My beef with the USDA - Mad as a Downer Cow

Posted by Jacqueline Church Aug 16, 2006

You've been listening, right? As I urged you to buy from local farms, get to know your butcher, your fishmonger. Remember when I asked you to think about the distance your dinner traveled before it ended on your plate?

Remember the "mad cow" fright? We heard all about BSE and how it's incurable. Some bad PR and poor spin control resulting in yet another changing of the guard in ol' W's cabinet. et voila!

Here were are. Being lulled into a sense of comfort about the nasty problem, 'hasn't been in the headlines so it must've gone away' - I admit it, I've been thinking about tartar again...

The Boston Globe reports that the US Dept of Agriculture is proposing to cut back on testing of cattle for BSE or "mad cow" disease due to costs. Given that they acknowledge more cases than those they've found are likely to have occurred I'm not so comfortable with the scale of the proposed cutbacks.

According to the Globe, the cutback proposed will reduce the number of cows tested per day dropping it from the current 1000 per day (that's just 1%, by the way) to a new low of 110 per day. Um, my math's not the greatest but isn't that hovering near 1/10 of one percent?

Grass-fed beef is one solution. Knowing where your meat comes from, or better yet who it comes from is another.