Why CAFO meat is bad

A brilliantly concise explanation of the bovine meat issue in the US was delivered in a lecture by Dr. Warrick of Oregon State University. Below are my attempts to do justice to his lecture by making this information available for others. Brilliant insights are credited to Dr. Warrick. Mistakes are wholly my fault, and I apologize. All efforts were made to avoid error. (CAFO= concentrated agricultural feeding operation)
______

We start with the digestive system. Bovines (cows, water buffalo, and the like) are ruminants. That is to say, they have a rumen, which is a modified section of the esophagus above the stomach. A cow is mostly rumen. This pouch is huge. The purpose of this pouch is beautifully simple: it creates a nice home for little bacteria that can break down and use cellulose (what grass is made of) for energy. The cows then use the broken down products, and some of the bacteria themselves, for nutrition. The reason we can't eat grass is because we don't have a home for these bacteria.

So this is the natural system. Cows "eat" grass, or more specifically, eat the by products of the things that live off grass that live in them. Things sit in the rumen a long, long time. If clods are too big to be broken down by the bacteria, they go back into the mouth (remember, they food isn't in the stomach yet, just the esophagus) and this is when cows chew their cud. They're helping the bacteria by mechanically making the grass smaller. Occasionally in the natural condition, cows will get their rumen "clogged". This is bad. The bacteria use fermentation to break down the cellulose, and fermentation puts off a lot of gas. When a cow gets clogged up, the gas can build, and the cow gets bloated. This can kill the cow. In the "old days", a farmer who noticed a bloated cow could go, get a needle (like a bike pump...) and stick it in the cow. All the gas would escape out of the rumen, then, and the blockage would normally fall down. How does the cow not get infected, you ask, with this large hole in their side? Because there isn't anywhere for pathogenic bacteria to live. (Pathogenic being the bacteria that cause problems for health and well being). There are already so many billions of good bacteria that anything else can't get a foothold. Cow wins.

So now let's look at cows eating corn. Corn is not like grass. Rather than being cellulose, it is made of starch. Cellulose is made of huge, complex, interconnected chains. Starch is much more simple. Cows can ferment (and break down) three types of products: starches, sugars, and cellulose. We've already talked about a cow's normal diet being based almost completely on the cellulose. The corn is made up of starches, though, which undergo a different metabolic process (break down process) than cellulose. This process occurs much more quickly, which makes sense, since cellulose is a more complex structure. Each pathway for breaking down this structures uses unique bacteria. That is to say, there are bacteria for cellulose, bacteria for starches, and bacteria for sugars. Whichever one of these bacteria gets fed enough (ie, their food source is the predominant one coming in) gets to reproduce more. Normally, cellulose break down takes long enough that these bacteria can't reproduce too fast and overwhelm the other types. But starch break down happens very fast. And these bacteria reproduce very fast. Which means on a corn diet, these starch bacteria quickly overwhelm all the other types.

Why is this an issue? Well, starch breakdown results in a lot more lactic acid being produced than the cellulose breakdown pathway. Lactic acid, as I'm sure you can tell from the name, is very acidic. You know how people take tums to help a stomach ache? The tums help neutralize our acid when there is too much of it. Just like we don't do well with acidic stomachs, cows don't either. The new acidic environment causes ulcers, especially in the rumen. It also causes liver absences. All of this is quite uncomfortable for the cow, and allows other anaerobic (not requiring oxygen) bacteria in: like ostridium, which causes gangrene. The cows, left on their own with this diet, would then die from the gangrene in their intestines. Obviously though, this is bad for business. So the cows are given antibiotics (in CAFOs, all the animals are given antibiotics from the start. Even if just the sick cows got antibiotics, though, that would mean all of them would still get them. As long as they eat corn, they are sick. Which makes legislation for "antibiotics only when they need it" quite futile. They all need it).

There is a more serious issue even than the gangrene. And this is one people are more familiar with. E. coli. Let's look for a minute at a grass fed cow. E. coli naturally occur in the gut of the animal, and that is fine. It's part of their intestinal flora, a unique mix for each of us of critters that all of us bigger critters house. In a natural cow, you could purposely expose yourself to this e. coli and not have anything bad happen. Remember how the pH of a cow's stomach is higher (less acidic) in natural conditions? The e coli live maximally at this acidity. basically, imagine a bell curve centered on a line. The peak of the bell curve sits at around 5 pH, where a cow's rumen normally is. Since our stomachs have a pH of 1.5-2, our stomach acid easily kills this e. coli. Easy peasy, no problem, more please.

But now let's look at what happens when the pH of the cow is lowered by a starch diet. Everything gets more acidic, so only the e. coli that do well in acidic conditions (around 1.5-2.5) get to reproduce. This quickly shifts the "optimal pH" of the entire e coli colony lower. Now, the cow gut e. coli *likes* to be at around 1.5-2. That's where they're comfortable. So when we eat them, they don't think anything of our stomach juices. They just sail past, get into our intestines alive, and cause all sorts of issues. These guys are called "acid resistant e. coli" and are one of the most pathogenic bacteria we can pick up.

Let's step back for a second though. Remember how I mentioned that e. coli is in the gut of the cow? Why then are we getting acid resistant e coli on our meat? That, my friends, is a direct result of the processing methods we currently use. As Dr. Warrick said, there is a lot of "intestinal flinging". If our processing methods were more sanitary and mindful, there wouldn't be e coli anywhere near our meat, acid resistant or not.

From grass fed, well processed beef, there is no risk from raw meat. This is why steak can be rare. Unlike pork, which can have nematodes (bad critters) directly in the meat, beef muscle is completely safe. In fact, raw beef dishes are still common in France, England, and many parts of Africa. Every traditional culture which eats meat had a raw meat dish. Beef is a common meat to choose. But in our current food system, you're better off playing russian roulette. Hamburgers should not be 99 cents. Our meat should taste like meat, and be raised like it. In days gone by, stealing a cow was a crime punishable by death. They were valuable, and people knew it. We seem to have forgotten that.

Bring back tasty, safe meat!