Chemical Farm

By John Feffer, AlterNet. Posted November 22, 2005.

Imagine having to go to a doctor for a prescription to buy the ingredients for dinner. It's not such a farfetched scenario. From testosterone and tetracycline to zeranol and genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, enough chemicals circulate in our animal products to stock a medicine cabinet. Because our meat and dairy are still over the counter, though, Americans remain largely oblivious to the intrusions of the pharmaceutical industry into our kitchens.

Consider the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving feast, the hybrid turkey raised in a factory farm in conditions of pain and squalor on a diet of chemical-infused feed. Close confinement requires the use of a long list of antibiotics to control such diseases as rhinotracheitis and colibacillosis. And let's not talk about what the bird picks up during processing. One of the last stages at the slaughterhouse is a dip in chlorine to wash off pathogens.

But conventional turkeys are practically a health food compared to some of the other dinner options, such as roast beef. Turkeys, unlike cows, don't get pumped full of growth hormones. Hormone residues in milk and meat likely play havoc with our endocrine systems.

Meanwhile, the routine use of antibiotics potentially builds up our resistance to drugs and encourages the spread of super resistant bacteria. "Eighty percent all antibiotics in the United States are given not to people to cure disease but to animals to make them fatten up and enable them to survive unhygienic confinement in factory farms," according to Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association. If one of those little bugs survives the onslaught of antibiotics at the factory farm, it's going to give you one hell of a bad case of food poisoning.

So what, you might ask. Food is cheap in America, and if that means that little Anna hits puberty at age nine or both Mom and Dad contract breast cancer or a new strain of E. Coli resists drug treatment, it's a small price to pay. Life in modern industrial society comes with risks. If you don't like it, then you're welcome to go to the chemical-free hinterlands of Greenland or the Gobi Dessert.

Or, conversely, you could hop a flight to Europe.

Europe's Beef

European policy on meat production is for the birds. And for the cattle, for the pigs, and most importantly, for the consumer.

The European Union (EU) has banned hormone beef from the United States since 1989. It doesn't let in milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone. Its ban on all growth-promoting antibiotics goes into effect in January. The EU is also contemplating a general amnesty of all imprisoned chickens through a phase-out of the battery system for egg production. Individual countries like Germany and Austria are implementing even stricter rules. In the UK, consumer activism persuaded McDonald's to serve organic milk and use free-range eggs in all of its products.

European governments approach meat and dairy more cautiously than the United States does, despite our famous muckraking history (from The Jungle to Fast Food Nation to Steve Striffler's recent book on chicken) and a regulatory structure that is at least bureaucratically impressive. Europeans embrace the "precautionary principle," an approach that puts the "healthy" back into healthy skepticism. They might push the culinary envelope with unpasteurized cheese and steak tartare, but they prefer to treat new-fangled foods as potentially harmful unless proven otherwise. They want their risks labeled and traceable. On top of that, European policy is more geared to both animal welfare and local production.

The ban on U.S. beef has been the most controversial and costly of European policies. In 1977, an Italian study showed that babies eating baby food containing hormone-injected veal exhibited early sexual development. Consumers throughout Europe began to campaign against the use of the growth-promoting hormones, achieving a ban that went into effect in 1985. That the EU was awash in excess beef made the decision all the easier for Eurocrats to make.

In the mid-1990s, the United States and Canada went to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and won a decision in 1999 that levied a fine of over $100 million a year on the EU. Principles of free trade trumped European arguments in favor of consumer safety (and the EU didn't provide a full risk assessment). Rather than back down, however, the EU decided to pay the fine and maintain the ban. In a partial compromise, the United States promised not to ban EU meat products as long as Europeans accepted hormone beef in pet food as well as a small quota of hormone-free beef.

The issue returned to the WTO spotlight this September in sessions that were open to the public for the first time in the organization's ten-year history. The EU boasts of a stronger scientific case for its ban, anchored by a new risk assessment conducted a couple years ago. It is tired of paying the annual fine and wants North America to back off.

Samuel Epstein, now a professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, testified to the scientific risks at the WTO back in the 1990s. He decried the lack of U.S. government testing of hormone residues in meat. He pointed to the practice in the United States of injecting hormones directly into muscle rather than relying only on ear implants.

John Feffer is working on a book about the global politics of food.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »