Dishing the Dirt

The Secret History of Meat

A Viva! Report
by Alistair Currie RGN, BSc
Senior Campaigner
© Viva! 2004

Meat:
"The flesh, including fat, and the skin, rind, gristle and sinew in amounts naturally associated with the flesh used, of any animal or bird which is normally used for human consumption." Definition of meat in Meat Products and Spreadable Fish Products Regulations 1984

Preface

Chicken nuggets originate in a commercial hatchery, incubated in vast ovens before the chicks emerge. From the hatchery, the chicks are transferred to a windowless, wooden shed where 30,000 of them are scattered over the litter floor. There they stay for six weeks, picking up infections like campylobacter, and spreading parasites and other infection among the flock. Together, they drop tonnes of faeces onto the litter – which is never changed. Almost all will develop leg problems – many will actually suffer dislocations and even fractures. Many will develop heart problems and diseases like bronchitis. The industrially-produced feed they eat is sometimes laced with antibiotics and other drugs to try to keep disease at bay – but still in that single shed, more than thirty will die every day of their short lives. Six weeks after hatching, the chicks are taken to the slaughterhouse and killed automatically, their throats cut and innards scooped out by machines.

To loosen their feathers, their corpses are immersed in a tank of hot water – contaminated with blood, faeces, feathers and whatever infections their skin carried. After butchering, the scraps of muscle and sinew still attached to their bones are blasted off with high pressure water and the resulting slurry strained through a mesh. After that, it is bound together with gums, flavoured with sugar and artificial chemicals, wrapped in breadcrumbs, heated up and served to you.

100,000 chickens die in broiler sheds in Britain every day. That means that on the day they are taken to slaughter, thousands of chickens are so ill they would have died anyway. Some of those diseased birds will become nuggets and some will become Sunday dinner. The people who eat them, however, will never know – and chicken is far from the only meat with a dirty secret . . .

INTRODUCTION

Given the chance, meat will kill you. We try to contain its dangers with a whole range of precautions but all it takes is for meat to be poorly butchered, inadequately cooked or left out of the fridge a little too long and it will show its true colours. The overwhelming majority of all food poisoning in the UK originates from animal produce and there are millions of cases and hundreds of deaths caused by meat every year. Nor can care in the kitchen  protect us from all of meat’s risks - BSE spread unobserved for many years in the cattle population and even today we do not know how many people may have contracted CJD as a result. Globally, the epidemic may have only just begun: experts fear that countries like China may harbour the disease and be unwilling to admit to its existence for fear of the economic consequences. New diseases are constantly emerging: the killer infection E. coli 0157 only evolved in the last few decades and wasn’t identified until the 1980s, after it had already claimed human lives - something it continues to do. Meanwhile, the routine administration of antibiotics to billions of farmed animals has contributed to the emergence of so-called “superbugs” – antibiotic-resistant bacteria which are a major and growing threat to human health.  Antibiotic-resistance, like bird flu, foot-and-mouth and BSE, does not respect borders: what other diseases which were created or exacerbated by human interference are out there waiting to be discovered? In a global meat and livestock marketplace, our health and welfare is at the mercy of too many business interests, too may incompetent, neglectful or indifferent governments and too much luck.

Why, in this day and age of efficient, industrial food production and pre-packaged, processed meat are millions of British people still infected with food-borne illnesses? Why is it that despite all our theoretical knowledge and expertise, illnesses fatal to human beings are allowed to develop and spread on our farms? And why is it that farmed animals themselves suffer from endemic diseases and are so often the victims of devastating epidemics like BSE and bird flu?

This report will show that animal and human diseases are utterly intertwined – that what causes half of all pig carcases to show signs of pneumonia at slaughter also leads to food poisoning; that what causes lameness and heart failure in broiler chickens is implicated in bird flu fatal to human beings; and that mastitis in dairy cows and variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease in humans are ultimately symptoms of the same fundamental problem.

As individuals and as a society, we need to look at the processes which put meat on our plates - the hidden and unpalatable reality of the lives and deaths of farmed animals and the flawed and fallible systems which make food products from their flesh. What becomes clear in conducting such an examination is that those processes do not exist to serve consumers or protect animals’ health but are designed solely to fulfil the needs of powerful business interests - interests to whom meat is simply a commodity and for whom meat production is about no more than squeezing costs and boosting profits. But while meat may be a commodity like any other to supermarkets, agribusiness and financial institutions, it is a substance like no other in its origins. What underlies this huge business edifice is still the messy, dirty and shocking business of turning walking, eating, excreting, thinking animals into cuts of meat. From farm, to abattoir, to butchery and packaging, it’s time to peel back the wrapping and expose the rot beneath.

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