Something that escaped my notice recently didn’t slip past the editors of Harper’s Magazine. As reported in their August 2007 Findings, “A federal judge ruled that a small meatpacker must be allowed to test all of its cattle for mad cow disease; the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which insists on testing less than 1 percent of slaughtered cattle for the disease, said that it will appeal the decision because of the high likelihood of false positives, which would harm the meat industry.”
My curiosity piqued, I looked into this further and learned the following. In justifying the desire for comprehensive mad cow testing, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef CEO John Stewart said 18 months ago, “Our customers, particularly our Asian customers, have requested it over and over again. We feel strongly that if customers are asking for tested beef, we should be allowed to provide that.”
Stewart can point to Japan, the most lucrative foreign market for American beef until the first U.S. case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) prompted a ban in 2003. Stewart says the ban cost Creekstone Farms nearly a third of its sales and led the company to lay off about 150 people.
Tadashi Sato, agricultural attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, said after the 2003 scare, ”We want to see the U.S. government introduce the same system for beef safety, or at least an equivalent system, that we have in Japan. We test all slaughtered cattle, regardless of age.”
Instead, the USDA appears to be heading in the opposite direction. After testing just 1 percent of the 35 million head of cattle slaughtered annually through 2005, last year the USDA announced plans to scale back mad cow testing even further, from 1,000 tests a day to 100.
The USDA says that in opposing Creekstone Farms, it is sticking up for larger companies, who worry that a suspect result might scare consumers away from eating beef. They claim that testing rarely detects the disease in younger animals, the source of most meat.
