Meat’s hidden ingredients

Phew! The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has declared that some 80,000 chickens in Indiana that ate melamine-tainted feed are safe to eat. Pigs that were fed melamine in a number of states, including North Carolina, have also been cleared as safe for human consumption. What a relief. Or is it?

If you remember, melamine was added to animal feed to boost protein levels (artificially), so manufacturers could claim that their feed was “better quality.” Unfortunately the melamine, when combined with another additive, cyanuric acid, led to the deaths of thousands of U.S. pets. But it didn’t only end up in pet food. In addition to poultry feed, melamine was also mixed in fish and pig feed.

While melamine has spurred the FDA, as well as the Chinese government, into action to strengthen food safety, this incident highlights a much larger problem with the global food supply—and one that consumers don’t want to think about. The billions of animals raised for food in the world each year are not happily grazing on grass in fields or pecking for feed in barnyards. If the neatly wrapped packages of steaks and chicken breasts or the glossy milk cartons found in grocery stores had full-disclosure ingredient labels, they’d look something like this:

• Corn and soybeans grown in vast monocultures in the U.S. Midwest or in areas of Brazil that were once covered with biologically diverse tropical forests;

• Antimicrobial drugs to prevent the diseases that can result when thousands of animals are crowded together and encouraged to gain excess weight;

• Hormones to boost growth rates;

• Fillers, including sawdust, newspapers, cardboard, and food-processing byproducts, such as almond hulls;

• Ground-up bits of other livestock (chickens are often fed chickens and, despite bans on feeding meat and bone meal to cattle to prevent mad cow disease, cows and steers are still fed blood meal and other ruminant byproducts);

• Cancer-causing agents, including dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs);

• Restaurant food waste;
  

• Dried and undried animal manure;

• Food contaminated with rodent droppings;
  

• ...and a range of other equally unappetizing ingredients.

And we wonder why millions of pounds of meat are recalled in the United States alone each year. We’re feeding our farm animals—and ourselves—garbage, and cleaning up this problem will take more than a few new food safety regulations and laws.