Writing for the Sierra Club, Carl Pope has an outstanding opinion piece about beef safety. He nails the problem: unlike health care and other issues confronting America, where reform demands complex and delicate negotiations, and compromise from all parties, the problems regarding beef safety could quickly, cheaply, and easily be fixed. All that’s needed is to implement proper testing at slaughterhouses and meat processing plants
And yet nothing is done. Dr. Kenneth Petersen, assistant administrator of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, says, “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health.”
According to Pope, making a burger from tested ground beef, instead of untested beef trimmings, adds less than a dime to the meal’s cost. But government and industry collectively can’t get it together to make this happen. Why anyone would purchase beef from such a broken system is beyond me. (Via RB and Marler.) Link.
