CARNIVORES, CAPITALISTS, AND THE MEAT WE READ

THERE’S A GROWING DISSONANCE BETWEEN HOW MUCH WE KNOW ABOUT OUR FOOD AND HOW MUCH WE CONTINUE TO EAT IT.
By JON MOOALLEM

1. NATURAL HUNGER

This is the meal equally set—this the meat for natural hunger;
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous—I make appointments with all...
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

In January 2001, the news from Europe read like a low-budget horror movie, and it worsened with the same implausible rapidity and reach. Human brains infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow disease, were literally turning into sponge. And mad cow had spread because, in an abysmal twist, we’d been feeding cows to cows—and maybe also because, when that was outlawed, we went on feeding cows to chickens and chicken poop to cows. The media stunned us with lists of surreptitious beef-industry by-products: cow blood in fire extinguisher foam and plywood adhesive; tallow in waterproofing agents, acne medication, lubricants for jet engines, and wiring insulation for electronic appliances. Beef suddenly terrorized us, its menacing ubiquity enforced by the slogan “It’s what’s for dinner.”

The following month, the fields were aflame! To quash a second epidemic, hoof-and-mouth, European ranchers rounded up, shot, incinerated, and/or buried the carcasses of more than ten million animals. In Great Britain, the fat rendered from this mass slaughter, added to that of the hundreds of thousand of cattle culled to beat the first mad cow outbreak five years earlier, left the country with a storehouse of nearly half a million pounds of tallow. Entire herds lay stacked in mass graves, discarded like pallets of defective merchandise. To put it mildly, all things concerning the meat industry suddenly seemed a little bit suspicious and a little bit out of control. We watched the apocalyptic footage of smoldering cattle pyres on the nightly news and wondered how the flab of a living, 1,200-pound quadruped wound up coating the wires inside the television.

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