Guest guest Posted January 20, 2004 Report Share Posted January 20, 2004 It seems to me that there are 2 possible responses to Verlyn Klinkenborg's presentation here, that the products of slaughtered cows pervade our economy. The first is to take a vegan approach -- which I call "neti-neti" (not this, not that) and attempt to track down every item which contains cow products, and then not use them. The second is to take the approach articulated by Srila Prabhupada, and work towards simple living and high thinking. When a village makes everything from its own land, then there is no guessing about whether something contains products from slaughtered cows. They know it doesn't because they made it. ys hkdd ************************ New York Times Editorial Observer: The Whole Cow and Nothing but the Whole Cow January 20, 2004 By VERLYN KLINKENBORG In the mid-1990's, British officials had been trying for almost a decade to respond to the appearance of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, in a herd near Ashford, England. At first, they simply dismissed public concern or proclaimed their faith in British beef. Even when humans began dying of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - the human equivalent of B.S.E. - government officials found it hard to act coherently. They had the one excuse that we lack: they didn't know what they were confronting. In time, the British government put in place a set of prohibitions against the use of meat and bone meal as food for cattle and against the sale of certain kinds of offal for human consumption. Those steps have seriously reduced the incidence of mad cow disease. The British government also introduced a strict system for tracking every cow in the country, something we are only now edging toward. By the mid-1990's in England, you could follow a cow's paper trail right up to the slaughterhouse door. But what then? Live cattle almost certainly can't spread mad cow disease. Dead cattle can, if the wrong things are done with them. After a decade of wrangling, the British decided to create an system to track cow parts. It sounded like a good idea, but it was never completed. The reason is that the parts of a slaughtered cow go everywhere. The official British B.S.E. Inquiry Report put it this way: "It has been said, and not altogether facetiously, that the only industry in which some part of the cow is not used is concrete production." The problem isn't just global meat. It's global cow. Here's the scale of the question. In 2002, commercial slaughterhouses in the United States killed 36,780,000 cattle and calves. How much of a cow carcass becomes meat depends on whom you talk to. The United States Department of Agriculture says 70 percent, some knowledgeable cattle buyers say 63 percent, and the British government's studies say 53 percent. Even the U.S.D.A.'s figure means that if you add up the non-meat remains of the cattle slaughtered annually in this country, you would have a herd of 11 million whole animals. You can begin to see why it seemed like a smart idea to feed bovine meat and bone meal to other cows - the practice, now banned, that transmitted mad cow disease in the first place. There's just so much of the stuff. What isn't meat leaves the slaughterhouse for the rendering plant. There it is converted into basic raw materials that are processed all around the world into a thousand different forms, most broken down all the way to their molecular components, into proteins and fats and fatty acids. Just how widely these are dispersed industrially can be gauged from a letter sent out from an office of the Food and Drug Administration in 1992, asking manufacturers of dietary supplements to check the sources of bovine "neural and glandular tissue(s) or tissues extracts" to make sure they were not contaminated. Letters also went out to the manufacturers of "drugs, biological drugs, medical devices and biological device products," to the manufacturers of veterinary drugs and animal feed, and to the makers and importers of cosmetics. In fact, the list is nearly endless. Vaccines are often prepared in media that may contain byproducts from slaughtered cattle. Until recently, heparin, a widely prescribed anticoagulant, was made from bovine mucosa and lung, and steroids come from adrenal glands. Chemicals derived from bovine tissue appear in plastics, paper coatings, rubber and asphalt. Glycerin appears in countless products. Collagen is a bovine byproduct. Some of these products - vaccines, for instance - are strictly regulated, and many of the industrial uses of cattle parts derive from cow parts that are not associated with mad cow disease. In fact, it is possible to stand back and marvel at the industrial ingenuity that has found so many uses for what looks utterly useless as it comes out of the slaughterhouse. The logic behind this ingenuity is blunt. The F.D.A., explaining why vaccines are prepared with cattle byproducts, said: "Cow components are often used simply because cows are very large animals, and thus much material is available." It isn't clear whether we would be better off, environmentally and economically, if other raw materials, not from animals, were used for products made from cow parts. But the inventiveness that converts cattle tissue into thousands and thousands of apparently nonagricultural products - like gelatin capsules and jet engine lubricants - also provides part of the economic rationale for expanding the global cattle herd, regardless of the consequences. It's easy to grasp the problem of feeding bovine blood and bone meal to cows. But economic pressure forces the use of cow parts further downstream, until blood and bone meal are fed to farmed fish. Without the industrial market for bovine byproducts, the size of the cattle herd in the world could never have grown as large as it has. When people talk about industrial farming, they usually refer to the often deplorable conditions in which livestock is raised these days, usually confined in close quarters, often indoors. But you might also call the capacity to turn a cow into fabric softener a kind of industrial farming as well, a kind we all participate in, whether we know it or not, whether we choose it or not. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/opinion/20TUE4.html?ex=1075625212&ei=1&en=f47 977b4d36eeef8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 21, 2004 Report Share Posted January 21, 2004 This is certainly true about cows being everywhere. I remember an article in the December 2001 (or 2002) issue of Discover Magazine, called "Cow Parts." It was a partial release of the data found in the British Study. Some of the most common items that contain cow parts: Tires (auto and bicycle), Asphalt (roads, roofing material) and plywood/particle board products. So it is practically anavoidable in the west. The most affordable and essential things in the west are thoroughly contaminated. Unless you live in a cob house with a tatched roof (my first choice actually) and drive an ox cart along a dirt path (again, my first option), you will be implicated. So it is not just indistrial products; you would be surprised to find how thy slip cow/animal products in to seemingly "vegitarian" food. You may be aware that "natural flavors" is often the code-word for animal derived oils etc, but you should also question "Natural Colors" as beef and pig blood is one of the most common ingredients for "carmel color". I have not been able to confirm this personally, but two completely unrelated sources have told me that Coke and root-beer (and any other dark "naturally colored" soda, containes beef and pig blood. One source, a devotee who drove a simi-truck, stated that he was following a tanker truck labled "liquid protien" and asked the other driver over the radio what he was hauling. The other drived informed him that it was blood from a slaughter house. The devotee asked where he takes that stuff. The other driver said he was taking it to the Coca-Cola plant- "natural colors." A few years later, my older brother, who is not a devotee, but is a fanatical vegan stated that he found the same thing after non-stop pestering of verious companies involved in the industry. We can see by the previous artical that they do not consider the blood and bones as waste material to be thrown away-- they do no waste a single ounce. They find ways of using it and therefore making it profitable (rather then paying for disposal of a bio-hazardous waste). It ends up in the most unlikely places. Animal blood, fat and tissue are "natural" whether for flavor or color. --Gopal In a message dated 1/20/2004 2:21:04 PM Central Standard Time, npetroff (AT) bowdoin (DOT) edu writes: It seems to me that there are 2 possible responses to Verlyn Klinkenborg's presentation here, that the products of slaughtered cows pervade our economy. The first is to take a vegan approach -- which I call "neti-neti" (not this, not that) and attempt to track down every item which contains cow products, and then not use them. The second is to take the approach articulated by Srila Prabhupada, and work towards simple living and high thinking. When a village makes everything from its own land, then there is no guessing about whether something contains products from slaughtered cows. They know it doesn't because they made it. ys hkdd ************************ New York Times Editorial Observer: The Whole Cow and Nothing but the Whole Cow January 20, 2004 By VERLYN KLINKENBORG In the mid-1990's, British officials had been trying for almost a decade to respond to the appearance of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, in a herd near Ashford, England. At first, they simply dismissed public concern or proclaimed their faith in British beef. Even when humans began dying of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - the human equivalent of B.S.E. - government officials found it hard to act coherently. They had the one excuse that we lack: they didn't know what they were confronting. In time, the British government put in place a set of prohibitions against the use of meat and bone meal as food for cattle and against the sale of certain kinds of offal for human consumption. Those steps have seriously reduced the incidence of mad cow disease. The British government also introduced a strict system for tracking every cow in the country, something we are only now edging toward. By the mid-1990's in England, you could follow a cow's paper trail right up to the slaughterhouse door. But what then? Live cattle almost certainly can't spread mad cow disease. Dead cattle can, if the wrong things are done with them. After a decade of wrangling, the British decided to create an system to track cow parts. It sounded like a good idea, but it was never completed. The reason is that the parts of a slaughtered cow go everywhere. The official British B.S.E. Inquiry Report put it this way: "It has been said, and not altogether facetiously, that the only industry in which some part of the cow is not used is concrete production." The problem isn't just global meat. It's global cow. Here's the scale of the question. In 2002, commercial slaughterhouses in the United States killed 36,780,000 cattle and calves. How much of a cow carcass becomes meat depends on whom you talk to. The United States Department of Agriculture says 70 percent, some knowledgeable cattle buyers say 63 percent, and the British government's studies say 53 percent. Even the U.S.D.A.'s figure means that if you add up the non-meat remains of the cattle slaughtered annually in this country, you would have a herd of 11 million whole animals. You can begin to see why it seemed like a smart idea to feed bovine meat and bone meal to other cows - the practice, now banned, that transmitted mad cow disease in the first place. There's just so much of the stuff. What isn't meat leaves the slaughterhouse for the rendering plant. There it is converted into basic raw materials that are processed all around the world into a thousand different forms, most broken down all the way to their molecular components, into proteins and fats and fatty acids. Just how widely these are dispersed industrially can be gauged from a letter sent out from an office of the Food and Drug Administration in 1992, asking manufacturers of dietary supplements to check the sources of bovine "neural and glandular tissue(s) or tissues extracts" to make sure they were not contaminated. Letters also went out to the manufacturers of "drugs, biological drugs, medical devices and biological device products," to the manufacturers of veterinary drugs and animal feed, and to the makers and importers of cosmetics. In fact, the list is nearly endless. Vaccines are often prepared in media that may contain byproducts from slaughtered cattle. Until recently, heparin, a widely prescribed anticoagulant, was made from bovine mucosa and lung, and steroids come from adrenal glands. Chemicals derived from bovine tissue appear in plastics, paper coatings, rubber and asphalt. Glycerin appears in countless products. Collagen is a bovine byproduct. Some of these products - vaccines, for instance - are strictly regulated, and many of the industrial uses of cattle parts derive from cow parts that are not associated with mad cow disease. In fact, it is possible to stand back and marvel at the industrial ingenuity that has found so many uses for what looks utterly useless as it comes out of the slaughterhouse. The logic behind this ingenuity is blunt. The F.D.A., explaining why vaccines are prepared with cattle byproducts, said: "Cow components are often used simply because cows are very large animals, and thus much material is available." It isn't clear whether we would be better off, environmentally and economically, if other raw materials, not from animals, were used for products made from cow parts. But the inventiveness that converts cattle tissue into thousands and thousands of apparently nonagricultural products - like gelatin capsules and jet engine lubricants - also provides part of the economic rationale for expanding the global cattle herd, regardless of the consequences. It's easy to grasp the problem of feeding bovine blood and bone meal to cows. But economic pressure forces the use of cow parts further downstream, until blood and bone meal are fed to farmed fish. Without the industrial market for bovine byproducts, the size of the cattle herd in the world could never have grown as large as it has. When people talk about industrial farming, they usually refer to the often deplorable conditions in which livestock is raised these days, usually confined in close quarters, often indoors. But you might also call the capacity to turn a cow into fabric softener a kind of industrial farming as well, a kind we all participate in, whether we know it or not, whether we choose it or not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 21, 2004 Report Share Posted January 21, 2004 - Dasgopal (AT) aol (DOT) com Tuesday, January 20, 2004 8:20 pm Re: The Whole Cow... NYT editorial 1/20/04 > > This is certainly true about cows being everywhere. I remember an > article in > the December 2001 (or 2002) issue of Discover Magazine, called > "Cow Parts." It > was a partial release of the data found in the British Study. Some > of the > most common items that contain cow parts: Tires (auto and > bicycle), Asphalt > (roads, roofing material) and plywood/particle board products. So > it is > practically > anavoidable in the west. The most affordable and essential things > in the west > are thoroughly contaminated. Unless you live in a cob house with a > tatched > roof (my first choice actually) and drive an ox cart along a dirt > path (again, > my first option), you will be implicated. > > So it is not just indistrial products; you would be surprised to > find how thy > slip cow/animal products in to seemingly "vegitarian" food. You > may be aware > that "natural flavors" is often the code-word for animal derived > oils etc, but > you should also question "Natural Colors" as beef and pig blood is > one of the > most common ingredients for "carmel color". I have not been able > to confirm > this personally, but two completely unrelated sources have told me > that Coke > and root-beer (and any other dark "naturally colored" soda, > containes beef and > pig blood. One source, a devotee who drove a simi-truck, stated > that he was > following a tanker truck labled "liquid protien" and asked the > other driver > over > the radio what he was hauling. The other drived informed him that > it was blood > from a slaughter house. The devotee asked where he takes that > stuff. The > other driver said he was taking it to the Coca-Cola plant- > "natural colors." > > A few years later, my older brother, who is not a devotee, but is > a fanatical > vegan stated that he found the same thing after non-stop pestering > of verious > companies involved in the industry. I remember at one point in my life, my husband and I stopped eating sugar, because we learned that in the refinery process, it was purified by running it over charcoal make from cows bones. Thus, I was surprised to see the devotees using sugar, and surprised that Srila Prabhupada accepted this -- even though devotees had told him of the situation. But later I realized that Srila Prabhupada had the best response to the situation. Avoid the most obvious contaminations, but don't waste your time trying to research all possible contaminations in our Kali Yuga environment. Instead of devoting our time searching for the negatives, we should be working together to build a positive example of cow protection to attract the public. your servant, Hare Krsna dasi > > We can see by the previous artical that they do not consider the > blood and > bones as waste material to be thrown away-- they do no waste a > single ounce. > They find ways of using it and therefore making it profitable > (rather then > paying > for disposal of a bio-hazardous waste). It ends up in the most > unlikely > places. Animal blood, fat and tissue are "natural" whether for > flavor or color. > > --Gopal > > > > In a message dated 1/20/2004 2:21:04 PM Central Standard Time, > npetroff (AT) bowdoin (DOT) edu writes: > > > It seems to me that there are 2 possible responses to Verlyn > Klinkenborg'spresentation here, that the products of slaughtered > cows pervade our economy. > > The first is to take a vegan approach -- which I call "neti-neti" > (not this, > not that) and attempt to track down every item which contains cow > products, > and > then not use them. > > The second is to take the approach articulated by Srila > Prabhupada, and work > towards simple living and high thinking. When a village makes > everything from > its own land, then there is no guessing about whether something > containsproducts from slaughtered cows. They know it doesn't > because they made it. > > ys > hkdd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You are posting as a guest. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.