Jefke.com

ok, so this whole mad cow thing is starting to get to me. I mean, we lived in europe during the aftermath of the orginal mad cow scare in jolly old england. but back then there wasn’t really the solid link established between fucked up cow brains and fucked people brains. right so i didn’t eat all that much beef, but i was broke so it wasnt’ a big deal.

oh let me say this now, i love beef, LOVE it. i love hamburgers, standing rib roasts, prime rib, steak. it’s great. it tastes very good to me.

i remember watching a 3 part special on the BBC about the origins of BSE and shit. it was very well done. the strange disease that struck the sheep population, the brilliant idea to grind up the sheep and feed them to cattle, even some studies that looked at a similar disease that hits african tribes that tend to eat the brain matter of their elders, and enemies. hell we had a friend over there that wouldn’t even touch any beef/cow products, i remember them always eating goat cheese, but i digress.

none of this really hit home with me. A couple years ago i read fast food nation and it really messed with my head. granted i’ve never been all that big on killing things, but i never really spent any thought wondering how the cows get so damn big and what their lives are like before they get the axe. and then the whole slaugtherhosue thing. yikes. I think what hit me hardest was how something as natural as farming was totally f’d up and industrialized by the fast food industry–and what that means in terms of health and safety.

So, in an act of quiet protest, i stopped eating fast food, and beef. that didn’t last all that long, as i found some non factory farm raised beef at the snotty grocery store. so i just stopped eating factory beef. and this was hard, and it sucked. (i mention now that there was a semester in college where i had a happy meal every day for 3 months. yes that’s right ONE a DAY for 3 months).

but then i started slipping. oh we’re on the jersey turnpike, i’m hungry. ok eat burger king. oh we’re in a resturant with the bluecheese burger, hmm can’t pass that up. ok i’ll have it–oh prime rib, we’re in vegas, i guess ihave to have it…..

but now we have our first REPORTED case of mad cow here in the states. oh sure, it’s all canada’s fault, but still. i love how the media is doing it’s best to scare and yet calm the masses about the whole thing. no one seems to be saying anything about how this particular poor animal just happened to be randomly discovered by an inspector, about how something like 8% or something of commerical beef comes from ‘downers’ which are cattle that can’t walk to the slaughter house, so when they fall down, they drag them to the slaughterhouse. how do you know if 1 cow out of a 1000 has mad cow, well it usually falls down–quick grind it up for fat jimmy’s triple whopper!

I have to imagine that there are, and have been many cases of stateside mad cow, but the ranchers aren’t going to go around telling everyone about it, and the government can’t and prolly wouldn’t know about it. i’m also amused how one cow’s body parts can be distributed to 8 states and the US territory of Guam. Guam! it’s like seinfield is coming up with this shit. used to want to be creamated when i died, i think instead send my corpse to a beef facility and have me distributed to 8 states and Guam, it’s more poetic me thinks.

after watching dan rather, or rather the robot that they used to replace dan rather on the news last nite, and seeing the footage of the cows being dragged to slaughter, well i felt like those kids in the simpson episode where lisa goes veggie–you know the part after the beef council film with troy mclure….

so i guess i’m off beef again. god, it’s gonna suck. i need to get off chicken too, but it’s just too fricking hard. boo hoo.