Make Them Eat (hormone-added) Meat

Food Is the New Bully Pulpit

This year’s food news sounds like a lot of rejected pilots for new television shows. First there are some sitcoms:

~ Star Industries of New York goes into the kosher tequila business, producing a half million cases on their first run.

~ Fifth Third Ballpark, home of the West MichiganWhitecaps, decides the timing is right to begin serving 4,800-calorie burgers. Pizza cutters are given to those who want to share.

~Gau jal, a new commercial drink based on cow urine, goes to market in India. It’s a big hit.

~The Environmental Protection Agency puts forth a plan to tax farmers and ranchers for their cows and pigs’ farts and belches. The Food & Drug Administration objects starting a turf war.

Then there are new Sci-Fi shows: ~Mexican scientists find that the heated vapor from 80-proof tequila blanco, when deposited on a silicon or stainless steel substrate, can form diamond films.

~Storchen restaurant in the exclusive Winterthur resort of Switzerland begins serving dishes made with human mother's milk.

~The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s three star restaurant in England, closes after 40 people reported flu-like symptoms after dining there. After the word reaches the media - another 400 people claim to have also been struck ill after eating there.

We also have potential 60 Minutes segments:

~93 year old Clara Cannuciari becomes an internet sensation with her You Tube cooking show, Great Depression Cooking. Canned peas with pasta, anyone?

~A Lebanese restaurant worker finds 26 perfect pearls in an oyster she is preparing for the table.

~ University of Iowa scientists link the deadly MRSA bacteria to hog lot confinements. Should you worry?

Next there’s a potential Bill Moyers script about injustice.

~Angry dairy farmers march on the Iowa capitol to dramatize the fastest drop in milk prices since the Great Depression.

And finally there are a couple 20/20 exposés on political correctness run amok:

~Scientists at Queens University in Northern Ireland determine that crabs recall the effects of electric shock and conclude that the seafood industry needs to protect all crustaceans from pain.

~ After successfully waging war against trans fats and cigarettes, New York City began pressuring food companies to remove sodium from their products. One can almost hear John Stossel asking “What’s next?”
Just when it didn’t seem possible that the food news could get weirder, two presidential administrations teamed up to produce a pilot for one of those old Peter Sellers comedies about the politics of absurdity. On their way out the White House door, Bush Administration trade representatives announced new tariffs on European foods like Roquefort cheese, bone-in ham, beef sausage and San Pellegrino water. With the World Trade Organization’s blessing, their stated purpose was to bully the European Union (EU) into legalizing beef that has been given hormones for growth purposes. The EU banned raising and importing such beef in 1998 and added a ban on livestock given antibiotics for growth purposes in 2006.

Most non bureaucrats in America can understand why. Way back in 1993, E coli O157:H7 became famous serial killer of people who ate fast food hamburgers. Such antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not a human medical problem before modern feed lots changed the American beef industry in the 1980’s. Today’s corn-heavy feedlot diets have shortened the average life of a steer from 5 years to 15 months, while adding body fat to its carcass. Grass, the preferred diet of cows that Europeans and South Americans prefer to eat, can’t take a baby calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in a year and a quarter. For that matter, corn can’t do the job alone either - it also needs protein supplements, antibiotics and growth hormones. However, feed lot diets create so much acid in a cow’s stomach that some bacteria become resistant to the human stomach acids that used to kill them. Food chain bacteria have also become resistant to antibiotics.

In 2003, McDonald's Corporation announced it would only buy chicken from producers who do not use antibiotics for routine disease prevention. More recently four of the nation’s top ten chicken producers announced they have stopped using antibiotics for growth promotion. Most of the food media thought that the world’s opinion about hormones and antibiotics would sway the Obama Administration to rescind the bullying tariffs.

But these are strange times. Instead, the tariffs were pushed forward, giving the Europeans only an extra month to think it about it. Rather than back down, Europe fought back. Germany banned the cultivation of genetically modified corn, claiming that one Monsanto seed is dangerous for the environment. The EU also released a series of studies they say prove the American growth hormones in beef cause cancer. Now we have a full fledged trade war because our leaders think they can force the EU to accept foods they refuse to eat.

This is an extension of an age old dynamic. Before the 20th century, all politics were said to be a conjugation of the verb “to eat.” Countries went to war, if necessary, either because they wanted to eat someone else’s food or they wanted to force someone else to eat their foods at a set price. Today’s trade war takes that to a second degree - the US wants to make the Europeans eat meat that ate something they don’t want their meat to eat.


Tell me that doesn’t sound like a Peter Sellers script.