What started out as mild interest by Foodie in a tiny beef story, is now a consuming desire to know more about the USDA denying slaughterhouses the right to test their own cattle for mad cow disease. Here's where it began.
USA Today reported recently that chef David Burke, owner of davidburke & donatella in New York, and David Burke's Primehouse in Chicago, now owns, along with investors, a $250,000 Angus bull, the better to insure the quality of the beef that will turn up at his restaurants, presumably.
The bull hangs out at Creekstone Farms in Kentucky, from which Burke has bought beef for some time. ( Creekstone's steaks and roasts carry the Certified Humane Raised & Handled Label. )
While the bull story caught our attention, of far greater interest was this. Foodie discovered that Creekstone had made news two years ago by deciding to set up its own mad cow testing unit, in part to assure its Japanese customers. ( The company slaughters over 300,000 animals a year.)
An LA Times story ( April 20, 2004) reported this:
"According to the Washington Post, Creekstone invested $500,000 to build the first mad cow testing lab in a U.S. slaughterhouse and hired chemists and biologists to staff the operation. The only thing it needed was testing kits. That's where the company ran into trouble. By law, the Department of Agriculture controls the sale of the kits, and it refused to sell Creekstone enough to test all of its cows. The USDA said that allowing even a small meatpacking company like Creekstone to test every cow it slaughtered would undermine the agency's official position that random testing was scientifically adequate to assure safety. ( Emphasis Foodie's.)
What it didn't say was that the rest of the meatpacking industry was adamantly opposed to such testing, which is expensive, and had no desire to compete with Creekstone's fully certified beef. "If testing is allowed at Creekstone . ," the president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. told the Post, "we think it would become the international standard and the domestic standard, too."
On March 23, 2006 Creekstone finally filed suit against the USDA. " Creekstone has sued USDA for refusing to allow the company to voluntarily test cattle for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) at its Arkansas City, Kansas facility." Read the company press release in full.
"No one in the USDA or the meat industry will admit it, but there is only one real reason for banning private testing: more mad cows will be found. All the other excuses are just rationalizations." Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, authors, Mad Cow USA.
( Photo of Texas Black Angus Bull from www.deercreekangus.com)
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