moooo.

  There's recently been another scare about mad cow disease in Europe. It seems strange to me that all the articles talk about how it's going to be economically hard for the farmers, but none of them ever mention that people are eating less meat. People can be really fucking stupid. If you eat meat these days, you should be really, really scared. Here's why:
  Let's start with mad cow disease. It's not a virus, and it's not a bacteria. It's something called a prion. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Cat's Cradle," a new way of stacking water molecules into ice crystals is invented, called Ice-9. When it's introduced into water, it re-aligns all of the molecules into that crystal, a form of solid water at temperatures way above freezing. Of course, it gets introduced into some water somewhere, and that means the end of the world.
  From what I understand, prions work in a similar sort of way. A protein molecule in the brain of the animal starts to fold a different way than usual. When it does, it triggers the same kind of folding in all the other protein molecules of the same type around it. Since the protein no longer works the way it should, the brain starts to literally disintegrate. It is ALWAYS fatal. Mad cow disease can spread to people, and it is ALWAYS fatal, after a prolonged period of mental breakdown. There are no antidotes or vaccinations, and since it's not a disease made by a virus or bacteria, there is little hope there ever could be. You go crazy and you die.
  Cows didn't always have this, it's only started showing up in the last ten years or so. Sheep have had a similar disease for a while however. How did cows get it? Farmers fed them ground up bits of sheep. It's common practice in the U.S. and elsewhere to take the left over bits of cows, sheep, pigs or chickens and grind them up into a paste. This paste - skin, bones, brains, feathers, marrow - is fed to other livestock because it's cheap. It's also a brilliant way to develop new and disastrous diseases. Poorly designed livestock raising methods have done this to us before. Near the end of world war one, an especially virulent strain of influenza swept through the world, killing some 20 million people. It is widely accepted that this flu was incubated in pigs, where it became extra strong, and then bounced back to people. Feeding infected animals to other animals is a very good way to strengthen and spread diseases.
  Now we have mad cow disease on our hands, and it is a very successful disease. The prions can withstand temperatures of up to 3000 degrees F, so even burning infected meat is no guarantee. However, just eating a steak will probably not give you mad cow disease. Here's the especially gross part. People who have gotten mad cow disease probably had to eat the brain of the cow. Apparently, when beef is processed, the left over bits of carcass, the stuff no-one wants to eat, are put in a giant compressing machine and divided into two products. One is white powdery stuff made from bones, the other is a pudding-like paste that is made from all the soft parts. This includes brains. We live in a country that has really not improved its meat inspection or safety rules since the days of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." This year, the FDA announced that boils and tumors were to be considered "asthetic issues" and should not affect whether or not meat is sold. A significant number of federal meat inspectors will not eat meat. Accordingly, the cow paste mentioned above is allowed to be sold as "meat product" and put in as filler in all sorts of things: cheap hamburgers, meat pies, TV dinners, etc. This is where you get to eat infected cow brains.
  Mad cow disease is just one of the many exciting benefits of modern farming. We don't know yet how much it will affect us, since it can take as long as eight years to show up in a person after he has eaten contaminated beef. The SF Chronicle reports that 77 people have contracted mad cow disease. They are, of course, all dead. The feeding of excess antibiotics to livestock, coupled with recycling livestock into feed is producing more and more antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. The amount of waste produced by factory farms is staggering. They have to build lakes to hold all the urine from pig farms. In the Stockton area of California, there are stockyards with 800,000 cattle that produce the same amount of waste - and this is very toxic stuff - as a city of 20 million people. This is like having a second Los Angeles right in the central valley, churning out greenhouse gasses and nitrogen-based pollutants.
  Maybe fast food burgers aren't as cheap as we thought they were.

Sources for this included:
National Public Radio,
The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle,
Covert Action Quarterly

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