Beef Recall, Hot Lunch, and Dog Food

Attention Silicon Valley and beyond....On Sunday, the USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef from Chino-based Hallmark/Westland meatpacking company.  DC Metro Mom blogger Joanne posted about the recall here a few days ago.  Over the past two years, thirty-seven million pounds of meat from so-called downer cows were shipped to school lunch programs. Schools are busy pulling meat from freezers, but our kids already ate most of it, according to the the Department of Agriculture's food safety official. Thankfully, the meat is not known to be tainted with e. coli or another pathogen. It's "just" from sick cows, so Hallmark/Westland thought they could get away with it.

I'm curious why it took this video from the Humane Society for the USDA to wake up.  These issues with putting downer cows in our food supply are not new and are quite widely known.  According to Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, a third of slaughtered cows have liver abscesses that would kill them within months anyway.  These aren't even the downer cows, who presumably have worse issues.

This all leads up to a conversation I had a few months ago, when I got a question from a mom of a kinder at our school:

"Your son told my son that 'hot lunch' served at school was the same as dog food. Is that true?" Time for that video:

Maybe I was too honest with my kids...

Looking sheepishly at the mom, I stammered, "Well, sort of."  I had indeed recently explained to my kids that they weren't going to get hot lunch at school because I always found time to make them their lunch. I said some families don't have time to make lunches at home. 

My mistake with my kinder twins was one of elaboration. I didn't want them to bug me about hot lunch every day, so I mentioned some graphic details that were probably not appropriate info for a kinder to be walking around with.  But, I made my point with my kids and they stopped asking for hot lunch at school.  I thought the problem was solved. Then, I found myself trying to explain to this nice mom what I'd actually said.

I told my kids about how we treat CAFO cattle that are made into hot lunch hamburgers. (I didn't actually use the term CAFO or explain it.) There are farms that treat their cattle really well, and it's OK to eat meat from those farms, but that's not what is at school.

The kids had questions, so I kept going. I said the cattle on these bad farms are really sick. Sometimes they can't even walk, so they are shocked with electricity to get them walking, and they are forklifted while alive. I said that the quality of the meat was the same as food we give to prisoners and that it was really no better than dog food. That got translated into "hot lunch is the same as dog food."

And why, you ask, do schools serve our children the lowest quality meat?  Lunch funding is a revenue source for public schools.  I don't know the exact economics for our Palo Alto public school, but I spoke with a friend who started a Charter school in San Jose. He said that school lunch appropriations are just that, an appropriation. The school district can choose to spend the whole budget or spend as little as possible and use the remaining funds for other things.  I don't know if the unspent school lunch money is restricted or not, but I sure do understand how much the school needs the extra funds. 

My friend's charter school spends the entire lunch appropriation on food only and then an additional 10% to make it all organic. Only 10% more to make it organic. How about that? (Not that organic solves all the problems with school lunches - there is plenty of organic junk food out there!)

I'm not the only one worried about the content of kids lunches.  A new non-profit called Two Angry Moms has made a documentary about the state of school lunches today and what happened when they tried to change the system. Beef isn't the only problem.

Maybe this is elitist because the schools really need the funding, but the health of our kids has got to be more important. I don't know which programs would suffer if public schools spent all of their food appropriation on actual food. I do know our kids would be eating a little better, and probably not ingesting tainted meat that would be recalled two years after enjoying their hot lunch burger.

Original Silicon Valley Moms Blog Post
Alix also blogs at <http://www.mednauseum.blogspot.com/>www.mednauseum.blogspot.com, a blog devoted to research supporting dietary and environmental causes of chronic illness.