Mystery Meat: A Real Horror Story
If you're watching the news today, you've probably seen videos of sore- and scab-covered cows, that can't even walk, being forklifted into the slaughterhouse. The video was shot by The Humane Society.
In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recalled 143 million pounds of beef.
The catch: most of it has already been eaten.
Here's a MSNBC video on the story, by the way.
No one knows if these sick animals produced tainted beef. (There's the irony: the animals we kill have to be healthy enough ... to kill.)
Before the Cattlemen's Association starts sending me e-mails: I just went out for bul go ki this weekend in Koreatown. I personally eat meat. My sister and several friends are vegetarians. We all make our own moral choices as adults.
But not everyone has equal choices, particularly if you're a kid ... a kid on the school lunch program.
Much of this suspect beef was used in school lunches. According to an article on the unfolding recall, "Grand Rapids [Michigan] Public Schools must throw out 10 tons of hamburger, while the Ann Arbor Public Schools has about 200 pounds of quarantined beef." Plenty of school kids have already eaten the mystery meat.
And school lunch programs haven't had a great track record of serving top-quality food. An article in the environmental magazine Grist calls the school lunch situation "grim."
The Federal Government's own accountability arm, the GAO, has a different critique: whether the nutritional value of school lunches encourages obesity.
(You can pull up the GAO report here. It downloads as a PDF file.)
Kids on free and reduced lunches are going to bear the brunt of federal decision-making about keeping food healthy and safe. In the school we visited as part of our piece on South Carolina's "Corridor of Shame," more than 90 percent of kids qualified for free or reduced lunches.
The kids of poor people and working poor people are much less likely to get the option to eat free range organic. And in the stratification of American society, perhaps there's a new group: the food-choice-poor, people whose incomes or locations (in neighborhoods without grocery stores, for example) make it much more likely that they'll eat whatever is served up in the school cafeteria or sold at the local bodega.
As the story of the suspect beef unfolds, hopefully we'll take a deeper look at what kids are being served ... and whether the government is serving them well.
Farai Chideya
7:22 PM ET
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02-18-2008
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On President's Day: Who Is the Best?
Mt. Rushmore
iStockphoto.com
News Headlines: Feb. 18, 2007
Talk About It:
Newsweek: New Discoveries About Abe Lincoln -- "Jean Harvey Baker, a pioneer of women's and political-cultural history, made us see Mary Lincoln more clearly. David Herbert Donald shifted his sharp pen from novelist Thomas Wolfe to Lincoln and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Doris Kearns Goodwin has made us see anew the workings of a 'team of rivals' known as a cabinet. Allen Guelzo places Lincoln into an intellectual and religious context better than anybody in the old days of slow-ball and Bible-thump. ... Books are hardly the only 'new thing' about Lincoln."
As we observe President's Day ... who would you consider the nation's best president? Why?
Election 2008:
L.A. Times: Obama Seeks to Turn Tables in Ohio and Texas
The Swamp: Did Obama Plagiarize? Clinton Team Says Yes
AP: Obama and Edwards Meet in NC
New York Times: Former President Bush Backs McCain
Nation:
AFP: Beef Taken Off the Menu After Largest U.S. Recall
TIME: How to Make Great Teachers
Reuters: More Advanced Cancer Seen in Uninsured Americans
World:
Reuters: Unpopular at Home, Bush Basks in African Praise
New York Times: Rice Brings Incentives to End Kenya Violence
Washington Post: Polls Close, Counting Begins in Pakistan Elections
Op-Ed:
Washington Post: The Dumbing Of America
Boston Globe: Black Man vs. White Woman
Stanley Fish: When 'Identity Politics' Is Rational
Geoffrey Bennett
11:41 AM ET
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02-18-2008
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