The use and abuse of innocent animals and clueless consumers
“You reap what you sow” (Jesus of Nazareth)
Since Germany began searching for BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), it has been found here. It would be absurd to think that Germany is an island of non-infection, especially if you consider how foodstuffs are produced and marketed these days. If your eyes are open to the overgrowth of the agricultural industry, with its unnatural breeding and production methods, you should not be surprised at what is happening here. Years of misguided EU politicking to gain greater subsidies for the agricultural industry — powerful lobbyists won the majority of the budget for this minority — have led to this crisis. These funds went to creating seas of surplus milk, to filling industrial refrigerators with unnecessary amounts of meat and butter and to growing crops only to destroy them, all in the name of keeping prices stable. Now we reap what nationalistic, egotistical EU politicians as well as a neo-liberal, derailed agricultural industry has sown. Their main goal is no longer to feed the masses, but to maximize profits. And, because of the insanity of these subsidies, we have the distinct pleasure of taking part in BSE roulette.
Maybe the politicians across the country — especially those from Bavaria — minimized, lied and buried the facts ’til the cows came home, but we, the consumers, are not innocent either. By demanding the cheapest meat possible, we have brought the industry to these kinds of perversion. The “Sonntagsbraten” (Sunday roast) is a thing of the distant past. Meat plays a part in our daily lives, be it ham and sausage eaten as early as breakfast, Leberkäs on a bun or Bifi mini salamis as snacks — the cheaper the meat, the more the demand. Vegetables and baked goods are often considered dispensable decoration. Some homemakers are incapable of dreaming up a meal that doesn’t include meat.
But, for the majority of consumers, organically and animal-friendly produced meats aren’t worth the price. Germany boasts, by far, the lowest food prices in Europe. In the 1950s, the average family spent more than one-third of its income on nourishment. Today, this figure stands at a scant 11 percent. Last year, pork prices were at their lowest since the end of World War II. But bursting sausage and sandwich-meat display cases — dozens of monochrome varieties that all taste the same — do not enhance our quality of life.
The appetizing hermetically-sealed, cellophane meat-counter presentation gives no indication of the suffering the creature had to endure in its six-week captivity, just to wind up an old rubbery chicken, able to be offered at a mere DM 3.99. The severely overfed turkey of today weighs twice as much as it did 25 years ago. Their tendons ripped by too much meat on their bones, the birds often tip forward under the weight of grotesquely fattened breasts. Beautiful packaging hides the ludicrous pharmacological practice of injecting the birds with antibiotics to make them even bigger. It is pure animal abuse — feeding creatures the cadavers of their diseased, fallen brethren and other atrocities — that makes the lowest prices at the supermarket possible.
Mad cow disease has spread to the point that consumers are boycotting beef, replacing it with other meat varieties, instead of looking inside themselves and using what is left of their still-functioning brain cells to reflect on a few things: on the production methods currently being employed in our agricultural factories, on our power of inquiry and on politically and economically praised globalization — which is no longer politically controlled, thus no one is accountable for the various indiscretions and failed developments.
Ulrich Beck, Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich, paints an even larger picture of the BSE crisis: “BSE, the climate catastrophe, the collapse of the financial market in East Asia, genetically manipulated foodstuffs, the demand for a flexible labor market and the plea for the universal utilization of gene technology and human genetics [all these things] stand for fundamental change from a closed, nation-state society with faith in progress — one that is centered around the distribution of wealth, i.e., goods — to a transnational high-risk society, one in which the distribution of bads is becoming the focus.”
No one wants the “bads” and we must not let them come to be. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean that it should be done. Nevertheless, the same politicians — who only recently promised us that all will be done in the fight against BSE — are in the process of opening the next Pandora’s box: gene technology. Here, they feed us the same lines about handling the matter with care, just as they did with BSE — with, as always, Bavarian politicians leading the pack.
But we, as consumers, are not powerless. Through changing our eating/buying habits, by leaving mass-produced garbage on store shelves, we can most certainly influence the agricultural industry and its shoddy production methods. We should reconsider our daily menus, place more value on organically grown/raised foods and we should be willing to spend more for quality rather than quantity.
