from the pen of icarus blake

My suburban upbringing holds a special place for hamburgers and hotdogs cooked on the barbecue, my place of birth hails the many joys of carnitas and costillas, but I don’t eat as much meat as I used to.  I could lie and say it’s because I have some ethical complaint against the meat industry (I do, we’ll get to that), but really it’s based on the time, effort, and cold hard cash it takes to cook meat when compared to vegetables.  I get wary of any meat that’s been in my fridge for more than one or two days, and most meats don’t keep well as leftovers.  Why bother, when a robust stew of mushrooms and root vegetables keeps better for reheating and is just as filling?  Why bother when a block of tofu lasts two weeks in the fridge, while the ground beef that costs the same only lasts three or four days?  

Meat in my home is a special treat.  We buy it for specific meals, usually from the farmer’s market.  I’m okay shelling out a little extra to know where my meat is coming from.  I am not particularly squeamish, either — I find knowing the name of the animal I’m eating a comfort, rather than unsettling.  It means the animal was cared for, loved enough to have a name, and probably not fed commercial high-protein feed made of the crushed bones and offal of his brethren.  My pastoral ancestors probably named their goats, cows, and pigs before they ate them.  Someday, I’d like to have a yard large enough for a few chickens and, make no mistake, I will be eating them, too.

You may have picked up on the theme here already, but I’ll spell it out for the sake of clarity: meat ought to be consumed mindfully.  Humans are predatory, a fascinating species with a fascinating biology adapted to cooked food.  This includes meat, and includes natural responses to the smell of cooked meat.  Even my vegetarian pals aren’t immune to the scent of bacon sizzling in a pan.  We crave it as a biological instinct for its high fat, protein, and calorie content.  

Of course, capitalists did not ignore the potential profit that comes from a biological imperative for a resource-intensive food.  They took advantage of lax pollution regulations for the farming industry and equally lax livestock feed regulations and created factory farms and slaughterhouses.  These mythical houses of modern horror, filled with the screams of the crowded and dying doomed for the exsanguinator’s blade, feeding on the pieces of their kin deemed too yucky for human consumption.  These places, that directly caused the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico through intensive phosphorous runoff (phosphorus in manure, something a factory farm produces mountains of) and effectively invented a new and terrifying disease in the 80s: Mad Cow, or Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (v-CJD).

V-CJD is not a virus or a bacteria, but something wholly worse.  V-CJD is something known as a prion disease.  A prion is a misfolded version of Major Prion Protein (PrP) which is prevalent in neural tissue such as your brain and spinal cord, and a protein is something within a cell that does a specific job.  We aren’t sure what PrP does, but its presence in mammals from mice to cows to humans indicates that it’s function is important.  This importance is illustrated best, however, by what happens when a prion is introduced.  A single prion introduced to healthy neural tissue will misfold any PrP it comes in contact with because the shape of the prion is more durable than the functional shape of PrP.  The newly mutated prion will then change any other PrP it comes in contact with, like a fashion trend that first drives you insane and then kills you.  As a bonus, their stability and the fact that they’re not alive makes prions difficult to remove from the environment.  You can’t disinfect them, you have to burn them.  They can persist in the environment for years afterwards, leading to large dead zones of apparently farmable land that you simply cannot use because doing so risks transmitting prion disease to your livestock or yourself.  Y’know, like a curse.

In the 80s, the factory farmers of Great Britain discovered that they could up the protein content of their cattle feed by grinding up cow neural tissue and bone.  Not long after, the instances of CJD shot up to record heights.  Now, CJD happens naturally sometimes.  You can be genetically predisposed to accidentally misfolding your PrP once.  Bad luck.  But it’s rare, and this was not.  In fact, it was so common that even particularly spoiled house pets were falling ill with symptoms eerily similar to CJD.  The government, par for the course, denied any wrongdoing.  Eventually those regulations were tightened, but recently we’ve seen outbreaks of v-CJD linked to farmed trout in the United States, so the lessons were not learned.

Long story short, be responsible with your meat consumption and farming or be stricken with a curse upon you and your many generations forthwith.