Reply #9: If you want to have fun with the political end of this stuff...

[warrens]

Check out what happened to Lester Crawford, head of the FDA, last fall. One Tuesday night, he told an audience in Washington that FDA was just about to introduce a really strict rule concerning cannibalistic practices in the cattle feed industry. By Friday morning, he was gone, disappeared. He has never appeared in public since then, evidently because the Bushies threatened to prosecute him over some stock his wife owned in pharmaceutical firms (and evidently, it was through a fund, so she didn't actually own the stock, but this is how Rove and his boys play).

In this case, I have heard, the real issue was protecting the source of the beef, which was, rumor has it, Cargill. The processor bought bulk beef that was already coated with salmonella, ground it up, and sold it to the national chain, which was evidently Sam's Club, although no one knows for sure. When USDA came knocking on the processor's door, the guy showed them his paperwork, including the source of the beef. There was no evidence of salmonella in the plant, and USDA allowed them to reopen, but never traced the beef back to the original supplier. Some little meat grinder has zero influence, but people like Cargill and major renderers and the American Meat Institute sure do.