the politics of eating, or, how big beef is destroying your health.

[AlmostStock]

"The meat industry in the United States is a powerful political force... ...that has succeeded in weakening or preventing many new meat-safety initiatives in recent years."


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...meat/politics/

Profits come before safety. Read this to see how it all works.

[DVS LT1]

Great topic - you're talking about "The Steak Religion" as it was described to us in high school. As far as the human body is concerned our diets or popular eating habits anyways are totally screwed up. What other species on earth drinks the milk from another animal? Our digestive systems are too long to efficiently digest red meats. As everyone has already mentioned it just doesn’t make sense, and we all seem to agree.

The other aspect we learned about the steak religion is the resources involved to process beef. Being Canadian our country has the ability to feed half the world, or lets say enough people in Africa or other famished regions; easily. We produce mass amounts of goods strictly for export. Beef is one of them. Now I can’t cite figures accurately but I remember learning in grade 12 geography that when you break it down it takes 5L of water and approx. 5-10kg of cow feed to produce a single patty of beef (1/4lb burger). Might be different in the States but bottom line it takes more than 4 or 5 times the amount of resources to actually produce a single “hamburger”. Its seems stupid when you look at how much we're actually wasting to make burgers.

Its so ironic how much things have changed over the years, within my lifetime moreover. Not that I was into politics much in the 80’s but it seemed when people talked about communism in the USSR (or in Poland where I have family) it was so unfortunate that these people didn’t even have McDonald’s there. MickyD’s was one of the biggest symbols of freedom in the US for people all around the world – its like, “oh, people overseas must be allowed to have McDonald’s! They’re so oppressed!” Obviously there were tons of shitty things about communism but really people over there in the thick of it must have dreamed the simple dream of what it would be like to walk into a McDonald’s for a big mac… Now McDonald’s is the worst place people would think to eat lol. Our steak religion has proliferated so many societies and now that we’re completely encompassed by these poisons its like what do we do – or more like what have we done?

[lazysmurff]

Originally Posted by DVS LT1

Its seems stupid when you look at how much we're actually wasting to make burgers.

while i find your whole comment rather interesting and informative (i had no idea there was an actual theory called steak religion, or that our digestive systems were actually too long to process red meat correctly) it is this i would like to comment on, though rather shortly:

you forgot to mention (or perhaps were unaware) that it takes somewhere between 7 and ten barrels of oil to bring a single cow to market (this includes processing, feed processing, power supplys, gas for tractors, etc) which, when you consider the mass amount of beef we eat in america and canada adds up to alot of oil....for beef.....at unhealthy restraunts.....ugh

[DVS LT1]

Originally Posted by lazysmurff

...it takes somewhere between 7 and ten barrels of oil to bring a single cow to market (this includes processing, feed processing, power supplys, gas for tractors, etc)...

There you go - even more resources we're wasting! We never really discussed that aspect.

The concept we were taught was simply how much food we waste to actually process a hamburger. Instead of mass producing frozen hambergers take all that water and grain and send it over to starving people.

[Steel]

if you want to see wasted food, go to any college dining hall. The sheer amount that is just THROWN AWAY is mind boggling. The worst is you see these cheerleader sized girls grab 3-4 plates FULL of an assortment of food, 1 they'd half eat, the other they'd pick at, and the others wouldn't even be touched as this perfectly good food is thrown right into the wastebasket. It's a sad sight. I've always been taught to only take as much as i can eat, and to clean my plate, and I stick to it. And i'm still 6'2 and 160 pounds, heh.

[fredjacksonsan]

Originally Posted by Steel

if you want to see wasted food, go to any college dining hall. The sheer amount that is just THROWN AWAY is mind boggling. The worst is you see these cheerleader sized girls grab 3-4 plates FULL of an assortment of food, 1 they'd half eat, the other they'd pick at, and the others wouldn't even be touched as this perfectly good food is thrown right into the wastebasket. It's a sad sight. I've always been taught to only take as much as i can eat, and to clean my plate, and I stick to it. And i'm still 6'2 and 160 pounds, heh.

on the wasted food. My wife works for a university caterer; they recently had a basketball camp of teenagers. She said it was staggering the amount of food that was thrown away. Hundreds of gallons of milk, still cold, getting poured down the drain. Just like you said, Steel, numerous plates and only 1/2 eaten.