LETTER: Poor people get poor-quality meat, and producers don’t care

For high-end, life of health and sustainability consumers, grass-fed meat is a luxury and lifestyle item. But for low-income communities, it’s a life and death issue, which the industrial beef industry that feeds maize and sub-therapeutic antibiotics and growth hormones to animals refuses to acknowledge.

Cattle and sheep, the main sources of red meat in SA, are ruminants. Simply put, they have a four compartment (160l) stomach of which rumen is the largest part. The rumen is home to over a quadrillion (think 15 zeros) rumen microbes, so called because they belong nowhere else in the body of ruminants but the rumen.

These are the only microbes that are capable of breaking down grass and converting the cellulose in it to meat and yellow fat. Yellow fat contains all the good things about eating quality beef: amino acids, omega-3 fatty acids and so on.

However, after World War 2, Americans figured they could feed their surplus corn to cattle. SA followed suit in the 1970s. Maize provides cattle feed yards with a cheap source of feed to convert 7-month old calves into fully grown slaughter cattle within 105 days, providing a large-scale source of cheap animal protein.

The problem with the convenience of feeding maize to cattle is multifaceted. First, rumen microbes revolt when fed an unnatural diet, i.e. not grass. Hence the need to feed unnecessary pharmaceuticals. Second, feeding maize to ruminants changes the colour of fat from a healthy yellow to deadly white, full of omega-6 instead of omega-3 fatty acids. Lastly, the eating quality if the so-called super beef, which is conveniently classified A grade, is not as good as beef from older animals.

But none of this matters to the captains of the conventional feedlot beef industry. While in the US they dispose of the green offal, poor Africans eat it. Therein lies a big problem. The feedlot industry makes more money selling green offal and the trim (including the deadly white fat) — including the rumen — to poor people than it does selling steaks to high-end consumers. This is how growth hormones are passed on to unsuspecting eaters, through white fat in the offal and trim in sausages.

In their defence, industrial beef producers are always quick to assure consumers that the law obliges them to allow a certain period for the unnecessarily fed antibiotics to clear from the system of their slaughter animals. The question consumers should be asking is: who is monitoring? Guess what? It’s the producers themselves.

Ruminants were meant to be raised on grass, as nature intended. But for the captains of industrial agriculture, all that matters is making a quick buck from unsuspecting poor communities looking for inexpensive protein. 

Mpumelelo Ncwadi, Madison, Wisconsin

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