Third Party & Independents: Archives

David,

You are so right in that American consumers have a right to know where their food comes from.

This issue is especially important down here where I live, as restaraunts are not required to disclose where the food they serve is raised. Therefore, a restaraunt can serve “catfish” and nobody knows whether it came from China, Viet Nam or is raised in the U.S.A.

So not only do I support labeling meats in the supermarket, but in the restaraunts as well.

David, it’s a bit difficult to discern how your examples support your arguments here.

You talk about the recalls of Chinese products, but I’d be extremely surprised to learn that ANY Chinese beef is transported across the ocean and slaughtered in the United States. Sounds like a huge waste of time and resources if it’s actually occurring. Are you claiming that it is—if so, perhaps you should explain. Otherwise, how that relates to COOL labeling is extremely unclear. If it’s slaughtered in China and brought here, then the law already requires it to be labeled as a foreign product.

Also, a bolt in your daughter’s chicken? A caterpillar in your green beans? Your family’s diarrhea from eating salads? You have my sympathy, but what does any of that have to do with the beef industry?

You didn’t even tell us if the chicken, beans, or salads were from overseas and if they were, that they were not clearly labeled as such. Looks to me that you’re talking about some broader issues of consumer protection here, but I can’t for the life of me see how chicken, beans, and salad (the makings of a nice picnic, sounds to me) are a “growing political and consumer issue” in regards to the beef industry.

Loyal Opp, you have been lead to the water, but, choose not to drink. You appear to not care where your food comes from, or you would know that much of our foods are NOT labeled at the supermarket, and not at all in restaurants. Mad Cow disease has been found in Canadian beef which we do import, and if I recall correctly, in Mexican Beef as well some time ago.

Obviously you didn’t notice that there was a bigger issue in this article than just China and Beef. Perhaps you would like to try reading the whole article again, since I explicitly state there is a larger issue than cattle and COOL. China was an example of why consumers can’t make informed choices due to lack of Country Of Origin Labeling. Americans can’t even know if they are buying American if they choose to support America by buying American.

I consider that too an enormous undermining of America by wealthy special interests, many of them supporting foreign trade agreements.

David

Where do you shop?

I agree with you about labelling laws, but mad cow is largely a scam. Last I heard, only around 150 people worldwide had actually gottne mad cow. I lived in Europe during the mad cow scare. Everybody was in a panic about prions, so they ended up buying all sorts inferior food and more people got ordinary food poisioning. You know that you can eat a steak from a mad cow w/o any harm. As long as you stay away from the brain and spinal areas.

Beyond that, you know that all countries blame the others for their troubles. The Canadians have good rules, as strong as ours. I would not have any hesitation about eating food from Canada. We have to be a little more careful with the Chinese, who evidently poison significant numbers of their own people with monotonous regularity.

Jack, and just how are we to be careful without knowing what food comes from what country. For that matter, how is the FDA supposed to do its job if it doesn’t track country of origin? And if the FDA does track, doesn’t the consumers have a right to the same information at the time of purchase?

The FDA used to be a respected agency…now it’s just another arm of pharma and corporate farms…consumers beware!

Jack,

“You know that you can eat a steak from a mad cow w/o any harm. As long as you stay away from the brain and spinal areas.”

I guess the point would be why would you want to?

Cattle are herbivores, why, other than money, would anyone feed animal protein to a herbivore?

IMHO, we should require, as we do with virtually all other packaged foods, a breakdown of what is in the meat we buy.

It’s only common sense.

Great article David. You’ve pointed why no business or special interest group should be allowed to give to political campaigns. And why contributions should be limited in the amount allowed to be given.
By banning business and special interest (which is business) from contributing to campaigns and limiting the amount individuals can give to say $100 per household no one could buy a politician in this manner. They’d have to resort to illegal activities which carry prison terms when caught in order to buy a politician.

China has seen its product recalls in American double in the last 5 years. Chinese products account for 60% of all recalls, and 100% of all toy recalls.

Maybe we should just quit trading with China.

Rocky

Cattle are herbivores, why, other than money, would anyone feed animal protein to a herbivore?

Ya got it!
The protein is put in the feed along with hormones to make cattle grow faster and bigger. The faster they grow the the faster they can be shipped to market. The bigger they grow the more money made at market time.
I have 15 head of Angus. If I feed the calves hormones and protein I could get them to market in around 8 to 9 months instead of 12 to 14 months and they’d be around at least 200 to 300 pounds heavier than the average one year old without hormones.
Personally I don’t think either is worth the health risk to humans.
Reckon that’s just another area where I don’t agree with the Feds and big producers.

All hail the almighty dollar, and screw anybody that starts asking questions.

If this is what capitalism is to become, then Heaven help all of us.

Hey Ron Brown,

How much is one of those angus’s you raise worth? If I may ask.

JT

David,

Your overall premise is the massive control of our government by special interest groups. I know of a sure fire way to put all the houses on K street up for sale. Change the tax structure from an income based tax to a consumption based system. The FAIRTAX does that. Check it out at fairtax.org . I think we basicly agree on most problems. It’s the solutions on which we differ.

Tomd, what an contradiction in terms, sales tax and FairTax. Do you really believe people are so blind and ignorant to fall for a regressive taxation by calling it a Fair Tax?

I have a lot more confidence in the American people. Your so-called FairTax doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever becoming law.

David,

The current message is simply, “trust me”!

Whether it’s food, pharmaceuticals, worker protections, etc. the message is, “we’ll monitor ourselves, don’t worry, TRUST ME”! Sadly time and time again we’ve seen that when the government fails to act as a dependable consumer watchdog the greed generated by a total free-market strategy bites the consumer (or worker) right in the a$$.

Two clearcut examples are the frequency of beef related e-coli in recent years and the results of lower standards regarding mining safety. Certainly, the involvement of big “pharma” in the FDA process deserves a spot in the “top three”!

Sheesh, look at the FEMA trailer thing……….I’m fairly comfortable saying that FEMA DID NOT insist on buying trailers that presented a health risk. Certainly, as the purchaser, they should have pursued the complaints and gotten to the bottom of the problem, but WHY were the trailers manufactured in the manner that they were?

Bottom line————-Laissez-faire is not fair! We’re witnessing the return to the “robber-baron” era and we’re too stupid to see it.

“I have a lot more confidence in the American people”

Enough confidence to let the American people vote on it David?
An understandable tax system which gives everyone an automatic pay raise may be pretty tempting to alot of people.

David, It also seems the past several years they are injecting some sort of liquid into the hamburger sold in most of the grocery stores, I guess to add weight. I dont see it on the label so I dont know what it actually is but its not fat nor is it blood. It looks like water.I assumed it was due to the deregulation of the industry.

KD your exactly right, this whole deregulation thing is heading us right to the gilded age robber baron era.

BTW, the whole Mad Cow thing is a direct result of GREED. While not totally proven it’s largely believed that the insistence on not WASTING one ounce of protein spurred the desire to feed “waste products” to increase EFFICIENCY!

Regardless of what Jack says I would be very reluctant to ever purchase ground beef, hot dogs, beef sausage or lunch meat with beef in it. My grandpa was a butcher. I love braunschweiger and liver loaf in spite of having been involved in making the stuff so I’m certainly not a vegan.

OTOH I was never too keen on head cheese and I’ll guarantee you that lots of “trimmin’s-n-drippin’s” go into burgers, sausages, and dogs! Has anyone wondered why “round steak” no longer has the “round bone”?

Well duh………….cut the the bone, release the marrow! And that process changed years before the European mad cow thing. Fortunately my family provides me with beef, pork, and poultry so I needn’t worry but I’m exemplary of maybe 1% of the population.

David

I already said I agree with you re country labeling. Some supermarket chains do this already. Actually, I think even Walmart does. I would not oppose making it a requirement.

Rocky

My point is that this whole mad cow thing is more hype than danger to humans. I looked it up. I was wrong when I said that only 150 people had gotten the human version of mad cow in the last 15 years. It was 153 - out of the billions of people who ate beef for those 15 years. This is a managed problem.

Mad cow, BTW, is not limited to cows. It is also present in deer, elk and even squirrels (Don’t mix those squirrel brains with your scambled eggs) Presumably these wild animals eat a natural diet. There is also a variant that New Guinea cannibals used to get. It was called the laughing disease, because those affected has rotten brains that made them act stupidly. The prions are from the brain and spinal cord. These cannibals ate those parts of their victims. Maybe it is a poetic way to punish cannibals.

I think it is better to raise animals in a more natural way, problably because I can afford to pay more for meat products. Many people are unwilling to pay that price.

Kansas

You can give up beef if you want. You may be healthier in other ways too if you avoid hot dogs and why anybody would eat head cheese is beyond me. It is just that more people are killed by lighting or die in their bathtubs every years in the U.S. alone than have died worldwide from mad cow in the last 15 years.

Jack, it’s a pleasure agreeing with you, yet again.

Ron Brown, thank you. And I applaud your cattle handling. Responsible stewardship is one of those conservative ideas I have always ascribed to.

Jack,

Actually they think this started with sheep.

Riddle me this;

Regardless of just how many people have died from “Mad Cow”, the research:

http://www.american.edu/ted/MADCOW.htm

“Normally, the rare disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)
strikes people over 60 years of age, but the subjects of the study
released in Edinburgh in March of 1996 all showed initial symptoms
of the disease before age 45. The disease strikes about one person
per million worldwide, which in the 1960’s translated to about 5
cases per year in England and Wales, almost all of which were
victims over the age of 65. What makes the Edinburgh study so
unusual and perhaps alarming, is the rate of incidence in younger
people. The patients ranged from age 16 - 39 at the time of
diagnosis. Six were women and four men and they have survived an
average of 12 months from the onset of the symptoms. All ten
patients considered in the study were diagnosed in the course of
ten months, with nine appearing between October 1995 and January
1996. This is in contrast to the 22 cases of CJD diagnosed in
Britons under the age of 45 in the last 24 years.”

is pretty convincing.

Does this sound like a hoax?
Would you like to have this disease?
Would you like someone in your family to have it?

My point is that common sense dictates you don’t feed dead animal protein to herbivores.
I don’t care if it makes someone more money.
It may be legal, but it is certainly unethical.
Why run the risk?
I do pay more to know where my food is coming from and what is in it.

I want to know if I am ingesting antibiotics because the cattle are kept in unsanitary feed lots. I want to know before I ingest who knows what hormones.

Shouldn’t all Americans deserve that?

At the heart of the issue is the tug o’ war between consumers making rational choices and producers fearing consumers choosing a competitors product based on a better product as judged by consumers.

If the consumers don’t know where or how their meat was raised or what risks are associated with it, the consumers will ‘blindly’ elect the lower priced product. The lower priced product tends to be the inferior product. Hence producers real interest is to preserve their practice of offering an inferior product at a lower price without the consumer being aware it is inferior.

At stake is a trillion or two dollars of inferior products. Hence, the millions spent by ag lobbyists to prevent Country of Origin labeling.

“David,

Your overall premise is the massive control of our government by special interest groups. I know of a sure fire way to put all the houses on K street up for sale. Change the tax structure from an income based tax to a consumption based system. The FAIRTAX does that. Check it out at fairtax.org . I think we basicly agree on most problems. It’s the solutions on which we differ.

Posted by: tomd at July 20, 2007 03:59 PM
Comment #226961
Tomd, what an contradiction in terms, sales tax and FairTax. Do you really believe people are so blind and ignorant to fall for a regressive taxation by calling it a Fair Tax?

I have a lot more confidence in the American people. Your so-called FairTax doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever becoming law.

Posted by: David R. Remer at July 20, 2007 04:54 PM “

You seem awful quick to dismiss a solution to your problem that doesn’t support your agenda of V.O.I.D.

If you get rid of “K Street Lobbyists” the problem goes away with it. The Fairtax does this and more. To dismiss it so easily, clearly shows your agenda.

JayTea
Cattle prices are based on a variety of things.
Cattle sold for slaughter bring a per pound price.
Breeder cattle prices depend on if they’re registered or not. An unregistered brood cow can range from $1,000 to $5,000 depending on age and past performance. An unregistered bull will bring between $2,500 and $7,000 again depending on age and past performance.
When ya get into the registered stuff it can get expensive fast. A cow with a proven sire and a good dam can fetch $8,500 to $10,000. And a proven bull with a proven sire and a good dam can fetch $18,000 up depending on blood line.
Champion quality animals are most expensive with prices starting in the range of $50,000 up.
I use unregistered cows but keep a registered bull. The last bull I bought set me back $9,600. He’s from a very good line and has a proven performance record.
I raise the calves to market weight and sell them.
Market weight is between 1,000 lbs and 1,200 lbs.
The local market is currently giving $.78 lbs.
I prefer Black Angus cattle. There’s fewer caving problems. Their dark color means less problems with utter burn. They’re naturally polled (they don’t have horns) so don’t have to worry about them goring ya if the decide to get ornery (something all cattle naturally are). And the meat is generally a better quality. That’s why ya pay more for Angus beef at the store.

When I was a youngin growin up on the family farm I asked my daddy one time why he wasn’t using commerical feeds for the hogs and cattle. His answer made an impression on me that effects the way I do things on my farm now.
He said he wasn’t gonna sell anything for someone else to eat with stuff in it that he wouldn’t want his family eating.
If more producers practised this I belive that we just might have fewer problems with our food supply in general.
Well gotta go. I’m walking my baby girl down the isle in a few hours and gotta start getting ready.
Or at least as ready as I’ll ever get.

David:
“Responsible stewardship is one of those conservative ideas I have always ascribed to.”

I think this comment is needless politicization of a simple and very basic idea. Responsible stewardship is not a left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative situation at all. It is merely Good Common Sense and Morality — something that everyone can have, and can appreciate in others.

Ron Brown:
“His answer made an impression on me that effects the way I do things on my farm now.
He said he wasn’t gonna sell anything for someone else to eat with stuff in it that he wouldn’t want his family eating.”

Good Common Sense. Basic Morality.

I only eat meat about once a week. If I’m going to buy beef, it’s local, grass fed (not commercial feed or corn fed — because both are an unnatural diet for cattle), free range, certified organic and free of hormones and antibiotics. With chicken and eggs, it’s local, organically fed, free range, and hormone/antibiotic free. Same goes for pork. Since I don’t eat meat that often, I feel I can afford to spend a little more on meat that has been raised by people who possess good common sense and basic morality about the animals they raise for consumption.

I also eat fish, and sometimes other seafood too, again, about once a week. It is either caught wild by fishermen who engage in responsible fishing practices, or is organically fish farmed. Aside from these two forms of protein per week, my diet is generally vegetarian — locally raised, certified organic produce and some organic products bought from the health food market or shop. I do my own canning too, and so some of the fruits and veggies that I buy at the local farmers markets end up being put up for later in the year. I also grow a garden every year and pick, eat, and can foods that I’ve raised myself.

I don’t eat this way to be hip, or trendy, or snobbishly elitist. As the granddaughter of an herbalist and holistic healer, and the daughter of an epidemiologist, who once worked for the EPA, I simply was raised to be conscious and careful about the things that I put into my body. I never saw a reason to change the habits and outlook I was raised to observe — except for when I was younger.
When I was young, and poor, and busy with college and a job, I shopped too quickly, in easiest proximity to wherever I was, ate far too many starches and caffeinated beverages, and didn’t always get a chance to buy organic. I began feeling pretty awful during that time and noticed that I was getting sick much more frequently, but I continued to work and go to school feeling that way, because I really didn’t have time to shop or eat the way I knew I should. When things slowed down, and I settled into working, I went back to eating responsibly and began feeling like my ordinarily healthy self again.

Now more than ever before, Americans want to eat local, organic, naturally raised foods. And with the increasing demand, we are seeing more markets, shops and restaurants that offer a healthier array of meat, fish, produce and other products to their customers.
Of course, where I live there are many such places, so I’m lucky that way. Here in the SF Bay Area, the demand for responsibly raised and grown food has grown to such a degree, that those who offer such things are the ones getting rich, while the other supermarkets, and shops are really beginning to struggle to compete.

While I agree we need better labeling, and government regulations that can effectively protect us from unconscionable greed and disdain for public safety, we also need people who truly want to shop responsibly. If that package of beef you pick up doesn’t proudly say grass fed, then it isn’t. Instead, it was cruelly fed things that cows don’t naturally choose to eat unless they have no other choice. If what you put into your cart doesn’t say certified organic, then it isn’t. Instead, it was heavily sprayed with chemicals the entire time it grew, and it’s roots absorbed nothing but petroleum fertilizers in ruined, desecrated soil.
Conservatives always talk about how the free market is the magical answer to everything — but in this case, it may well be true. When unhealthy food sits rotting in the markets and shops because it was mass produced by corporations who clearly don’t care at all about it’s quality, freshness, or healthiness they’ll either be forced to take the hint, or go out of business.

Remember my friends (left right, and center), you are what you eat — so we should be demanding what is best for us, and for our environment.

Adrienne, conservative, as in to conserve earth’s resources and our own. It is a principle I have always found has great merit and returns for the effort expended.

David, sorry about that. I totally misunderstood what you’d meant.

Ron Brown, congratulations on your daughter’s marriage, and as I write this, I hope you’re having a real blast at the reception! :^)

Yeah man- The “Cow” lobby IS powerfullll, when ME/General Bush is a spokesman— “I” demand the Chinese, Japanese and the Koreans consume Cow! “It’s good for you”, as stated by “ME” during the G-8. Eat Cow, Yummy!

Adrienne

Good Common Sense. Basic Morality.

Yeah it was a good common sense answer. And one that is basic morality. But the those are the only kind of answers that ever make any sense to me at all.

congratulations on your daughter’s marriage,

Thanks. I did enjoy the whole thing. This is the fourth time I’ve been the Father of the Bride. And it don’t get any easier giving your little girl in marriage. If fact I had a little more trouble this time than the last three. Reckon it’s because she’s the baby of the family. And more so than the others she been daddy’s little girl.
I’ve known the boy she married for the past 20 years. He’s always been a good kid and will make her a great husband.
But most importantly he says he loves her more than anything in the world. And she say she can’t live without him. And all I’ve ever wanted for my youngin’s is for them to marry someone that’s as wonderful of a spouse as mine is.