Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman
Our ever-evolving culture gave me a new verb, a new phrase, and a new acronym last week. The verb is "googlemire," and if you've ever been sucked into the Internet's virtual vortex, you know exactly what it means. Word maven Patricia T. O'Connor used it on NPR the other day, but, ironically, the word's so newly minted that you can't google it, yet.
The first time I got googlemired was December 19th, 2005. At the time, I was getting paid to blog about food for a "healthy living" website. With Christmas around the corner, I set out to write an innocuous post about low fat eggnog.
I googled around in search of the best brands, which led me to Horizon, which led me to the revelation that this supposedly organic dairy producer with the famously happy cows on its cartons was, in fact, becoming infamous for cramming its cows into open-air feedlots that totally violated the intentions of the organic standards. I got sucked into the Agribiz muck and have been stuck there ever since.
Which brings me to the sad new shorthand for battered bovines: "spent dairy cows." The Humane Society employed this phrase a month ago in reference to the Westland meat recall, noting that "15 percent of the hamburger meat in the United States comes from "spent" dairy cows."
Last Thursday, the New York Times used the phrase minus the quotation marks, a sign that it's officially entered our lexicon: An investigator for the Humane Society spent six weeks working in the outdoor pens at Westland/Hallmark, which used spent dairy cows to make ground beef. Before you dismiss "Downergate" as last week's news, allow me to draw your attention to some details that beg for better coverage:
Downer cows are considered potentially unfit to eat because a cow that can't stand up may be (a) carrying mad cow disease, and (b) may have wallowed in E. coli-tainted manure which might find its way from the cow's hide to its carcass, and from there into our hamburgers.
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