- First, let me disclose that I am a vegan and have not
willingly ingested any part of a dead cow for 18 years. So, I'm biased.
There you have it. We vegans have strong views and must be careful not
to proselytize. It offends people. This is doubly important for me because
I'm a "health" (disease symptom treatment) reporter for a local
TV news operation. I have to be quite cautious about how I report food
and nutrition issues. Yet I was taught that a reporter should ask pertinent
questions and present as many sides of a story as possible without taking
sides or imposing personal views. (This is not a news story, so I may violate
that rule in this article.)
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- Today, I was tasked to do a report on the recall of 225,000
pounds of beef from the Hawaii school lunch program. Since I don't eat
meat I was very careful about how I reported this. The thrust of the story
was more logistical than logical. Who is going to pay to round up all this
recalled beef? How will they do it? How will it be disposed of? Who is
going to pay for it? These are interesting but not particularly controversial
questions.
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- The questions I really wanted to ask:
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- Why really did the USDA recall 143 million pounds of
beef? Were they just worried about e-coli? Has anyone gotten e-coli from
this "tainted" beef? A good deal of it has already been consumed.
If the cows were "sick" then what might pose a danger to schoolchildren
who ate their remains?
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- Is this really about Mad Cow Disease? This question was
not seriously considered in the newsroom where I work.
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- The recall was prompted by video showing downer cows
being abused by slaughterhouse workers. Some have suggested that because
the cows couldn't walk into the slaughterhouse and fell to the ground they
might have gotten some feces on them. Dirty cows. Was it just a matter
of hygiene? Or perhaps were the cow carcasses recalled because someone
had been cruel to them? Some earlier stories seemed to imply that the largest
beef recall in history had something to do with punishing slaughterhouses
that were cruel to sick animals. This doesn't make sense to me.
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- Or, did the real reason have anything to do with- Oops!
Do we dare utter the words? Mad Cow Disease. I did not raise these questions
and did not use the term "Mad Cow Disease" in my story. We would
not dare imply that our children might have been fed beef tainted with
prions that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy. This term is not mentioned.
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- In my story I originally used the term "downer"
cow and this word in my script was actually changed. I was told viewers
might be confused by the term "downer". So we called them sick
cows. I was also advised not to use video of actual cows being abused.
We have video of nice neat hamburger patties, so let's show that instead.
No need to disturb the viewers with video of live cows being abused. Certainly
not at dinnertime.
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- So the story presented was this- what an inconvenience!
All this free meat has to be loaded up and destroyed. What will that cost?
How will it be replaced?
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- Don't worry. Mad Cow Disease is very rare. They've only
found three cases of infected cattle in the US since 2003. They test for
it, don't they? Sure, they test for it a lot. 32 million cows are slaughtered
and consumed each year in the US and they take the time and effort to test
more than 2-thousand of them. Those spot checks are more than enough.
Our food is safe as can be. They're on top of it. Don't ask too many questions.
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