E-Coli, Mad Cow, High Cholesterol, oh my!
The meat processing industry in the United States, and particularly the beef processing part of it, is making a stupid mistake. Don't get me wrong; it's run by very intelligent people, and their actions would usually make sense, but in this instance it's very stupid.
The way meat packing has been able to become an effective monopoly (in this instance, a few big companies dominating each sector of the industry) is by reducing their margins to the lowest possible level. This means that, while it might cost an independent butcher a certain dollar amount worth of labor to slaughter a cow, and get all of the mat to the point where it can be sold, an large slaughterhouse could probably do it for half the cost. The way they do this is with industrial assembly line techniques (or dis-assembly in this case). Since each little part of slaughtering a cow is easy, they only need to teach a new employee how to do one or two parts. This means that the labor for each part is cheap (remember: little training = cheap labor), so they can slaughter the cattle more cheaply than an independent butcher could possibly do the job. This means that the slaughterhouse can either [a] pay more for the cattle, [b] charge less for their product (possibly a good idea, depending on the state of the market) or [c] make more profit. In reality, they will do all three at different times and in different circumstances, in order to gain advantages in the market.
This leads to a certain amount of cost-cutting mentality in the business. The way these companies have become strong is by reducing costs to a level lower than (most of) their competitors could possibly deal with. The fact that this mentality has generally been so successful is probably the reason they've been so reluctant to abandon it, even in circumstances where it doesn't make sense, like health regulations.
The big meat companies are also the big folks in Washington DC lobbying congress to stay out of their business. Every time a new disease is talked about in the nation's meat, these companies are the ones who manage to make sure that no new regulations get passed to restrain them.
Take the example of downer cattle: these are cattle which can no longer walk. The reason could be as simple as a broken leg, or a neurological disease (such as Mad Cow; that is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), or an infection. The rate of Mad Cow disease in downer cattle is many times higher than it is in normal, walking cattle. Other diseases are also common. Despite all of this, the industry perpetually lobbies to have no regulations on what they can slaughter and what they can't.
Another related issue is that of feeding animal byproducts (meat-and-bone meal, blood meal) to live animals. It seems rather obvious to me that this is a very efficient means of transfering diseases from dead animals to live ones, but the industry apparently disagrees. Herbivorous animals are built to eat plants, not animals.
Another issue is that of feedlots. In a feedlot, cattle are fed an enormous quantity of specially formulated (ie not just plants) feed, quite regularly. I saw a statistic that a cow can gain 3.5 pounds a day while in a feedlot. Meat from animals fed in a feedlot is a lot more fatty, including the marbling effect where muscle and fat are interspersed. While this effect is sometimes considered more desirable (the resulting meat tastes more juicy and tender; there's no need to age it before eating) it is also far less healthy, contributing to things like heart disease and obesity.
Now for why this is stupid: Every time a new wave of diseases in meat makes the news, it hurts the reputation of the meat in the country. Damaging the reputation of the products of an industry primarily hurts whoever controls most of that industry. Ta-da! Even in a true monopoly, there is always the competition of simply not using the product. If people feel that beef is unsafe, they might well switch to fish and poultry (as I did), or even switch over to entirely vegetarian lifestyles (as a couple I know did). Either of these actions hurts the beef producers.
Another reason that resistance to health regulation is stupid is that, while the laws would be applied equally, some companies are more equal than others. What I mean by this is that since the marginal cost of complying with these kinds of regulations (the cost per pound of beef, for example) will be about the same industrywide, then no one company will be singled out as having higher expenses because of this. If it costs everybody a penny a pound more to produce beef, you can carelessly pass this cost on to consumers, as everybody else will do the same. But while the marginal cost may be roughly constant, the initial costs (ie hiring somebody to do the testing) will depend greatly on the size of the operation. In other words, the smaller operations are going to end up paying more than the big corporations (and it's the big corporations lobbying against these sorts of laws, surprisingly enough).
While I am against the creation or sustaining of monopolies, it seems very strange for the monopoly itself to be against a law that would only serve to strengthen it.
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