I Won't Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For A Tainted Hamburger Today

It's 11PM, do you know where your hamburger has been?

I tell ya, it's stories like this one, today, that can easily have you thinking the movie, 'Idiocracy' was a documentary, not a feature film.

Yves Smith, over on his Naked Capitalism, has a whopper (pun intended);

Tainted Burgers Show That Corporate Profits Trump Public Safety (Cargill and McDonalds Edition)

The object lesson is America’s addiction to hamburgers versus E coli. E coli gets into the food chain when feces get into the meat. Period. It’s a very straightforward contamination mechanism. And in this case, the party fighting for the right to eat contaminated food is Cargill, and one of its major suppliers in its burger business, a company called Beef Products.

It is a detailed, and tremendously fascinating, tale, on just how contaminated meat sold to the public is, how the enormocorps, in this case Cargill, are totally cool with that, as they, sanctimoniously, cite bullshit boilerplate tributes to "following regulations", and such.

And, in using information from NYT articles, Smith gets to the diss, who else, the NYT, for not connecting the dots in their own reporting.

I am hesitant to quote more from the post, as you need to read it, jaw-dropping paragraph, after jaw-dropping paragraph.

How does this happen?

Check out the post we did last year, on Food Inc., and the corruption deeply rooted in our food industry, and ties to Congress.

But go read "Tainted Burgers Show That Corporate Profits Trump Public Safety (Cargill and McDonalds Edition)", and, if you do eat hamburgers, start checking out the source they traveled before slapping them on the grill.


Bonus Riffs

Forget About Tuesday, Cash On The Barrelhead Today, Wimpy!

M'm! M'm! Good!

Spam-A-Lot ...The Eating Kind!

Top Ten Cloves: Ways Spinach Industry Plans To Overcome E. Coli Setback

Forget About Tuesday, Cash On The Barrelhead Today, Wimpy!

About the only other characters more associated then Wimpy, with hamburgers (cheeseburgers, in this case) was Aykroyd and Belushi, in the classic SNL Greek Diner skit.

And those may soon be long-gone, fond memories.

Future generations may have to Google (or use whatever will be in vogue for knowledge searches) "hamburger" and "cheeseburger" to get hip to the pre-Global Warming crowd, as they sit around the futuristic retro soda shop, wolfing down their soy burgers and non-dairy, highly-concentrated protein shakes.

Hamburgers are the Hummers of food in global warming

Pelletier is one of a growing number of scientists studying the environmental costs of food from field to plate.

By looking at everything from how much grain a cow eats before it is ready for slaughter to the emissions released by manure, they are getting a clearer idea of the true costs of food.

The livestock sector is estimated to account for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and beef is the biggest culprit.

Even though beef only accounts for 30 percent of meat consumption in the developed world it's responsible for 78 percent of the emissions, Pelletier said Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That's because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry, Pelletier said.

If people were to simply switch from beef to chicken, emissions would be cut by 70 percent, Pelletier said. 

[Snip]

If meat consumption in the developed world was cut from the current level of about 90 kilograms a year to the recommended level of 53 kilograms a year, livestock related emissions would fall by 44 percent.

"Given the projected doubling of (global) meat production by 2050, we're going to have to cut our emissions by half just to maintain current levels," Pelletier said.

"Technical improvements are not going to get us there."

Poor Wimpy, he's gonna starve.

Don't see'em making the switch to chicken.