Where's the Beef?

My family is (sorta) a beef lovin’ family.  My husband LURVES himself some beef.  I’m more of a pork-gal, but I definitely get burger cravings.  My girls?  Eh, not so much.  In fact, they don’t really like meat at all, which is ok because we live on a pan-asian diet which includes lots of soy-protein.

But we have, more or less, been on a beef boycott since 2004.  Entirely at the direction of my husband, even though he LURVES his beef.  Why?  Because he’s seriously pissed at the USDA for the crap they pulled the last time (in 2004) they faced a beef recall based on the presence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or the mad cow disease, in one American cow.

When the US found that one mad cow back in nought four, one of the first things that happened was that Japan (at that time the largest importer of U.S. beef) immediately put a ban on all beef imports from the United States.  Now, I don’t know if you know Japan, but I know Japan, and the Japanese seriously lurve themselves some beef.  And I ain’t talkin’ ground beef, but the good stuff.  You know the stuff that have fancy European names like mignon or angus, or are raised on beer like Kobe.  The stuff that is priced by the oz and not the lb.

Anyways, the US, or rather, the USDA did a little hand wringing here and a little soul searching there, and they probably fired a couple of old timers and got a couple of extra millions appropriation from Congress and *Voila!* they were ready to say that U.S. beef was a-OK and ready to ship.  But Japan, well, they didn’t buy it.  So the US and Japan got into a bit of a pissing battle, whereby the Japanese insisted that until the US required 100% testing of all its beef products for BSE (Japan requires 100% testing of its domestically produced beef) Japan wasn’t going to allow any US beef products into its country.

Anyways, this put a severe crimp in the sides of some of America’s smaller, specialty beef producers, who produce some of the best beef in the world specifically catering to the Japanese market.  They were losing money fast and were in fear of losing everything if the Japanese continued to boycott their beef.  So you know what those small beef producers, and one (Creekstone Farms of Arkansas City, Kansas) in particular did?  They offered to do rapid tests, a method used in Europe and Japan, on 100% of their cows, so that their product could be considered 100% BSE-free and once again be sold into the Japanese market.  Smart?  Good for the consumer?  You would think so.

But the USDA did not allow Creekstone Farm to do the tests.  In fact, the USDA said that Creekstone Farm would be doing something ILLEGAL because the rapid test method had not yet been approved by the USDA.  Even though Creekstone Farm offered to mark its product as being tested under the rapid test method, and even though the product was being shipped to a market that sanctioned the rapid test method. 

This seemingly irrational behavior on the part of the USDA can be explained by one very logical observation.  The large, “corporate” beef producers in the United States have consistently lobbied against a 100% testing standard.  Such a standard would be costly, and would either cause a hit to margins or a rise in beef prices, both of which would affect their profitability.  Also, since large producers aren’t singularly catering to niche markets like Japan, a complete embargo by Japan wasn’t catastrophic to their business.  In fact, if the embargo actually pushed the small, specialty beef producers into bankruptcy, there was simply more consolidation to look forward to.

The Japanese ban on U.S. beef has been lifted, though Creekstone Farm did take the USDA to court for preventing testing.  As of April 2007, a U.S. District court judge ruled in Creekstone Farm’s favor, though the ruling was put on “hold” pending a USDA appeal.  I don’t know the current status of the suit, nor the status of beef exports to Japan, especially in light of the most recent recall.

Stefania wrote her thoughts on the recent beef recall in her personal blog; how she didn’t feel that even buying organic was enough.  Well, this mama is pissed because there was someone in America who was trying to do something that would have been enough.  And our government failed him, and failed us as well. 

So for now, for this sorta-beef-lovin’-family.  Well, you know… Beef, it’s what’s NOT for dinner.

Cross-posted at Momocrats.

Comments

[Mama Nabi]

Ha... this reminds me of the dirty looks I got from certain people when Korea banned beef from US... and now that I've read this, I'm TOTALLY resentful of those dirty looks.