Curiously Awesome

There are 14 billion hamburgers consumed each year in the US. Current USDA regulations openly allow beef that is contaminated with E. coli to be repackaged and then cooked and sold as ready-to-eat hamburgers.

Another interesting fact…USDA regulations also allow chicken feces to be used as feed for cows. Do you see how this might be significant?

Farmers feed their cattle between 1 million to 2 million tons of chicken feces every year. Critics are concerned that this practice may lead to an increased risk of mad cow disease contaminating beef products. Many people are pushing for a ban of this practice of feeding of chicken litter to cows.

McDonald’s has actually joined this fight to ban the practice. CSPI and the Consumers Union have also joined the fight.

How could chicken feces create a mad cow infection risk to cows? Chickens are fed ground up parts of other animals, including cows, sheep and other animals. Some of this chicken feed spills during the feeding process and gets swept along with the chicken feces…and then fed to cows.

Make sense now?

So we have a situation where dead cows, sheep and other animals are fed to chickens, the chicken feed spills onto the floor where it is mixed in with chicken feces, it then gets swept up and manufactured into a cow feed and fed to cows. Spin this out and know then that some of those cows may even eventually get ground up and fed back to the chickens.

Grossed out yet?