Economy of Scale Efficiencies

Regardless of whether you think pink slime is Beef, Dude or Dog Food, it is going to go back to being dog food (and thereby no doubt reduce the cost of dog food to the consumer).  It's a done deal; that paste isn't going back into the tube.

The gorilla in the middle of the room that continues to be ignored is the use of antibiotics on healthy farm animals. We've all known for a couple of decades or more about the danger this poses to humans, and yet it is still routine practice in the meat and poultry industries.

Nicholas Kristof, in his column today entitled Arsenic in our Chicken? points out that "Already, antibiotic-resistant infections kill more Americans annually than AIDS, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. "

It isn't even remotely profound to observe that a large  part of the problem is government regulators who are too close to the industries they regulate. I recognize the problem that, for example, USDA regulators have to be knowledgeable about the meat and poultry industries, but there needs to be more of a balance between these people's loyalty to an industry and their commitment  to serve the larger good of the people who pay their salaries.

When it comes to the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in animals, the meat and poultry industries are like the tobacco companies and lung cancer. We need more studies to prove conclusively....blah, blah, blah. In fairness, there are apparently some big poultry producers who are at least committed to "cutting back" on this practice, whatever that means.  But the fact is that there is no openness about this and the consumer has no way of knowing the provenance, if you will, of what is in that package in the grocery store.

I think that the ultimate authority for the use of antibiotics in healthy animals rests with the FDA, and presumably the FDA isn't staffed with a lot of people associated with the meat industries (on the other hand, who knows?), but they work very closely with the USDA, which is.

 Back to the pink slime issue for a bit. Whether a little more transparency on the subject from the beginning would have changed that story is debatable, but certainly the industry didn't do itself any favors with its lack of openness from the beginning. A couple of other observations: the term pink slime did not originate with the media or food activists; it originated with a specific USDA inspector who tried hard to have the stuff banned for human consumption. He no longer works for the USDA, and he grinds his own ground beef, by the way.  The administrator at the USDA who overruled the field agents, and who supposedly justified her decision with the observation "if it's pink, it's beef," worked in the beef industry for all of her professional life, including after her time at the USDA.