberry pie not until they had digested the ribs that had been barbecued in the pit of coals until the meat was almost tender to fall from the bone.
I think that's from Luke. Might be Mark.
:P
Janiece,
Try buying kosher meat and poultry. The rules for what qualifies as kosher guarantee humane slaughtering and all animals are inspected for health before slaughtering (an animal with any disease or defect isn't kosher). Here's a place in your backyard:
Auerbach's Kosher Foods (groceries and glatt kosher meat products under national hechsherim such as O-U and Star-K. Meat and poultry by the case.)
4810 Newport Street
Commerce City, CO 80022
(303) 289-4521
Thanks, Nathan. I'll keep that in mind. The butcher that our local beef rancher uses also does kosher slaughtering two days a week, which is a good thing. I'm also concerned about how the animals are treated prior to slaughter, so this is another option to consider...
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