On August 4, 1997, almost a year and a half after the FDA promised a speedy response to the threat of mad cow, new animal-feed restrictions took effect. “The United States has no BSE,” the agency declared, “and the final rule provides the necessary feed controls… should BSE occur here.” The FDA described its new ban as “mammalian-to-ruminant, with exceptions.’ Dead sheep, goats, cattle, deer, mink, elk, dogs and cats could no longer be fed to cattle. Rendering plants and feed mills would have to prevent these banned ingredients from mingling with feedstuffs that cattle were still allowed to eat: dead horses, pigs, and poultry; cattle blood, gelatin, and tallow; and plate waste collected from restaurants, regardless of what kind of meat those leftovers contained. Extensive records had to be kept on the disposition of various animal proteins, and feeds that were now prohibited for cattle had to be clearly labeled as such. There were no new restrictions, however, on what could be fed to poultry, hogs, zoo animals, or pets. Indeed, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the National Food Processors Association, and the Pet Food Institute successfully lobbied against any new labeling requirement for pet foods. These industry groups rightly worried that the FDA’s proposed warning label — “Do not feed to ruminants” — might alarm consumers about what their pets were actually being fed.
The dire predictions of the meat, feed, and rendering industries — their claims that new FDA rules would create havoc and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars — proved unfounded. Cattle remains that had previously been fed to cattle were instead fed to pets, hogs, and poultry. Aside from slightly higher transportation costs, the new feed restrictions had a negligible economic effect. One rendering industry supplier told Meat Marketing & Technology magazine that the whole rule-making process had proven to be “a remarkable example of cooperation between the industry and the FDA.” That cooperation, another rendering executive said, had “protected the beef industry and the rendering industry” without creating “a mood in the country that recycled protein ingredients would be harmful.” The trade journal noted that some of the wording of the new FDA rules had been taken “verbatim” from the rendering industry’s own recommendations.
In the United States, mad cow gradually receded from the headlines — until January, 2001. For more than a decade, countries in the European Union had assured the public that BSE had not been detected in their cattle. Which was true, because relatively few of their cattle had been tested for the disease. Once widespread testing began in Europe, the actual scale of the mad cow epidemic started to become clear. Switzerland was the first to begin routine testing; the number of BSE cases there soon doubled. Then Denmark began testing and discovered its first infected animal, followed by new cases in Spain and Germany. After widespread testing began in France, the number of BSE cases there increased fivefold. On January 1, 2001, the European Union launched a program that required BSE testing for all cattle older than 30 months. Intended to calm fears of mad cow, the EU program had the opposite effect, as more and more infected cattle were discovered. On January 15, the first case of BSE was found in Italy. The infected animal was discovered at a slaughterhouse near Modena that supplied ground beef to McDonald’s restaurants in a number of European countries.
The fear of mad cow disease caused beef sales in the EU to plummet by as much as 50 percent, and news from the United States was hardly reassuring to consumers there. A federal investigation of American feed mills and rendering plants found that many companies had not been taking the threat of mad cow — or the FDA’s new feed regulations — very seriously. More than one-quarter of the firms handling “prohibited” feed neglected to add a label warning that it should never be given to cattle. One-fifth of the firms handling both prohibited feeds and feeds approved for cattle had no system in place to prevent commingling or cross-contamination. And about one out of every ten rendering firms was completely unaware that the FDA had passed feed restrictions to prevent the spread of mad cow. In Colorado, more than one-quarter of the cattle-feed producers had somehow never heard about the new rules.
The federal government’s apparent inability to keep prohibited feed away from cattle prompted the McDonald’s Corporation to take action. The company’s sales in Europe had already fallen by 10 percent, and American publicity about mad cow was raising doubts about the wisdom of eating any hamburgers, let alone Big Macs. Officials from the FDA and the USDA, as well as representatives from the leading meatpacking and rendering companies, were quietly invited to discuss the feed issue at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. On March 13, the McDonald’s Corporation announced that its ground beef suppliers would be required to supply documentation showing that FDA feed rules were being strictly followed — or McDonald’s would no longer buy their beef.
IBP, Excel, and ConAgra immediately agreed to follow McDonald’s directive, vowing that no cattle would be purchased without proper certification. Every rancher and feedlot would have to supply signed affidavits promising that banned feeds had never been given to their cattle. The American Meat Institute, which routinely fought against any mandatory food-safety measures proposed by the federal government, made no complaint about these new rules. “If McDonald’s is requiring something of their suppliers, it has a pretty profound effect,” said an AMI spokeswoman. What the FDA had failed to achieve — after nearly five years of industry consultation and halfhearted regulation — the McDonald’s Corporation accomplished in a matter of weeks. “Because we have the world’s biggest shopping cart,” a McDonald’s spokesman explained, “we can use that leadership to provide more focus and more order throughout the beef system.”
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FOR THIS PAPERBACK EDITION Penguin has included quotations from some favorable reviews of Fast Food Nation. In the interest of balance, I’d like to quote a few contrary opinions. “McGarbage,” wrote a correspondent for the National Review Online. “Schlosser wears many hats, a few of which are conical and contain the word ‘dunce.”’ I was described, moreover, as a “health fascist,” and “economics ignoramus,” a “banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid,” and a “hectoring taskmaster of the nanny state.” The book was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal not by one of the paper’s fine investigative journalists, but by a right-wing member of its editorial staff. Among other things, she accused me of producing a “hodgepodge of impressions, statistics, anecdotes, and prejudices.” A spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute said that my evidence of worker safety problems in meatpacking plants was “anecdotal,” and that I had “vilified the industry in a way that is very unfair.” The restaurant industry did not like Fast Food Nation, either. “In addition to acting like the ‘food police’, and trying to coerce the American consumer never to eat fast food again,” the National Restaurant Association said, “[Schlosser] recklessly disparages an industry that has contributed tremendously to our nation.”