This weekend, I profited off the beef industry, as a waitress at a New Orleans steak house. While the menu shows a $2 increase in the prices of premium quality steaks, customers did not seem phased by the recent mad cow scare in the United States.
No one ever thought it would stretch this far into the United States, spanning four, oh excuse me, possibly eight states on the west coast. Mad cow disease has crept into America’s food source and into an industry that is uniquely American, the beef industry.
When people think of typical “American” foods, they think of hamburgers and french fries, steak and beer. So why wasn’t this multi-billion dollar industry been more alert to the a major threat to the American way of life?
Now playing damage control, the beef industry is not detailing the horrific story behind the origin of the disease. They are instead squelching American fears that their precious meat is in danger by saying the cow was imported from Canada.
What really needs to be done is look in the past, before mad cow disease had spread to the United States.
NOVA broadcasted “The Brain Eater” on Feb. 10, 1998, right in the midst of the mad cow disease outbreak in England. The show detailed connections between a disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease, or spongiform encephalopathies – spongy brain disease – more commonly known as mad cow disease in humans.
The disease riddles the victim’s brain with holes causing symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s disease. While a person may be infected with CJD, it may lie dormant for years. After symptoms begin to arise, they rapidly regress into disability and death, usually within 6 months or less, according to MEDline plus Medical Encyclopedia.
What is not commonly known is CJD is closely related to a disease that appeared in Papua-New Guinea in the mid-1900s called “kuru,” which means “to tremble with fear” in their native language.
According to NOVA, the disease killed thousands of the Fore people, but remained unknown elsewhere in the world. In 1957, scientists traveled there to figure out the cause of this disease, only to find out they had been transmitting the disease person to person by cannibalism. Members of this tribe would eat their dead relatives as an act of homage during funeral rites.
The scary part of this story is that NOVA explained how cannibalism was quite possibly the cause of the epidemic in England and speculated a unique form of mad cow disease already existed in the United States under the radar of the beef industry.
For several decades, the beef industry has been feeding cattle a cheap protein supplement made from the carcasses of other animals, including sheep and cows. The reason the epidemic spread so quickly in England is because an infected cow would be eaten by other cows spreading the disease at an alarming rate.
Along with other practices of injecting hormones, steroids and massive amounts of antibiotics into the systems of cows on feed lots, mad cow disease is just the tip of the iceberg of what the beef industry gets away with.
Because thousands of different cows are ground up into one hamburger, so one infected cow could be inside between hundreds and thousands of packages of ground beef.
Some argue that since humans are higher up on the food chain than cattle, it is a cow’s purpose to be eaten by humans and thus few really care about the way the animals are treated.
These acts have finally crossed the line, it is a grevious act to force a species to become cannablistic.
It is up to the American public to decide whether the beef industry needs to clean up its act and begin to become accountable for their lechery-filled capitalistic ways.
So far, rising prices of beef do not seem to be a concern.
In a world wrought with moral degradation and where money rules all, sometimes a little thought about where your hamburger or steak is coming from may just churn your stomach enough to pass.
Bon appetit.