June 28, 2004

• This made me hungry for a 5 Guys hamburger. Man those things are good...
• America has no problem with BSE. America has no problem with BSE. America has no problem with BSE. If you say it enough, it becomes true.
• This made me hungry for a 5 Guys hamburger. Me too f8x - I remember the last time I was in a 5 guy sandwich. Wo-eee! Couldn't sit down for a week.
• Is this a bad time, then, to say I'd like an In N' Out burger?
• I can make you a hot dog if I can just put my sausage between your rest of comment deleted by tracicle at 08:20PM UTC on June 28 Hey, WTF?
• I just lost my appetite. Thank God I already had my lunch.
• Oh *please* let this lower beef prices! Please please please! I wants my steak and I wants it cheap!
• I found you some cheap steak.
• Definirely needs more Cowbell...
• I've got a fever, and the only cure... is more cowbell.
• I can make you a hot dog if I can just put my sausage between your rest of comment deleted by tracicle at 08:20PM UTC on June 28 Wow. That looked startling. Once in a while, Monkeybashi reminds us of her super(admin)powers. I like my beef raw myself. Sliced thinly. And coiled up looking like roses. mmmm...
• Welcome to modern agricultural crisis management as inspired by industry pressure (and by that I'm not necessarily referring to farmers). Cross your fingers and pretend it doesn't exist. I often wonder if the head of the USDA eats beef, or the CEOs of the meatpacking companies...maybe there's a specially tested herd just for them.
• Easy, guys.. I put my pants on just like the rest of you - one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on, I make gold records. ned- are you kidding?
• Meanwhile, Rocket fuel found in milk in California
• Take the red pill.
• I'm glad I live in a country where they still let the cows eat grass. Although I saw an article about the Californian owner of a large New Zealand farm complaining baout the lack of feedlot practices here. Shoo, Americans, shoo. Keep messing up your country, and stay away from mine.
• ned- are you kidding? Nope. I really do like raw beef. Only I don't eat it anymore. *sigh*. I take my beef rare, and sop up the blood with bread.
• *eats raw beef*
• Ok, I regained my appetite. Where are those damn beefs? I would also like some rocket fueled milk. Better than ginseng for a work day.
• You'd actually expect an awful lot of the initial positives to be false. If one in, say, 100,000 cows has BSE, then you'd expect .99999 * .001, or .00099999 of the cows to test false-positive. If we assume no false negatives, you'd expect .00001 * 1 or .00001 cows to be true positives. So of all the positives, 99% are false. Bayesian updating in action. The false-positive rate here won't be 99% because they're only testing animals with some BSE traits, but the principle is the same. A low false positive rate * a large population gets you a high percentage of positives being false.
• rodgerd, I doubt US-style cattle-feeding would catch on here primarily because we could never produce the amount of grain that cattle consume, and secondly because grain-fed cattle tastes so much worse than grass-fed. No sane kiwi with a choice would eat that beef.
• You can buy grass-fed beef in the US. It ain't easy, but you can do it. cheap too. just find a few friends willing to split the cost of a side or whole bovine and drive out to where the farmers are!
• I like to wash down my BSE-laden cow parts with Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor! DAMN!!!
• This isn't going away anytime soon. A future may come where I'll want to know the pedigree and barnyard contacts of every cut of meat on my table. It's not unlike meeting people in a world with AIDS.
• yo, zedediah I'm wondering just how likely it is that humans who eat beef cooked to 140F through and through will get um...mad cow disease? vCJD? AIDS is pretty hard to catch. How about that thing you get from cleaning litterboxes that's especially bad to get if you're preganant? I forget its name. Ennyway, do you know just what the stats are? I live in cow country and I do loves my filet mignon but it sure ain't worth it if I'll get some icky neurological disease. Seriously. Got any links I could go to to get eddycated?
• Cooking does not reduce mad cow risk at all. Temperatures hot enough to destroy surgical instruments don't destroy prions (the agent which causes the disease). Read "Mad Cow USA" if you want to learn all about this stuff. You can download it free here. It is a very well researched book in spite of the alarming title. Nobody knows how much you have to eat to get sick. The risk is probably fairly small from a steak (higher for ground beef and other processed stuff like taco filling and pizza toppings), but since it's such an awful way to die I'm eating organic beef for now (which is fed an all vegetable diet).
• organic beef It's there any beef that isn't inorganic. Like PVC meat or something. Sorry chithulhu for the snark. I just hate "healthy" terms.
• isn't inorganic Cheeez! I can't even make good snarks.
• chithulhu is right. I heard a talk on prion-borne diseases a few years ago, and this is what they said. That was also the same day that my friend and I realised that "bovine spongiform encephalopathy" is a very fun phrase to say. I'm sure it's awful to experience (cow or human) but very fun to say.
• Zemat, I think the problem is that cattle are often fed fodder that includes leftovers from butchered cows. (A little protein boost to get the weight up.) I don't think it can be transmitted without an infected cow in the chain.
• path, sorry I didn't come clear with my snark. I already know the facts of prions transmission. I know it's because cows are being feed butchered cows leftovers. And I don't argue with that and the unhealthyness it implies. What I'm arguing it's the use of the word "organic" to refer to beef of cows feed with grass or other kind of vegetable products. "Organic" is a word used to describe anything coming from living organisms. So beef will be always organic even if coming from cows feed with rocks and stones.
• even if coming from cows feed with rocks and stones. *trembles in awe of SUPERCOW!*
• Forget what I said. I'm just being cranky.
• Meanwhile, in China: China's Carnivorous Eating Habits Become Food for Debate
• Zemat, you'd find that usage even more irritating if you knew more of the "organic" cant. Its practitioners throw around an enormous amount of nonsensical voodoo. I lease some property to an organic farmer, so I've kept the company of these people a bit. That farmer once bought me a subscription to Acres USA (not to be confused with the Jim Davis suckfest U.S. Acres), in the interest of educatin' me. It was the most random, effects-of-magnetism-and-"organic"-copper, antifluoridation, Genetic Frankenfood Armageddon tract imaginable. It also had a fair bit of useful information, were I interested in raising a crop without benefit of organophosphate, but I was so distracted by the witchcraft that I couldn't read the rest. I was afraid that it would combust spontaneously if left next to a copy of Nature. In the end, I decided to ignore both the cant and the associated anti-scientific dogma, and focus on the ends: those guys really care for the land, and I value that. It's a bit like talking to a priest, to my mind. On one hand, I'm thinking, This guy professes the Nicene Creed every day, and on the other hand, This guy does an enormous amount work to promote the world's weal: who am I to cross-examine his rationalizations? All of which is merely a long-winded way to say, yeah, I feel your snark.
• goetter, some or a few of its 'practitioners throw around an enormous amount of nonsensical voodoo'. I'll assume the omission was a simple typo. ;)
• For a long time I was very blase about organic food, and I thought it was just a feel-good thing for people who could afford to pay twice as much for their groceries. But then I happened to attend a graduate class and seminar on agriculture and society (mixture of environmental, agricultural and social studies), in which I learned a great deal more about farming than I had expected. And I learned that, hysteria aside, there are damn good reasons to support organic farming, both scientific and social. It may still have a silly name, but I buy organic when I can afford it. Not only does it taste notably better, but I know that I am suporting improved soil health (which no-till agriculture is hurting), and supporting small-scale farming, both of which are real (not imagined) concerns in Western agriculture.
• It would hurt too bad if somehow we managed to devise new industrial "organic" hydroponic methods of mass food production that require much less land than current big and small scale farming. The truth is I don't care for farmers of any kind at all. I wish we could turn all arable land again into natural environments and concentrate all food production into processing plants. That's the way food production should be headed
• Lab-made prions trigger mad cow symptoms
• Prions speed evolution
• The real Mad Cow II.
• Mr. B was telling me there was something to the effect that FDA knew last year that another mad cow had been found "somewhere in the Western US" but they were not "at liberty" to say exactally where. It was reported by a Dr. Lloyd Knight DVM, and had not been acted on until six months later. Somewhere in the West is Southern Idaho. Lloyd is my vet. GACK!!
• The infected 12-year-old beef cow was born, raised and used for breeding at the same ranch... Where art thou mad cow? The cow arrived dead at a pet-food plant in Waco, Texas, in November and never entered the nation's human food supply. *swallows last bit of Big Mac with confidence*