As recommended by Bruce Cole over at Saute Wednesday, I went and read the LA Times article I have quoted here:
It seems like a ghastly conspiracy. Yet factory farming isn’t someone else’s fault. It’s not only of our making, but it also made us. More than any other factor, cheap food accounts for American prosperity. We spend less of our annual incomes on food than any other nation. Our first case of mad cow disease isn’t the result of some evil plot. It’s the price of our way of life and it may be telling us that it’s time to change.
Read beyond the headlines and one finds that the practice that wrought the disease, recycling ruminant slaughter waste back into cattle feed, was the work of social idealists. Meat and bone meal, which in 1988 was revealed as the source of the disease, was put in the dairy feed in ever greater proportions after World War II to boost the protein content. Feeding cows protein, it was believed, would increase output and enrich milk. The dairy technologists behind it were not out to kill people, just to nourish them.
What’s more, it worked…
It worked so well, we ourselves grew bigger. We outgrew our kitchen counters, doorways and beds. How could our grandparents have been so short? [LATimes]
The author goes on to examine one of the unexpected consequences — mad cow disease — of these good intentions. She ends with this sagacity:
Great food has always been a matter of quality, not quantity. Organic meat is far more expensive than conventional — often twice and three times the cost of conventional. That gap will surely narrow as more farmers convert to organic, but organic will always cost more. It has to by definition. It costs more to produce. That does not necessarily mean we must double what we pay.
Imagine how much longer we would live, and live to eat well, if instead of gorging on 16-ounce factory-farmed steaks we ate 8-ounce organic ones?
Cheap food made us wealthy. Now is the time to be wise. In the past, conventional producers dismissed organics as a niche market and credited themselves with feeding a hungry nation. That argument has become obsolete. The environment, public health and safe food are no longer niche concerns. If we heed the lesson of our first case of mad cow disease, it may just prove our salvation. [LATimes]