Sean
Jun 1st, 2007
Jun 1st, 2007
Government Fights Voluntary Food Testing?
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Precisely who is the government trying to protect by suing a small Kansas meatpacker in order to prevent them from testing all of their cattle for BSE aka Mad Cow Disease, rather than the pitiful sub-1% level currently required?
For some reason, I don’t think it’s me or my family…
I agree, certainly not us. I don’t understand the governments thinking on some of these things…
The government, once again making no sense.
Why the heck would they object to exceeding the minimum standards? Its not like they are asking the government to pay for it. Its brilliant marketing. After all, who would you rather buy meat from? The place that does the minimum or the place that TESTS EVERYTHING?
Wow. Bad idea, govt.
I’m all for letting business self-regulate. If a business is willing to go the extra mile, let it - customers will likely appreciate it, even if they have to pay a bit more.
Since the Bush administration has taken office nothing has made sense… but this one is beyond me or any form of logical thinking by a long shot.
We have a cattle rance in southern Oregon. I can tell you the problem is not the ranchers, it’s the damn feed lots. Here’s how it works, we raise our beef on grass and hay in the winter. Then they go to the auction, feed lots buy them and then feed them fattening feed to plump them up for slaughter. Because of laws regarding having beef that is sold by the pound and wrapped, you have to have it FDA inspected. There are no FDA inspectors in rural areas.
So we are forced to sell it to these big plants that have an inspector.
We would love nothing better than to sell the beef direct to consumers. Here’s where the problems lies, the feed lots sometimes use ground up animal remains in the feed, and this is where mad cow can come from. Since the mad cow scare there is not alot of that going on any more, they are using corn to fatten them up now mostly. The problem is they require these inspections, which is fine, but there are not enough inspectors to go around, this hurts the little guys and created local monolpolies, hurting the consumers as well.
the another side of the argument is that since the original mad cow break out only about 126 people world wide have died of mad cow disease and it has never been proven that mad cow can actually attack the human nervous system.
On the other hand it is strange that the government would get in such up roar over an industry creating new standards that go above and beyond those of the fda. one would figure that conservatives would be all for the private sector taking a more active role in its inspection process which would remove strain from an under funded over stretched government agency.