Forget Foreman vs. Frazier, there’s nothing I enjoy more than watching competing factions of the meat industry duke it out against one another.
On February 25th, Canada found BSE in a six-year-old dairy cow. Such a finding pits the consumers’ right to know against the industry’s desire to keep things on the DL. Guess who won out?
But somehow, R-CALF, an American beef industry trade group, caught wind of Canada’s secret mad cow. Would R-CALF oblige its beef-producing comrades across the border by keeping everything hush-hush? Of course not: if word of this mad cow got out, it could provoke the US to close its market to Canadian beef, thereby guaranteeing higher beef prices and more profits to American ranchers. So R-CALF let loose with a torrent of outrage against Canada’s handling of this BSE case:
The [Canadian Food Inspection Agency] said the BSE-positive case was confirmed Feb. 25, 2010, which means the CFIA and all other governments who knew about this latest BSE case kept it a secret from the public for almost two weeks. If we had not discovered this information, the public may never have known.
This is beyond awesome: America’s beef industry rats out Canada’s cattlemen while feigning disgust.
Now that this precedent has been set, it’ll be interesting to see how R-CALF will react if, in the future, another mad cow is discovered in the United States. My guess is they’ll be saying it’s no big deal—and will issue the usual blanket denial that the public health has been at all endangered. (Thanks, Larry.) Link.
