Just say no

During the past two and a half years, I have come close to eliminating red meat from my diet.

This change in my eating habits has nothing to do with some newfound compassion for cattle. I’m a strong believer that humans are meant to eat meat, but I have made the personal decision to refrain from its redder varieties. Shunning burgers and roast beef hasn’t been the easiest decision in the world and makes things like barbeques and family dinners particularly frustrating. But when the Department of Agriculture comes out with reports like the one it released last week, the struggle becomes particularly gratifying.

It should come as no surprise that consuming beef here in the United States is downright harmful to your health. According to a new report, there are no guidelines to test for certain contaminants in the meat released to the public. These include copper, dioxin and nearly two-dozen pesticides.

These figures come from the National Residue Program for Cattle Audit Report conducted by the Department of Agriculture in 2007 and 2008. The study found that the United States has no standards when it comes to levels of harmful substances in meats. It’s so bad that one shipment of beef that was rejected by Mexico found its way to dinner tables across America.

What’s worse is that processing plants did nothing to recall beef even when harmful elements were detected.

The report suggests that if there were only better coordination between the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, this problem wouldn’t exist. The truth of the matter is that America’s food supply doesn’t need to be fixed with bureaucracy but with a little common sense.

The Department of Agriculture recommended some steps the beef industry could take for the worst of its offenses. Among suggestions were testing for more substances, improving the testing method and deciding on limits for certain hazardous residues. However, these all seem to be avoiding the basic question inherent in the problem — what are these contaminants doing in the beef anyway?

That, of course, is a conundrum far more complicated than I can afford to examine in this column. If the poor quality of beef is a surprise to you, I would check out the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Food, Inc.”

Every American should feel comfortable eating whatever they find on the grocery shelves, but what this report shows that consumers do not have that piece of mind. The simple truth is that cattle do not naturally have copper and pesticides in them; they acquire these hazardous residues because of how we raise them for slaughter.

Red meat may be delicious, but until the industry adopts better practices, the price of consumption just isn’t worth it.
 

E-mail: danfleis@indiana.edu