My family is Italian and I grew up in the Catholic Church, going to Catholic schools from Kindergarten through High School. Throughout my years in a very Catholic culture I remember the “jokes” about priests and alter-boys. Literally everyone had heard stories about priests being attracted to young boys who worked in the Church and when I asked my family about it I discovered that these practices were known to parishioners for literally centuries but were ignored. In the United States we have the same problem with “fast food” restaurants. In the 1970´s Jack-in-the-Box was caught serving both horse and dog meat to customers, as well as e coli tainted meat. In the 1990´s McDonald’s was found to have accepted meat that was known to be tainted with e coli. Taco Bell serves a medium “hot sauce” that children use to clean old pennies and in any of these restaurants you can actually buy a meal for less money than it takes to feed your dog. A hamburger at McDonald’s for instance can be purchased for under $1 but a can of dog food costs nearly twice as much.
But despite the dangers of eating disease tainted meat, the chances of an individual actually eating this meat is quite high, simply because of the large numbers of people who eat at these restaurants. Not all meat is tainted or even a significant part of it. But one thing that every customer at these restaurants consumes a tremendous amount of food additives. The animals are injected with hormones during their entire lives and these hormones are eaten by our children, which causes them to develop much faster than nature intended. When the meat is processed it is injected with sodium, to increase the plumpness of the cut, preservatives, to keep the meat fresh, and food coloring to give the chemically loaded meat a more natural look.
While “primitive” cultures, like Native Americans, are known for using every part of an animal they kill, even these cultures, with zero scientific knowledge, understood that it is dangerous to include every part of the animal as food. In the United States however, one of the most scientifically advanced societies in history, with the Food and Drug Administration in place to protect us, we allow these fast food restaurants to use parts of animals that have ruled as unfit for human consumption. They take these scraps, formally used only in pet food, and “wash” it with ammonium-hydroxide, a chemical more commonly found in products like household cleaners, fertilizers and even explosives. The meat is then further treated with food coloring and turned into the ground beef that until recently was served in every hamburger sold at McDonald’s restaurants. It does not take a registered nurse or any medical professional to understand that ingesting the same chemicals used in fertilizers and explosives is just not a good idea.
While the FDA seems unable to make appropriate decisions about issues like this, the general public is not. Led by celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver, a months long campaign against using “pink slime”, a name given the concoction by the industry itself, to human beings and charging them as if this were real meat. Public pressure from the campaign has forced at least this one chain from using this poison but the company maintains that it was not Oliver´s efforts that led to the decision. They use the FDA’s confusing position that using the same chemical used in fertilizers and explosives is “generally safe” practice, yet they give no explanation why, after decades of use, they suddenly decided to stop.
The simple facts are that unless industries are monitored tightly by the Government, they will do whatever it takes to make money. How many of the executives of these huge corporations actually eat the food their company regularly sells to the general public? How many of them, knowing how this food is processed, allow their children to eat it? Nearly 70% of all meat processed in the United States is loaded with these, or comparable, chemicals and these chemicals are used by companies for two purposes. They either want to use parts of animals that are proven to be dangerous, or they want to increase their profits by forcing animals to become larger, heavier, than is natural for them. In either case these companies are playing with the health of all Americans for the sake of a few dollars more profit.