IRRADIATED MEAT? Duh?
Misleading image for irradiated meat
I
IRRADIATED MEAT? DUH?
Big Meat’s response to the squalid, filthy, disease incubators that are the conditions of feedlots and slaughterhouses, combined with the impossible task of keeping shit out of your burger rich in gut flora superbugs, is to conspire with the USDA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), a big promoter of all things nuclear, to keep beef fetid and simply ionize the mess with radioactive cobalt-60 or some other day glow material before you stuff it down your pie hole. The DOE has long advocated using the radioactive waste left behind from making bombs to irradiate food in a kill them all and let god sort them out scenario. This abnormal response is typical of an industry that is essentially unaccountable and long overdue for reform Currently these mechanized killing floors dispatch 12,000 chickens, 1,100 pigs, and 400 cows per hour. That’s per hour 24/7.
SPEED KILLS
What happens with cows especially is that the workers are under tremendous pressure to “perform” which is when the problems start. That entails tying off the bowels so that they do not contaminate the meat. But of course at this rate the workers can mess up and slice open bowel and spill cow manure all over the place. Rather than slowing down the production line which has already caused fatalities and numerous injuries, they want to speed it up. This obsession with efficiency and profit leads to more feces in meat, which is ripe with selected deadly and virulent E-coli from grain feeding, posing a greater risk to consumers of dying if eaten undercooked especially with children. As far as line speed goes why slow it down when we can blow it down- just smoke everything with gamma radiation, feces, belchings, urine and all, nobody will be the wiser.
TOO BIG TO CARE
In fact, Industry is really pushing for this because it can increase shelf life for meat and produce as much as three times longer. It kills insects so Dole is seizing over it because fruit from anywhere can get imported without a hassle. It’s a win-win situation for anything with “Big” in front of the name. This only works for mega corporations with the cash to set up an industrial fry-pot if you will for irradiation of consumer foods. Look at the recent merger reminiscent of the Robber Barons of yesteryear.
A bundle of recent mega-mergers, featuring Smithfield-Farmland in 2003 and Tyson-IBP in 2001, have concentrated enormous economic and political power in the hands of so few people that it borders on oligarchy. The Tyson-IBP deal has been called “deadly” for consumers and family farmers alike.[1]
We could call these mega-corporations “too big to care.” Throw in some deceptive advertizing and you’ve got a Going Jessie. Making a buck is fine but I have to smirk when I see SureBeam’s term electronic pasteurization a quaint, fuzzy, industry term for dirty-bombed foods. Cold pasteurization is another one.
THE PUBLIC CAN’T GET ENOUGH
P. T. Barnum once said there was a sucker born every minute. He was wrong there’s a sucker born every second. It all started with the Chicago suburb grocer Carrot Top selling the first irradiated foods-strawberries-in 1992. On May 16, 2000, frozen hamburgers irradiated by a linear accelerator in Sioux City, Iowa, went on sale in 84 grocery stores in the Twin Cities. While the public went ape stuffing their faces with this strange new food, the media devoured the story: “Incredible.” “Historic.” “Groundbreaking.” Within two years, according to the food irradiation industry, zapped beef was on sale coast-to-coast in 5,000 stores, including Albertson’s/Jewel-Osco,.. Safeway, and Winn-Dixie.[2]
However, much of it was your typical media circus hype from your standard issue corporate presstitutes parroting industry rhetoric without questioning any of the “facts.” The whole charade backfired when media acting like Socrates’ Blushing Ape, did a turn around after discovering that the school lunch program which feeds 27 million poor children across the nation were using irradiated beef for hamburgers. Add in 4D meat which also goes directly to school lunch without passing Go. This is a real bargain by any estimation. You get real shit burgers from a prion-infected downer cow (remember 4 D means down, dead, disabled …). Get the feeling that the USDA not only hates economically disadvantaged children but actually wishes to experiment on them?
LAB AMERICAN STYLE
Experiment on them? Huh?
Throughout this book I will be counting the number of national experiments perpetrated on the American people without informed consent. We have a few.
1. The GMO experiment
2. The Prion (vCJD) experiment
3. The irradiation experiment
4. The vaccine experiment
5. The SSRI and Statin experiment
6. The fluoride experiment
7. The pesticide experiment
8. The Age of Aluminum experiment
9. The Mechanized Meat, Industrial Dinners experiment etc
10. The Pill for Every Ill experiment
11. The Better Living Through Synthetics experiment
12. The Commercial Sick Care System experiment
I could keep going but I think you get the idea; this is actually the contents of my book.
THE CONCERNS
Yes the intellectually honest scientists without a conflict of interest are very concerned with our eating of irradiated food Duh, really? Here are a few concerns listed by the Center for Food Safety:
* Irradiation destroys vitamins and damages the nutritional quality of
food. Even at low doses, some irradiated foods lose 20% of vitamins such as
C, E, K, and B complex. Because irradiation breaks down cell walls,
irradiated foods which are stored for long periods may lose up to 70-80% of
their vitamin content.
* Scientific studies–deliberately ignored by the FDA–are alarming. In
numerous lab tests, animals fed irradiated foods have shown increased
tumors, reproductive failures and kidney damage. In 1979 J. Barna of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences noted hundreds of adverse effects in animals fed irradiated foods. In a study carried out by the National Institute of Nutrition in India, whose results were published in 1975, chromosomal abnormalities were observed in children who were fed irradiated wheat.
* Nuclear and electron beam irradiation produces toxic byproducts in the
food. Ionizing irradiation is so powerful that it knocks electrons out of
atoms and creates what are called “free radicals.” These free radicals
react with food components, creating new radiolytic products, some of which
are toxic and carcinogenic (benzene, formaldehyde, lipid peroxides), and
some of which may be unique to irradiated foods. No one knows the long-term
impact of eating these “modified” foods.
* Irradiation creates the impression of “counterfeit freshness,” kills off
beneficial bacteria, and creates an ideal environment for the proliferation
of botulism and grain aflatoxins–two of the deadliest food toxins on
earth. Although irradiation kills 90-99% of harmful bacteria, those
bacteria that survive will be radiation-resistant and ever more virulent.
* Nuclear irradiation facilities using radioactive materials are
environmental hazards. Accidents have already occurred in Georgia and New
Jersey, injuring workers and contaminating the ground water.
* Despite irradiation’s hazards and drawbacks, it is being aggressively
pushed by an embattled meat industry looking for cover in the wake of
numerous recent food-borne illness outbreaks, particularly E -coli,
Salmonella, and Listeria. At the same time, the industry has vigorously
opposed efforts to clean up filthy slaughter houses, slow down meat
production processing lines, stop the feeding of antibiotics and rendered
animal protein to livestock, and increase the number of federal meat
inspectors–all more productive, and less hazardous, measures to reduce
food-borne illnesses.
