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The Whole Cow... NYT editorial 1/20/04

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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

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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.

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-

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

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