National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #07-01 Milk, Meat and Money
February 14, 2001

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2001/0701.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact....

Ronnie Cummins: Industrial agriculture has been a disaster. And our government, the US Surgeon General's report, even admits that one-third of all these cancers that we will be getting are directly caused by the food that we eat.

Michelle Simon: You have a billion dollar industry who's very survival depends on their ability to keep promoting and brainwashing people into this idea that milk is essential.

Phillip Babich As global corporations gain greater control over the world's food supply, their industrial methods of production are coming into question. On this program, we take a look at food safety and some of the health problems associated with the foods we eat.

I'm Phillip Babich -- your host this week on Making Contact -- an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information.

Irradiation, pesticides, fertilizers, and genetic engineering are some of the modern elements of food production in the United States. Federal regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, assure U.S. citizens that the nation's food supply is safe, but food-related diseases and food allergies are rampant and on the rise. According to public health advocates, these problems are partly rooted in the way our dairy and meat products are made.

Most factory farms rely on the heavy use of antibiotics to prevent disease among livestock living in overcrowded conditions. The World Health Organization recently declared that the overuse of antibiotics has become an issue of global importance. As doctors and veterinarians over-prescribe antibiotics to people, and to the animals they eat, harmful bacteria are developing resistances that are sometimes impossible to treat. A recent study of milk at Rutgers University demonstrated that samples contained residues of three antibiotics. Although the FDA has certified that the levels of these antibiotics were safe, the residues caused harmful bacteria to become resistant at an increased rate -- almost three thousand percent. Making Contact's Krissy Clark has more on what's making some doctors and consumers worry.

Krissy Clark: When a cow's udders become inflamed and suffer bacterial infection, its called mastitis. The usual treatment is antibiotics. According to industry observers, mastitis appears most frequently in cows who live in crowded, dirty conditions, or in cows who are producing milk at unnaturally high levels because they are treated with a bovine growth hormone called Posilac. Posilac is sold by the biotech company Monsanto.

Michael Hansen: It says right on the label "Use of Posilac is associated with increased frequency of medication in cows for mastitis and other health problems."

Krissy Clark: Michael Hansen, does research for the Consumer's Union, a consumer advocacy group. A decade ago, the FDA raised ten-fold the amount of antibiotic residues considered safe in milk. This happened under the supervision of a former Monsanto employee, who came to work at the FDA. Since then, Hansen has tracked the increasing use of antibiotics on dairy cows and its regulation.

Michael Hansen: The argument is, is that every bulk milk tank, every bulk tanker of milk, gets tested after it comes off a farm. That's true, but the general tests that many states do, only pick up a handful of antibiotics. Basically, pick up antibiotics in the penicillin family. So as long as you re not using those, in many of these states when they do a routine test, nothing gets detected. That doesn't mean that there isn't any antibiotics there, it's just none of the ones that they're testing for. And I have also been told, I don't want to mention the name of the company, but I've been told by farmers that new antibiotics that are coming out from certain companies, the way that they're actually pitched to the farmer is, I've been told by a number of farmers that for certain new antibiotics the pitch given to them was: "Oh, you can use this they can't be detected."

Krissy Clark: Some dairy farmers are avoiding the antibiotic question entirely.

Albert Straus: When I became organic, and I stopped using all those, we're actually having a better and healthier herd than we had before.

Krissy Clark: Albert Straus, whose father has been dairy farming since 1941, runs Straus Family Creamery, in California. In the 1970's, it became the first organic dairy farm in the western United States.

Albert Straus: We try to prevent disease by keeping the bedding that they're laying on dry and clean. We take. . . we try to address the problems before they happen, or turn into a bigger problem. And we use alternative medicines and you know, that hopefully helps us also.

Krissy Clark: When Straus's cows do get sick, he uses homeopathic medicines and aspirin. His milk is bottled in recycled glass containers and comes from cows that are hormone and antibiotic-free, and eat organic grass and feed. He says hundreds of people who cannot drink most milk, for a variety of health reasons, have contacted him to say they can drink his.

Albert Straus: I think they think they're lactose intolerant, but they might be allergic to something else in the milk. We don't use any vitamin D in the milk. We don't homogenize the milk. We don't use chlorine as a sanitizer. We use hydrogen peroxide, which breaks down to water and carbon dioxide. You know of course. . .in glass doesn't have anything leaching into it. So I think. . .and besides it being organic where we don't use antibiotics or hormones.

Krissy Clark: Straus distributes his milk to stores from New Mexico to Hawaii and several major grocery store chains carry his products. As antibiotics find their way into the milk supply at higher and higher levels, people continue to turn to organic milk. But antibiotics are just one example of how the food and biotech industries have exerted their influence over milk.

Greg Miller: Dairy foods are part of the US Food Guide Pyramid. . .they have their own little food group there, and two to three servings of dairy foods are recommended each day.

Krissy Clark: Greg Miller is the Vice President of nutrition research for the National Dairy Council, the communication and education arm of the dairy industry. As milk consumption started to decline over the last couple decades, the dairy industry began working with the USDA to fund the "Got Milk" ad campaign and milk moustache ads. He says, by FDA standards, dairy foods are a good source of calcium and 8 other essential nutrients. But lately, Miller has had to defend milk against some health professionals, who question the nutritional value of dairy products altogether, organic or conventional.

Greg Miller: Well. . .I think, there really aren't any health risks. If you go out and look at what mainstream medical health professionals are recommending in terms of a healthy dietary pattern, almost every mainstream health professional organization out there recommends dairy as a part of that healthy diet plan. The US Dietary Guidelines which were just revised last year continue to support the role and value of dairy foods in a healthy diet. In November of 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics developed a new policy position that said every pediatrician in the US should be talking to children and parents about their consumption of milk, yogurt and cheese, because if it's low, it means their calcium intake is probably low, because it's difficult to meet your calcium needs without dairy in your diet.

John McDougall: There's never been a case of dietary calcium deficiency ever reported in the world literature.

Krissy Clark: John McDougall is a general practitioner and author of several best-selling books on nutrition.

John McDougall: No one's developed a disease called "calcium deficiency disease" because they didn't include milk or other high calcium foods in their diet. In fact when you look around the world at various populations of people what you see is those who take in the least calcium have the lowest rates of osteoporosis. In other words, in Africa, in China, other Asian countries, where osteoporosis is rare to non-existent, they have very low intakes of calcium, compared to Americans, and one of the reasons is they don't drink milk. Now, the scientific research is mixed on what it says in terms of milk's benefits as far as bone health. And I have to tell you that the bulk of the literature says that milk does not help bone health, but there is a segment of it that does, and I have to also tell you that a good portion of that literature is paid for, is funded by the National Dairy Council. So I believe there's some bias there.

Krissy Clark: What's behind the battle that pits some doctors like McDougall against the nutritional advice of the US Food Pyramid and so-called "mainstream" health professionals? The USDA, says Michelle Simon, a lawyer with a background in public health. Simon founded the Center for Informed Food Choices. She says the USDA, which is heavily lobbied by the milk industry, has an inherent conflict of interest.

Michelle Simon: On one hand, it's responsible for promoting the interests of the milk, the dairy and meat industries, and on the other hand, it's responsible for telling the American public what's healthy to eat. And it does that in the form of the US Dietary Guidelines, what we've come now to recognize as the food guide pyramid, which also includes additional guidelines.

Krissy Clark: Simon points to the "Got Milk" and milk moustache ads, as examples of the close ties between the milk industry and government. The dairy coalition funds the ads and the USDA administers the funds.

Michelle Simon: The US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Donna Shelala, did her very own milk moustache ad, as did President Clinton. So, basically, we have the highest government officials promoting a product, just like any other, I mean, imagine, you know, President Clinton doing a Coke ad. I mean people would be outraged. Well why is milk any different than Coke? Really, I mean only because again, we've been brainwashed to think this is a health product, when it's not. It's just a product being sold on the market that happens to get a lot of government support.

Krissy Clark: In fall 2000, a US District Court determined the USDA violated federal law by hiding financial conflicts of interest among members of the Diet Advisory Committee that sets federal nutritional policies. Mindy Kursban is a staff attorney for the Physician s Committee for Responsible Medicine, who filed the suit. She discovered that over half of the members of the USDA advisory board had ties to the food industry, including the Dairy Council, the Dairy Promotion Board, and Nestle, a major brand of milk. The USDA dietary guidelines serve as a blueprint for all federally-funded food programs. Under the school lunch program, cows' milk is the only beverage provided. Kursban says that several of the plaintiffs in the suit were parents of school children who were lactose intolerant.

Mindy Kursban: One woman, she had 8 children, and they all went to public schools in New York City, her eldest child turned out to be lactose intolerant, and at that point on she never gave any more of her children any milk, any of her younger children, because she knew what was going to happen. And she had. . .her children every day could not, you know they had to bring their own meal. And if they didn't bring their own meal. . .then if they forgot, they had nothing to eat for the day because of their diet. And so what we were trying to do was to get the government to offer additional alternatives, as part of, not only the school lunch program, but all other federal food programs and not limit it so much to these meat, dairy and egg-based foods.

Krissy Clark: For Making Contact, I'm Krissy Clark.

Phillip Babich You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, or want to get in touch with any of our guests, we'll be giving out our toll free number at the end of this broadcast.

Severe regulatory and even consumer dietary changes have taken place in the wake of outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease in British and French cattle, and its cross-over to humans in the form of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease. The United States maintains that the U.S. supply of beef is safe, responding to the European outbreak by enacting its own regulatory changes, though not as sweeping. But some investigators aren't as sure about the purity of the nation's beef supply. Making Contact's Monica Lopez has more.

Monica Lopez: A cheeseburger, fries and a soft drink. Very few meal combos are considered more American, and very few Americans have never eaten one. Which is why the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease in Europe, and it's highly publicized human counterpart, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, has raised concerns on this side of the Atlantic. Both diseases are part of a larger class of illnesses, called Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies, or TSEs. It is believed that the disease initially spread in British cattle through a common process not widely known to the public, the feeding of infected cattle and sheep parts, back to cattle. Converting dead livestock into livestock feed is a lucrative part of the rendering industry.

Dr. Linda Detwiler is senior staff veterinarian with the US Department of Agriculture s animal and plant health inspection service. She says that the US government has been aware of TSEs for some time.

Linda Detwiler: TSEs that we have endemically, are scrapie, in sheep and goats. It's predominantly in the United States in sheep. We've only had seven cases in goats. Our first case was diagnosed in 1947 and we've had a control/eradication program in place for scrapie since 1952, with new, hopefully new validated tests that will help us in this effort coming on board. We also have in the United States Chronic Wasting Disease that affects deer and elk. In the free-ranging, or wild deer and elk, it's been found in these areas in northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming. We've tested about between 5000 and 6000 animals outside of the endemic area and have found no evidence of the disease in there. It's also been found in several ranch-raised elk.

Monica Lopez: John Stauber is the co-author of "Mad Cow USA" and Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Stauber explains how the rendering process in feed furthered the spread of Mad Cow Disease in Britain. John Stauber:

John Stauber: Unfortunately, one of the neat ideas that the rendering industry developed over the last few decades, along with the feed industry was to take meat and bone meal, protein and fat, from rendering plants and use it as feed supplements for cattle. Apparently, either from sheep that were infected with their version of TSE called scrapie, or from that one rare individual cow infected with a TSE, somehow, this strain emerged. Imagine one cow or one sheep with this strain of TSE being fed back, infecting another dozen animals, those being fed back, infecting more animals. This closed, cannibalistic, feed loop made sure that as animals became diseased and died and then were fed back to living animals, the disease amplified and spread, and because of the long latency period, the disease first emerged in just a few cows in the mid-1980s in Britain but by the early 1990s had spread to hundreds of thousands of cows.

Monica Lopez: Although the same kind of feed has been produced and fed to cattle in the United States, the US Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and the feed industry maintain that a series of protective rules, dating back to 1989, has ensured the safety of the beef supply in the United States.

Richard Sellers is the Vice President of the American Feed Industry Association. Sellers says that AFIA tried to go even further than a 1997 FDA rule that bans the feeding of ruminant animals (cows, goats and sheep), to other ruminants. It also requires warning labels on feed products that contain by-products from ruminant animals.

Richard Sellers: The American Feed Industry took the lead and proposed, actually, further steps than FDA proposed in their rule. The original draft proposal that FDA had put forth was to ban ruminant protein co-products that we use in the industry, from the packing industry, in feed, banning ruminant products to feed to ruminants, which was what the UK had done with their outbreak. We actually told them, told FDA that that was not as enforceable as a mammalian protein ban, in other words banning all mammals in ruminant feed, and that's actually the rule that came out, with a couple of exceptions, exemptions that were in there.

Monica Lopez: But some say the FDA rules and industry responses are too little, too late. Howard Lyman is a former cattle rancher and author of Mad Cow Boy. Lyman says, that although the ruminant ban is in place, the circle of ruminant-to-ruminant animal consumption has not been interrupted.

Howard Lyman: Since Mad Cow Disease raised it's ugly head, the USDA and FDA have passed regulations of not feeding ruminant animals back to ruminants. That's cows, sheep and goats back to cows, sheep and goats. But we're still feeding pigs, chickens, turkeys and horses to cows. We're feeding cows to pigs, chickens, turkeys and horses. And there's no doubt in anybody's mind in the scientific community that we can pass Mad Cow Disease from one species to the other and so we're seeing in the US, where we have banned the feeding of cows to cows, we're having the same results that they had in England, where they found that until they banned the feeding of all animals to animals, that the farmers and the feed producers just pay no attention to the ban, they just go merrily on their way.

Monica Lopez: Rendering facilities are far from welcoming, but like a number of other so-called invisible industries, they provide needed public health services, in that they deal with the remains of dead animals, including "roadkill", dead pets, and butcher scraps. David Secondine, works at a rendering plant called San Jose Tallow.

David Secondine: We receive the scraps from butcher shops, which is the trimmings, the fat, the bones, whatever is left over after they trim their meat. And from any kind of meat produce or anything in the area. We get roadkill, we get dead horses, dead cows. And so on and so forth. Now the roadkill doesn't go into the regular stuff. It's disposed of another way. It's cremated. The rest of it is just all the scraps and things like that the scrap trucks bring in.

Monica Lopez: Outside of the feed industry, rendered by-products are the components of a number of other consumer items, from cosmetics, to marshmallows, to gel caps. David Secondine:

David Secondine: True beef tallow winds up as additives to cosmetics (every time you put lipstick on it s got beef tallow in it). And hand soap has tallow in it, that s the traditional way that hand soaps have been made for thousands of years. And it works, so why mess with a good recipe. And, other than that, they basically, just, it s used as animal feed.

Monica Lopez: According to the US Department of Agriculture, the United States produced an estimated 25.7 billion pounds of beef in 2000. The feed industry estimates that cattle ate approximately 165 million tons of feed. John Stauber:

John Stauber: The rendering industry is actually bigger in the US than any other country, simply because it's how the slaughter industry deals with its waste, and we have the largest livestock industry in the world. This type of disease could have just as easily emerged in the United States [as] Britain. The meat industry will say that's not the case, that it emerged in Britain for reasons unique to Britain. And they will argue that it probably came from sheep and that there are a lot more sheep infected with TSE in Britain and that they have a lot more sheep in relation to cattle than we do and that the disease couldn't occur in the US.

Monica Lopez: With the presence of scrapie in sheep and chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, as well as the long-time practice, prior to 1997, of feeding ruminants to ruminants, both Stauber and Lyman contend that there is a real possibility for the spread of TSEs in the US beef supply. Also, according to Lyman, there is another risk out there. US meat byproduct exports can cycle back to the US in imported meats.

Howard Lyman: We export feed, with ground up animals in it, to other countries. We export meat meal, bone meal, blood meal, which are the byproducts of the slaughter process, and we are sending that food out to be added to the diets of animals that are being reimported into the United States. It has the name of "The Circle of Poison", where we send the things from the US that are banned to the countries that are producing our food and then we reimport it. It is one of the strangest things I ve ever seen. We continue to do it, we know it, but we take no steps to stop it.

Monica Lopez: There have currently been no confirmed cases of TSE or Mad Cow Disease in US cattle. Still, industry insiders like Lyman say that another important precautionary step would be to ban the feeding of all animals to animals. For Making Contact, I m Monica Lopez.

Phillip Babich: Food safety is an issue of great importance as a handful of corporations gain greater control over the world s food supply. According to Ronnie Cummins, director of the Center for Food Safety, based in Washington D.C., when chemical companies became involved in agriculture, after World War II, they introduced many of the ongoing problems with industrial food production.

Ronnie Cummins: Over the last 50 years we've seen farming change around the world, from something that was relatively sustainable and that was basically in the hands of several billion farmers around the world, to a chemical intensive process that in the United States for example last year, poured one billion pounds of toxic pesticides on our farm land, poured 12 billion pounds of chemical fertilizers, has an incredible rate of contamination, food poisoning, cancer related diseases and so on. Industrial agriculture has been a disaster. The fact that right now, standing here, myself and every man in the audience, the latest statistics are 48 percent of us will get cancer. At least once in our lifetime. The percentage for women is 38.4 of you will get cancer at least once in your lifetime. And our government, the US Surgeon General's Report even admits that 1/3 of all these cancers that we will be getting are directly caused by the food that we eat.

Phillip Babich: But the trouble doesn't stop there. Cummins warns that less than a dozen global corporations are working to corner the world food market, using biotechnology to sell their new version of food.

Ronnie Cummins: We spend a trillion dollars a year on health care and drugs. We spend 700 hundred billion dollars a year on food products. These companies, like Monsanto and Dupont and Dow, Aventis, Navartis, have decided that they're going to merge together pharmaceutical companies--the drug companies--with the seed companies, with the pesticide companies and be reborn, as they call themselves, as life science companies. In other words, the companies that have poisoned the planet with agricultural chemicals and fertilizers over the last 50 years have now "greenwashed" themselves, called themselves "life science" companies, claiming that this new technology will help them feed the world, will help them cure illness, will help them develop designer drugs and in fact designer human beings, over time that'll solve all of our problems.

Phillip Babich: Genetic engineering of food is controversial because of the unpredictable effects the process will have on the environment or on animal and human health. What little is known of these effects has made investors and consumers wary of the potential dangers. Awareness of the problems with industrial food production is spreading, according to Andrew Kimbrell, director of the International Center for Technology Assessment in Washington DC.

Andrew Kimbrell: When I grew up, I'm old enough to remember "Progress is our middle name," "Better living through chemistry," you know. "DDT is good for me," you know. And I remember the Jetsons. . .people remember the Jetsons? Right, you're gonna eat tablets and drink Tang, you know. And I'm convinced that a lot of the people at the agencies and the corporations still have this mindset. They still believe there's something called "Modern Food." I think they really do. In their heads is this idea that the more biological or artificial inputs we can put in this food the better it is. But something happened on the way to their future. People said "No." People said "We don't want that. We want stuff that looks good, that tastes good, that's healthy for us, healthy for the environment." So organics, as we all know, is the fastest growing sector in American agriculture today. So you have. . .I think genetic engineering right now is a historic battle in this crossroads of two very different world views for our food future. On one hand you have this old corporate model, of artificial, industrialized, mechanized food. The industrial model, the more inputs, the more mechanized, the better. The other hand, you have a very new consciousness. A consciousness that rejects that model, and sees more natural as better.

Phillip Babich: Kimbrell says that the corporations intent on pushing so-called modern food into supermarkets weren't ready for such a negative public response.

Andrew Kimbrell: And I've talked to these guys, and they'll say "Andy"--you know, after a couple of drinks--"What in the hell's going on here? Why are people so opposed to this?" I say, "Well, besides the fact that it could kill them, and it could destroy the environment, and offers them actually no benefits, I have no idea."

Phillip Babich: Andrew Kimbrell, Director of the International Center for Technology Assessment in Washington, DC... And that's it for this edition of Making Contact: A look at food safety. Thanks for listening. And special thanks this week to Paul Couture and Orla Rapple for recorded portions.

We have production assistance from Krissy Clark. Laura Livoti is managing director. Peggy Law, executive director. Associate producers, Stephanie Welch and Shereen Meraji. Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National producer, David Barsamian. Women's desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman. Prison desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt. And, I'm your host and managing producer, Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the topic of this week's program, or how to get in touch with any of our guests, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. You can also go to our website at radioproject.org (repeat).

Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter trio. Bye for now.