Recent incidents of bird flu and mad cow disease in leading meat-exporting nations are symptomatic of a much larger civilizational crisis, and must not be brushed aside or treated as mere health or gastronomic matters that should be handled by competent meat inspectors. Discerning citizens worldwide, especially in India, deserve to know how globalization and the profit motive have been driving the meat industry to commit unthinkable obscenities upon living animals, with results that may prove too horrendous to imagine.
‘You are what you eat,’ our sages have long warned us, and the food consumed by us, particularly the manner of its preparation, has long been a matter of concern to civilized people. That is why citizens in our part of the world, who are being driven inexorably by attitudes and lifestyles of western civilization, have a right to know that contemporary epidemics caused by meat and meat products are mostly the result of willful disregard for ordinary standards of hygiene and decency by what is now a multi-billion dollar meat industry.
Nick Fiddes, in Meat, A Natural Symbol (Routledge, London, 1991) has documented that less than 10% of British slaughterhouses meet European hygienic standards, and that inspectors routinely complain of inadequate sterilization and ruptured intestines that smear the meat with faeces. The infections caused by such meant include salmonella, compylobacter, tapeworm, listeria, toxoplasmosis, and chlamydiosis.
In 1988, Fiddes records, a controversy arose in Britain over the levels of salmonella contamination in eggs and chickens. Media investigations then revealed that a principal cause of the epidemic was that the meat industry had been feeding carcasses of dead chickens to living chickens as a protein supplement, with the result that the infection was perpetuated. As for BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), popularly known as the mad cow disease, which is believed to have ‘jumped’ species from sheep to cattle, and now onto humans, the same pattern was repeated in 1989-90. It was found that British cattle were being fed the remains of sheep to increase productivity (i.e. they were artificially fattened), and some of the sheep had probably suffered from scrapie, a ‘spongiform’ disease epidemic.
Last December, US beef exporters were badly hit as Japan, South Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Russia and South Africa banned imports following the discovery of mad cow disease, even though Federal officials insisted the supply was safe (Pioneer 25 December 2003). Few nations were impressed by the American argument that the meat from sick animals was not infectious, and that the infection was restricted to the tissues of the nervous system, which were “unlikely” to enter the food supply of people or of animals susceptible to the disease (Hindustan times 26 December 2003).
Their caution is understandable, as BSE is linked to a rare, progressive and fatal degenerative brain disease. Its outbreak in Britain in the past decade has been linked to the practice of grinding dead sheep and cows and feeding them to other cows. BSE is linked to a protein called prion, which turns the brain into a spongy mess, and moves with ease from one animal species to another, as also to humans. These prions are not destroyed by cooking and other conventional methods.
The western meat industry has been found to be guilty of other abhorrent practices as well. A 1985 television show in Britain showed that sausages and other industrially processed meat comprised of parts of animals normally considered inedible (not eaten in the normal household). All these issues, though known in the west, are not adequately known and debated in India and other countries that are being targeted for the sale of such meat, with tantalizing press reports about chicken legs at a mere Rs. 18/- a piece. The issues at stake here are not just that the meat is very likely to be contaminated, as the US meat industry has so far resisted a ban on the slaughter of animals that are too sick for the slaughter-house.
Far more important is the basic principle of duplicitously feeding herbivorous animals with the remains of dead animals of their own or other species, in the form of food cakes and other processed food. In the process, animal species intended by nature to be vegetarian are forcefully mutated into carnivorous cannibals.
We cannot yet imagine the consequences of this action, which the governments of western nations have known about for nearly two decades, and have done little to stop, even as human rights activists from those lands rant and rave about child labour in underdeveloped nations. The quality of the meat of these herbivores-turned-carnivores is surely the least important, though it is what will grab the public imagination.
By far the worst-case scenario is the rise of a mutant species as the ‘dumb’ animals being reared for meat in meat farms, protected from public scrutiny by benign governments, reproduce after being made unwittingly carnivorous. The possibility of such a horror upon the natural world cannot be brushed aside lightly. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical and processed food industry is at special risk from these carnivorous animals as their tissues are widely used for a range of purposes, from manufacturing vaccines and surgical and prosthetic products, to foods and food supplements.
Prion-related disease has an enormous potential for damage, as it is known to lie dormant for many years. It is therefore imperative that the public be made aware of these issues, and meat-exporting nations be held accountable for their products and manufacturing processes at forums like WTO when issues of agriculture and agri-business are debated.