Beef A Safe Bet
Once again the media shows it’s incredible bias, in the words of one Wall Street journalist “Curiously –I haven’t heard any of the critics call for draconian regulations on organics after the out break that killed 35 people and severely sickened 3,250” (from consuming organically grown bean sprouts.) I’m Susan Allen when Open Range returns O’ Boy imagine if this would have been beef! We need to listen to experts not activists, put into proper perspective when it comes to food born illnesses; lettuces, fish, grains, shell fish, dairy and yes even organic bean sprouts account for twenty percent of salmonella outbreaks each year. Poultry is 29 percent, and eggs at 18 percent. Beef eight percent meaning “Beef” be it flank steak, burgers or smoked ribs “ should be "what’s for dinner.” Especially after the “organic bean sprout” tragedy in Germany. Wall Street Journal reporter Laura Landro highlighted via a graph in her recent article that out of all meat and seafood choices, beef is by far the safest. Then why is red meat such an activist target? I’d hazard to guess that if beef had been traced to the terrifying food illness outbreak in Germany, we wouldn’t have heard the end of it, production agriculture would be vilified once again not only by the hollywood set, Vogue and Vanity Fair but even those goody goody, Sunday magazine inserts. This weekend, there won’t be a peep in the healthy living newspaper magazine sections regarding the dangers of poorly regulated organic produce. Yet reflecting back on last summer’s salmonella scare in eggs, media mass mass hysteria, huge egg recalls and numerous calls for reform in both food safety and production yet there not one one death from a bad egg in a country whose industrial food system and I’ll add beef is pretty darn safe.
