{"id":6576,"date":"2013-11-25T18:37:45","date_gmt":"2013-11-25T23:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=6576"},"modified":"2013-11-26T10:26:27","modified_gmt":"2013-11-26T15:26:27","slug":"a-cow-named-carlos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/a-cow-named-carlos\/","title":{"rendered":"A cow named Carlos (Or the USDA gets to the meat of things)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"aCOW\"<\/a>I don’t eat a lot of meat but I’m not a vegan, or vegetarian. I’m still an omnivore as nature intended — I think. But I’ve often wondered why we call chicken, “chicken”, turkey, “turkey”, but pig is pork and cow is beef. And it’s bad enough to learn that cows nearly die when they are force fed corn, grain, and chopped up parts and blood from other animals (agribusiness tried hard to make cows cannibals, but the FDA finally banned feeding cow parts to cows. It used to Elsie the Cow, we might have had to change that to Hannibal the cow.)<\/p>\n

Now, our wonderfully overworked and highly lobbied USDA is going to require companies that sell meat to give some biographical detail about the \u00a0cow or pig you’re about to eat right on the package. Can you imagine:<\/p>\n

Carlos Vasquez (a nice cow)
\nBorn April 12, 2008
\nDied May 16, 2014
\nCause of death: Numerous blows to the head and shocks to the body; murdered
\nPlace of Birth: Quintana Roo, Mexico
\nPlace of Death: Lawton, Oklahoma
\nButchering date: May 16, 2014
\nButcher: John D. Chopper
\nDistributed by Mad Cow Beef Inc.
\nHave a happy meal.<\/p>\n

You think I’m kidding, don’t you? But I am not. Just read the following article from The New Yorker (yes, I know that makes me a yuppie!). Here’s the beef:<\/p>\n

Starting Saturday (01 DEC 2013), companies that sell meat in grocery stores will have to label where the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered. It used to be enough to know that you were buying a hamburger or a steak. Since 2009, meat companies have also had to provide some vague information about origins\u2014for instance, that a product came from North America. Now, you\u2019re about to discover the whole life story of the animal you\u2019re about to eat\u2014and often you\u2019ll learn that it came from abroad.<\/p>\n

It shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise that meat is part of an increasingly complex global supply chain. The total number of U.S. cattle is the smallest it has been since the nineteen-fifties, partly because of high feed costs and drought. The number of ranchers has been declining, too. On average, they are in their late fifties; fewer young people are interested in the tough, often unprofitable line of work. But Americans are still eating plenty of meat, and it has to come from somewhere. Mexico\u2019s abundant forage has given it a comparative advantage, and cheaper transportation\u2014in Mexico, in Canada, and elsewhere\u2014has made it more economical to ship cattle long distances.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moo on over to this page and chew on this information for a while…<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The sponsors below have nothing to do with Cloudeight or Mad Cow Beef, Inc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t eat a lot of meat but I’m not a vegan, or vegetarian. I’m still an omnivore as nature intended — I think. But I’ve often wondered why we call chicken, “chicken”, turkey, “turkey”, but pig is pork and cow is beef. And it’s bad enough to learn that cows nearly die when they are force fed\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,1426],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6576"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6597,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6576\/revisions\/6597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}