A Steak in the Heart

Normally a "stake in the heart" gets you thinking about vampires and young, vulnerable women in low-cut lingerie screaming in old, black and white horror movies. Lately, though, the horror has been at the thought of BSE infected beef making its way into the American food system.

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy is a brain wasting disease in cows that can, on rare occasions, be passed on to humans in the variant Creutzfeld-Jacobs disease (vCJD). This disease basically eats holes in your brain - causing it to appear, in later autopsies to appear like Swiss cheese - until you lose all sense of self. And then you die. Nice, huh?

But we were told our meat supply was safe.

Earlier this week, when BSE, better known as "Mad Cow Disease," was discovered in a single cow in Washington state, the government at first said that the animal had been restricted in its eventual distribution; that it had all been recalled. And yet, many in the blogosphere had wondered whether the Bush administration - already shown to be rabidly averse to telling the truth about anything - might be understating the case. After all, only one tenth of one percent of beef is inspected... if one case had been found, how many others might be out there awaiting discovery? But no, the president was still eating beef in the White House.

Again, we were told our meat supply was safe.

Now we know that the original story was not complete. Of course, these stories take time to develop. The FDA had to try to trace the beef back to its source. But the cattle and beef industry had long ago decided that laws requiring traceabilty back to birth herds were too cumbersome and restrictive. So there was no easy way to determine where this one cow - then said to be a heifer (no offspring) - had come from. Then they said it was from Canada. Now we know that this cow had had at least two calves and its meat had been distributed far beyond what was originally stated.

And still we are told that our meat supply is safe.

I've always had great confidence in government agencies like the FDA. Sure they were over extended (much like our military), but they'd always done a masterful job of keeping our food supply among the safest in the world. But this maladministration has shown itself to be not beyond trying to spin even scientific evidence to fit its predetermined agenda - witness the disappearance of global warming from its reports and web sites, despite the fact that it has become "truth" in the scientific sense.

So, I have to wonder, what of the safety of our food supply under Shrubby and company? Surely everything they eat is well tested. The same with the new aristocracy of the well-moneyed. Why should they concern themselves overly with the slop left for the peasants? Keep the rest of us - including those overseas - from questioning the one thing that would likely get us all up in arms - food - and we will all remain, literally, fat, dumb and happy.

Until we begin to see cases of vCJD among the general public. And then it will be too late.

Is this just paranoia? It's hard to say from this point. It could be a general unease about such a horrible disease. It could be BushCo's past record of dissembling and outright lying. It could be the two glasses of wine I had with dinner. Regardless... you just have to wonder.