Mad Cow Disease and World War 2 - Essay Example

Mad Cow” Disease and the “Mad” American Lifestyle: A Cause and Effect Essay on the Emergence of a Disease from a Way of Life Your Name Your School After the combined economic and social pummeling of the Great Depression and World War II, a new lifestyle began to emerge in the United States in the 1960s – a lifestyle grounded in an attitude of entitlement: “I should be able to have what I want when I want it.” As this attitude took hold, it became the impetus for an unhealthy “mad” lifestyle that would eventually lead to the presence of new diseases that would become its trademark, one of those diseases being “Mad Cow” disease. The stage for the birth of this disease was set in the early 1970s when an economic recession began to cast shadows of memories of forty years past. As inflation permeated the economy of the United States, prices went up and the value of the dollar plummeted. The farmers felt it first. Unable to sustain themselves, the nation’s farmers struggled into a crisis that further fueled the recession and further damaged the struggling American economy. The price of meat was particularly affected resulting in a nationwide meat boycott in 1971. (Critser, p. 9) President Nixon and his administration responded to this crisis by dropping farm regulations for the amount of crops or livestock farmers could harvest. Within a couple of years the presence of an agricultural excess had to be addressed, thus export regulations were also dropped, resulting in more nations receiving United States agricultural products. New food technologies were also developed to put the excess crops to use within the nation, such as the development of high fructose corn syrup as a highly concentrated food sweetener and corn “lard” used to make margarine and corn oil. (Critser, p.10) At this same time, having an equal impact on both the economy and its direction, a higher percentage of women were entering the American workforce. The mother of the previous generation had the time to plan, prepare, and manage family meals; the working woman, who was also more often than not a mother, did not. The results of this evolved into nearly half of the American food dollar being spent on food eaten away from home by 1996. (Critser, pp.31-32) The foundations for unhealthy eating habits were then fully in place. A new philosophy of child care was also gaining momentum during this time which gave further impetus to this unhealthy lifestyle. It was the age of “child empowerment,” which preached avoiding conflicts and hassles with one’s children, often implemented (especially when it came to food) by giving them “what they want when they want it.” (Critser, p. 33) The food industry encouraged this with the invention and sales of snacks of every variety. This resulted in snacking becoming a well-ensconced eating practice in the United States and fully entrenched in the food economy of that nation by the early 1980s. (Critser, p. 39) Then, with the impact of rocket fuel in a lift-off, in 1979 a little-known state-budget slashing proposition passed in the State of California known as Proposition 13, (Critser, p.43) which triggered the passage of similar laws and propositions in others states. The passage of this propostion resulted in budgetary cut backs in every public service and the schools were particularly hard-hit. One of biggest and quickest areas of budgetary change for the public schools was in food service. Foods taking time and manpower were clearly more expensive and thus eliminated in favor of faster, easier to prepare foods. Thus, the presence of “fast food” in the public schools of America began. (Critser, pp. 43-47) But another unfortunate corresponding outcome of Proposition 13 was the school budgets for Physical Education also were reduced; with the result that physical Education was no longer compulsory in American schools, (Critser, p. 66) This “tag-team” of budget reductions spelled defeat for the health and well-being of children in the United States. An uncanny coinciding force was the emergence of cable and satellite television and the inventions of the VCR and video games. As a result children were staying inside for hours a day in a sedentary life of watching, TV, playing movies on those VCRs, or keeping the “Mario Brothers” busy in video games, while filling their stomachs with snacks. (Critser, p. 72) Now with less exercise demanded of them, children were gaining in body fat, resulting in larger children. And if that were not enough, clothing companies fully cooperated in changing their sizes to compensate. (Critser, p. 57) Thus, by the 1980s, the “mad” lifestyle was in full gear. As Americans gained in body fat they became hungrier, since fat cells by nature demand to be fed. The food industry as well as other related industries continued to respond with the production of more high-fat content foods and the meat industry was at the forefront. (Critser, p. 132) American cattle were grass-fed, until after World War II, grazing freely and eating native grasses, or living on farms and eating hay. After WWII as the demand for meat production began to speed up, farmers began to feed the cattle year-round buy buying the left-over surplus vegetables such as corn, sugar beets and alfalfa from other farmers. The meat of grain-fed beef was fatty, tender, and more importantly, did not need to be aged. (Schlosser, p. 151) This sped up meat production greatly, but in the 1970s as the American lifestyle changed, it was not fast enough. To keep up with the demand for more meat more quickly, giant agribusiness corporations such as Cargill, ConAgra, and IBP began to purchase the rural land of America. Family farms were slowly replaced by gigantic corporate farms, resulting in the sad statistic that the United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers. (Schlosser, p. 8) On the giant corporate livestock farms, the cattle were packed tightly together in small areas. They had no room to move around and got little exercise. They lived in the midst of their own excrement and their food and water were polluted by it. They were fed less expensive food pumped full of high protein substances to keep costs down. These “high-protein” substances included the remains of dead sheep and other cattle and dead dogs and cats purchased from animal shelters. (Schlosser, p.202) At the meat-packing plants, corresponding changes to keep pace with supply and demand were also implemented. Slaughterhouses were moved into rural areas near the feedlots, cutting shipping costs. Production methods were changed to take advantage of the unskilled labor market of the American immigrant. Jobs reverted back to a single task that could be performed again and again and denied access to labor unions to represent workers. Workers were paid just a little over minimum wage, needed six months to a year of employment at the plant to get health insurance, and two years of employment to earn vacation pay. Trapped in a system taking advantage of their poverty and status as immigrants, they were reproducing the practices of the beginnings of the meat industry at the dawn of this century, reverting to a mindset in which “justice and honor … were for sale in the marketplace, and where humanity … was wallowing in its own corruption. (Sinclair, Pg.165) Added to the injustices of the meat production industry, was its need for speed in the market place. The speed of its production lines however, was in large part responsible for meat contamination. Workers as they handled the meat often had no time to wash their hands of contaminated blood and animal excrement. (Schlosser, p. 170) Finally in January 1993, an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 caused the severe illness and even death of several children who ate hamburgers at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Seattle, Washington. E. coli O157:H7 releases a powerful toxin that can destroy the lining of the intestine and interfere with kidney function and causing hemolytic uremic syndrome. E. coli O157:H7 is now the leading cause of kidney failure among American children. (Schlosser, p.198-200) Then in the early 1990s a terrible disease emerged in cattle called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or more commonly “Mad Cow Disease.” The disease affects the brain of the animal, which is slowly, progressively, and severely damaged. The human version has a similar impact on the human body and is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. When evidence from Great Britain suggested that the practices of the United States meat industry were directly responsible for the initial widespread outbreak of “mad cow” disease, The Food Safety Act of 1996 was instituted. (Schlosser, p. 202) Similar to the Food and Drug Act of 1906, exactly ninety years before it prompted by the publishing of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” the 1996 Food Safety Act was a United States congressional attempt to address and fix the problems and abuses of the meat packing industry and the deadly illnesses resulting from its abuse of power in the market-place. It tried to require regular inspections and microbial testing; but due to the successful lobbying efforts of a conservative Congress at the time, the industry was given the power to employ its own inspectors. The results of their inspections are also not made available to the public, thus negating any possible hope of honest accountability in the meat industry of the United States. (Schlosser, p. 215) Although the Food Safety Act of 1996 banned the practice of feeding the rendered remains of sheep and other cattle into cattle feed, gaping loopholes in the law continue to allow the feeding of potentially infectious cow parts back to other cattle and cattle blood is still put into the feed given to American cattle. Dead poultry, pigs and horses are rendered into cattle feed as well. The American poultry plants sell their waste materials to the meat industry as well and over 3 million pounds of chicken manure a year is fed to American cattle. Schlosser wrote: “(Cattle) are designed to eat grass and maybe grain …...They are not designed to eat other animals.” (p 202) Why does this abuse and its resulting diseases continue? The answer lies in the attitude, “I want what I want when I want it.” Octavio Paz wrote, “All the choices we make reveal something about our personality” (Muller, p. 287) The American meat industry is a reflection of the personality of the people whose demand it is trying to meet. For a century the American meat industry has been consistent in its denial of having any problems or causing any problems to a nation’s and ultimately the world’s health. (Schlosser, p. 205) It has had the support of American presidents more concerned perpetuating the “mad lifestyle” and thus appointing staff to the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees the meat industry, who are more concerned with deregulation than with the health and safety of the American people and beyond that the people of all nations who import and consume American meat products or cattle feed to feed their own livestock. (Schlosser, p. 206) And, in fact, now the American meat industry is a world power, for with the expansion of American fast-food companies overseas came the accompanying growth of their suppliers, namely the American meat industry. Cargill, ConAgra and IBP have control of about eighty percent of the beef industry in Canada. ConAgra owns Australia Meat Holdings, the largest beef company in Australia which exports more beef than any other country in the world. ConAgra now manufactures frozen french fries in Holland, India and Turkey. McCain, the worlds biggest french-fry producer, operates more than fifty processing plants scattered across four continents. (Schlosser, pp. 222-229) One American scientist hired to try to help the industry recognized the truth. “This is a matter of will, not technology." (Schlosser, p. 208) “I want what I want when I want it” is the theme of the will of a nation. The resulting lifestyle created: 1) an “underclass” of immigrants abused in the greed food- related industries trying to capitalize on the “mad” American lifestyle. (see Muller, p. 47); 2) an unhealthy way of life with its accompanying diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer; and 3) with the export of American food products particularly meat all over the world, a “weapon of mass destruction” ( see Norris essay, Muller, p.284) that does not need to resemble a missile or a bomb to destroy the people of the world. Sources Cited Critser, Greg. “Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People In the World. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2004 Muller, Gilbert H. “The New World Reader, Second Edition, Boston:Houghton-Mifflin, 2005 Schlosser, Eric. “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.” Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2001. Sinclair, Upton. “The Jungle.” Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2001. Read More