Bush government attempts to limit testing of food supply

Creekstone Farms is one of the many beef producers who have recently made a push toward 'natural beef', which in their case means no hormones, no anti-biotics, and a vegetarian diet (1). To further assure their customers that beef produced at Creekstone is safe, they want to test 100% of their cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (i.e. mad cow disease), a big improvement over the 1% testing rate that the USDA has. Great, a food supplier who is concerned not only about food quality but food safety; so much so that they want to voluntarily, and with their own money, go above and beyond the required testing mandates. You would think the USDA would be all over that. Turns out, not so much:

The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.

Their reasoning is that testing may create false positives that would hurt consumer confidence. I do see the point; but given that the only ones harmed by this would be the owners of Creekstone (who would lose business as a result of a false positive), and that a retest would be relatively easy, it seems that there may be other motives.

Larger meatpackers have opposed Creekstone's push to allow wider testing out of fear that consumer pressure would force them to begin testing all animals too. Increased testing would raise the price of meat by a few cents per pound.

Once again, 'big food' has worked hard to make the price of foodstuffs artificially low, and they would like to keep it that way.

(image via Manishin; story via Tree Hugger)

Blogs on this:
YumSugar
Crooks and Liars
Loaded Dice

(1) Their cattle are corn fed, not grass fed, but I guess you can't have everything.