Attention Livestock Owners and Food Eaters

Countryside & Small Stock Journal, July/August 2006

Mr and Mrs Consumer, NAIS will affect your life/eating habits. It's not just about the homesteader, small farmers, hobbyist, 4-H or FFA.

The other night the History Channel's show Modern Marvels did a show about the butchering industry from the way it used to be to modern sanitary methods. Truthfully, it scared the crap out of me.

The Butcher
aired on Thursday, June 29 at 12:00am ET.

In a carnivorous world, a butcher is a necessary link in the food chain, carving a carcass of unsavory flesh into mouthwatering cuts. We trace the grisly trade's evolution--from yesteryear's butcher-on-every-corner to today's industrial butcher working on a "disassembly" line. We tour the infamous remains of the Chicago Stockyards, where Upton Sinclair, Clarence Birdseye, and refrigeration changed butchering forever; witness high-speed butchering; and travel to a non-stop sausage factory. And if you're still squeamish, a USDA inspector offers the lowdown on HACCP--the country's new system of checks and balances on everything from quality grading to E. coli, Salmonella, and Mad Cow Disease. Finally, we visit the last bastion of old-school butchering--the rural custom butcher, who slaughters, eviscerates, skins, and cuts to his customer's wishes.

After watching this I understood more about how they have totally removed any natural benefits that could be found in meat if they left it alone. Modern butchery includes washing the carcasses down with a sanitizer (as opposed to the old way of letting the beef hang for 2 weeks and let those inate enzymes do their work), injecting meat with chemical salt solutions to make the meat more tender, wrapping the meat in a gas rich environment to "preserve" its color - bright red - no matter how old the meat is. Ick.

The Gaited Horse also has a new article against NAIS. Horse owners haven't felt that NAIS will have anything to do with them.

This cartoon pretty much sums up how the USDA,Inc. and the states Agriculture Agencies are handling NAIS.

We know that communication is a problem,
but the company is not going
to discuss it with the employees."

Have a wonderful 4th of July weekend. You might spend some time reflecting on why the Founding Fathers even bothered to make the US independant. I doubt, in all sincerity, that it was just so that some 230 years later our freedoms would be stripped because a few in power think we are so dumb that without direction from "on high" (being the goverment) we might drown on our own spit.

Hen....out.