Drugged cattle

The Washington Post reported yesterday that despite warnings from health groups, including the American Medical Association, and the FDA's own advisers, the FDA is likely moving forward with approving a new antibiotic for cattle, cefquinome. Currently, cefquinome is a last defense drug used on humans for whom most other resources have been spent.

According to new FDA guidelines, the risks of using such a potent drug in the animals humans will eventually eat have been documented and deemed not alarming enough in the FDA document "Guidance for Industry #152." Of course, the key phrase is "not alarming enough," meaning it has yet to be proven to cause mortality among humans. Forget about the fact that cefquinome is almost certain to encourage the development of supermicrobes, which will, in turn, send scientists scrambling for an even more powerful antibiotic. Meanwhile, people are eating what they've been assured is safe...

I can't encourage you enough to read Michael Pollan's smash success, The Omnivore's Dilemma. While most of the information can be gathered elsewhere, his approach is readable, fair and leaves few questions unanswered.

But until then, let me spoil a plot point: we have created the system that necessitates drugging our meat animals. The vast majority of the beef we eat, from the tiny percentage of fast food burgers that are actually beef to the steaks shrink wrapped at the grocery store, were animals raised in CAFOs or Confined Animal Feeding Operations. Though I have never had the displeasure of visiting a CAFO, the descriptions I have read lead me to believe that they are even more horrific than the name implies. Tens of thousands of animals crammed together, standing in their own waste, fed corn, animal byproducts and other substances that are totally foreign to their digestive systems. In a nutshell, these living slabs of entree are raised in a way that minimizes the effectiveness of their immune systems while cramming them so closely together that any disease can travel effectively.

The slaughter itself compounds the problems and though I won't spoil your breakfast with a description, trust me when I say that it is amazing we don't get food-borne illness every single time we eat conventional meat.

Of course, we could thank the antibiotics lacing every scoop of feed for our happy eating. Or we could patronize small farms and ranches all over the country who raise animals in such a way that antibiotics are never needed. By feeding cows according to their natural biology, i.e. grass, their immune systems are maximized and (this part is really cool) the fat more closely resembles the great fat found in fish: packed with Omega 3s. The beef-fat doctors warn us away from is yet another unfortunate side effect of feeding cows corn and other products their bodies don't know how to digest.

Moreover, cows fed grass, even if for only a week before slaughter, have been show to carry dramatically fewer microbes causing food-borne illness like e-coli. Of course, farms and ranches that go to the trouble to feed their cows grass throughout their lives and give them an appropriate amount of space to graze, roam and do whatever cows do when they're off the clock, are the same people who are finding small slaughterhouses to ensure that the same amount of care goes into their slaughter as went into their growth.

So, we can fix the antibiotic problem by continuously developing more powerful drugs with even more nebulous side effects, or we can fix the problem by spending a little more money on our meat to vote for better practices in farming and ranching.

As an interesting side note, when I began reading about the horrors of cattle feed and CAFOs, I asked our local beef rancher if their cows were grass-fed. She said that though their cows were fed grass for the majority of their lives, they had to finish them on corn because consumers have grown so accustomed to the muted beef flavors of corn-fed beef that the natural flavor was a turn-off.