WHAT IS RENDERING?
Animals, Road Kill, Shelter Dogs
and Cats...they are all boiled down for every imaginable consumer product
Modern rendering plants are
large and centralized, and the industry's revenues amount to $2.4 billion
a year.
Rendering? The term
refers to a process the meat industry and others rely upon to take care of
an incessant and nagging predicament they face: by-product dead animals and
parts of dead animals.
Think about it. Millions of chickens and other livestock victims of today's
agribusiness die tortured deaths on factory farms every year. Half of every
butchered cow and a third of every butchered pig are not consumed as food
by humans. On a daily basis, some 250 rendering plants deal with a hundred
million pounds of feet, tails, feathers, bones, spinal cords, hooves, milk
sacs, grease, intestines, stomachs and eyeballs.
Both business and government add to this volume. Farms contribute the most,
but animal shelters, with their daily kill of euthanized cats and dogs, also
provide a hefty share. Highway patrolmen, with the days road kill, partake of the
service, too. They all benefit as their headaches are carted away, first to be
minced, then to be poured into vessels and steam cooked.
On the "fringes of polite society," this "witch's brew,"
as the Times put it, consists of a slurry of animal
fat and protein, which eventually makes its way into every conceivable
commercial product. Example: Industrial lubricants. Lipstick, Pharmaceuticals
and Gummy candies. Ultimately, the ubiquity of these rendered ingredients makes
it tough even for careful vegetarians to avoid them completely.
Steam cooking reduces the animal stew so it can be broken down and
separated. Fats and oils rise to the top; heavier materials--hooves, muscle,
bones--settle to the bottom. The various levels of fat are siphoned off,
filtered and processed more by centrifuge. The heavier material is dried,
squeezed of fat and then dried again, with the resultant powder serving to make
cannibals out of our nation's livestock. You might call it recycling; and at
least one trade group that represents Renderer's, the
Animal Protein Producers' Industry, is proud to use this term.(Recycling)
Most of us know at least bits and pieces of the mad-cow saga still dragging
on in England.
There is strong evidence that the British practice of feeding rendered scrapie-infected sheep to cows was the cause. With such
recycling so commonplace in the United States,
widespread concern is mounting here.
Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a ban on using
certain animal tissue in animal feed. Named by the proposal were animals that
chew their cud (cows, sheep, goats, deer and elk). At the end of March, a
coalition of consumer groups, veterinarians and federal meat inspectors
proposed that pigs be added to the list of animals banned as animal feed.
These proposals sound like good news for vegetarians. As noted, rendering
eliminates what would otherwise be a huge headache for meat producers as well
as for others; and a headache for industry is another name for higher
production costs. The rendering process is an incredible cost-saver, especially
when the rendered material is made into livestock feed. Take away the
convenience of rendering and the industry will have to pass the extra costs on
to consumers. The natural outcome? A marginal number
of people are likely to eat just that much less animal food.
Could this be the beginning of a trend in which the meat-industrial complex
falls from under its own weight? We can only hope.
by Pamela Rice
Copyright © 1997. The VivaVegie Society. All rights reserved.
HTML source file: Copyright © 1997 EarthBase, Inc.
All rights reserved.
NATURAL
PET FOOD
Mad cow outbreak may have been caused by
animal rendering plants
N.Y. Times News Service Mar 11, 1997
When
cows in Britain
began staggering around and dying, their brains eaten away by a mysterious
disease, officials in the United
States were reassuring. The
disease would not be a problem here, they said. Later, when it appeared that a
few people in Britain
had contracted a similar lethal condition from eating affected meat, experts at
the Department of Agriculture said there was no reason for Americans to
worry.
Now,
though, the Food and Drug Administration is starting to talk about new
regulations in the aftermath of disturbing hints that something similar
conceivably could appear in American animals. So far, the only affected animals
are a few hundred mink in Wisconsin.
Nevertheless, the agency wants to restrict the little-known agricultural
practice that lies behind the problem in Britain:
the use of rendered animal tissue in animal feed. In the process, they are
drawing new attention to rendering -- the ancient but seldom-discussed practice
of boiling down and making feed meal and other products out of slaughterhouse
and restaurant scraps, dead farm animals, road kill and -- distasteful as
it may seem -- cats and dogs euthanized in some
animal shelters.
This
quasi-cannibalism lies behind the outbreak in Britain
and regulators want to be sure it will not cause problems in the United
States. The disease that struck the British
cows, bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
may have originated as scrapie, a mysterious
condition limited to sheep. Scientists believe the so-called mad cow disease
results when cattle eat feed made from the brains or spinal cords of sheep
suffering from scrapie. They believe the people who
died were infected when they ate beef or other products from these cows, a
theory that remains controversial, though evidence is accumulating.
Public
health officials and agricultural experts say there are good reasons to believe
that mad cow disease will not become a problem in the United
States. Scrapie is
less common in this country than in Britain.
More importantly, the Food and Drug Administration is moving to ban the use of
certain animal tissues in cattle feed. The agency recently held hearings on the
effects that such a ban might have on the billion-dollar industry and hopes to
decide this year whether to impose a ban.
Rendering,
which dates to the early Egyptians, operates in the shadows of polite society,
persisting because it provides an essential service: disposing of millions of
pounds of dead animals every day.
"If
you burned all the carcasses, you'd get a terrible air pollution problem,"
said Dr. William Heuston, associate dean of the
Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at College
Park, Md. "If you put it
all into landfills, you'd have a colossal public health problem, not to mention
stench. Dead animals are an ideal medium for bacterial growth."
Renderers in the United
States pick up 100 million pounds of
waste material every day -- a witch's brew of feet, heads, stomachs,
intestines, hooves, spinal cords, tails, grease, feathers and bones. Half of
every butchered cow and a third of every pig is not consumed by humans. An
estimated six million to seven million dogs and cats are killed in animal
shelters each year, said Jeff Frace, a spokesman for
the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New
York City.
For
example, the city of Los Angeles
sends 200 tons of euthanized cats and dogs to West
Coast Rendering, in Los
Angeles, every month, according to Chuck Ellis, a
spokesman for the city's Sanitation Department. Pet food companies try
not to buy meat and bone meal from renderers who
grind up cats and dogs, said Doug Anderson, president of Darling International
Inc., a large rendering company in Dallas.
"We do not accept companion animals," he said. "But there are
still a number of small plants that will render anything."
At
least 250 rendering plants operate in the United
States, said Bruce Blanton, executive
director of the 130-member National Renderers
Association in Alexandria, Va.
While there are still a few small operations on the outskirts of some cities,
he said, modern rendering plants are large and centralized, and the industry's
revenues amount to $2.4 billion a year.
After
trucks deliver the wastes to the plants, the material is minced and fed into a
vessel where it is steam-cooked to 250 degrees or more, and then the stew is
cooked for 20 to 90 minutes, Blanton said. In the resulting mash, heavier
material drops to the bottom and the lighter stuff floats to the top. Fat is
siphoned off the top, filtered and sent through centrifuges to further refine
it, Blanton said. Chemical manufacturers turn much of it into fatty acids for
lubricants, lipstick, cement, polish, inks and waxes. Other fractions,
including gelatinous layers, tallow and grease, go into thousands of products,
including soaps, candles, pharmaceuticals, homeopathic medicines and gummy
candies.
The
heavier protein material on the bottom goes through a separate process, Blanton
said. It is dried, squeezed to remove more fat and dried again. The
resulting powder is the major ingredient in pet and animal feed. It is a
cannibalistic practice that has proved highly profitable.
"We
are the original recyclers," said Dr. Don A. Franco, a veterinarian and
director of scientific services for the Animal Protein Producers' Industry,
another trade group representing rendering firms. "We recycle 40
billion pounds of material a year."
Mad
cow disease erupted in Britain
because of a number of factors there, said Dr. Linda Detweiler,
a veterinarian with the United States Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service in Trenton.
Unlike the United States,
Britain has a
large sheep population relative to cows and a serious problem with scrapie, a transmissible, slowly progressive degenerative
brain disease of sheep.
Many
scientists who have studied the problem now believe that scrapie
somehow crossed a species barrier to infect cows, possibly when the cows ate
feed composed in part of brain tissue from infected sheep. The disease
presumably jumped to people who ate infected cow brains. Current theory holds
that some people may have genes that make them particularly susceptible.
Mad
cow disease was first recognized as a cattle disorder in November 1986. Since
then more than 165,000 cows have been affected. Heuston
said renderers were shocked to learn that an agent
like scrapie might survive the rendering process.
But
British rendering practices may have helped spread the disease, said David
Evans, president of Carolina Byproducts, a rendering company in Greensboro,
N.C. There are people in Britain,
called knackers, who make a living going around the
countryside picking up dead animals and rendering them in their backyards. The
fat they obtain brings good money from chemical firms, he said.
These
knackers simply grind up and partly cook their daily
haul to break fat cells and collect the gunk from the top of their vats. The
remaining material, called greaves or crackling, was sold to farmers who then
mixed it with grain and fed it to their animals. This material, some derived
from sheep with scrapie or cattle with mad cow
disease, was fed in large amounts to dairy herds in the late 1980s, Detweiler said.
Yet
another factor lay in the way greaves were processed in conventional rendering
plants, Anderson said. Until the
early 1980s, many renderers had used flammable
solvents to dissolve fats and the solvents may have deactivated the agent that
causes mad cow disease and scrapie. But after several
plant explosions, the companies switched to other methods that appear not to
deactivate the agent -- a mysterious particle called a prion.
Since
1989, British renderers have tried to keep infected
meat out of their products, many knackers have gone
out of business and brains are no longer put into hamburger. But the incubation
for the human disease is 7 to 30 years, Evans said. While only 15 cases of
human disease have been confirmed, many experts fear a latent epidemic.
In
1989, the American rendering industry initiated a voluntary program under
which, for example, no sheep heads were to be accepted at rendering plants. An
Agriculture Department survey three years later found that 6 of 11 plants
inspected still did accept sheep heads. Nevertheless, many experts feel
that American shores are safe from mad cow disease, especially if scrapie is the underlying vector. In Britain,
sheep account for 14 percent of raw rendering material. Here it is 0.6 percent
and most of that material is free from scrapie.
The
reason is that scrapie is closely monitored by United
States Agriculture Department veterinarians under a federal program. There are
no knackers in this country and no greaves to infect
cattle, Detweiler said. Few ranchers here feed meat
and bone meal to young cows and American renderers
usually treat the raw material at higher temperatures.
But
the key element in efforts to prevent the cow disease is a newly proposed
Agriculture Department ban on feeding protein derived from ruminant animals to
other ruminants. Ruminants are animals that chew cuds, including cows, sheep,
goats, deer and elk. Mink are included in the ban because they can be affected
by a disorder similar to mad cow disease.
If
the Agriculture Department rules are adopted, cow protein might still be fed to
fish, chicken or pigs in hope that if mad cow disease were to appear, a
species barrier would stop it from spreading. At the same time, the Agriculture
Department continues to monitor American cows for signs of mad cow disease.
Scientists have examined the brains of 5,342 cows that displayed symptoms of central
nervous system disease; no cases have been discovered.
But
a major reason to worry is that the cow epidemic may have nothing to do with scrapie or the processing techniques used by renderers, said Dr. Richard F. Marsh, a veterinarian at the
University of Wisconsin
in Madison. There are reasons to
believe that mad cow disease has already risen spontaneously in American
cattle, he said. But it apparently has not jumped into the animal feed supply
at this point.
The
strongest evidence is an outbreak of mink encephalopathy
(a disorder similar to mad cow disease) that occurred in 1985 in Stetsonville, Wis.
The mink farmer did not feed commercial meal to his animals, Marsh said. Rather
he fed them the meat from a downer cow, a cow that is down and cannot get up.
It is possible that the cow had a spontaneous case of mad cow disease and
passed it into mink, Marsh said.
Spontaneous
cases of mad cow disease may well occur in one cow out of every million cows
each year, said Dr. Joseph Gibbs, a leading expert on mad cow disease at the
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda,
Md. There are 150 million cows in this
country, which means that each year 150 of them might develop mad cow disease
-- all on their own, without any exposure to tainted feed.
Renderers pick up the carcasses of 100,000 downer cows
every year and mix them in with other animals, Marsh said. Although the
Agriculture Department tries to test downer cows for signs of mad cow disease,
it can only sample a small percentage. Moreover, animals can be quite sick and
not show signs of it before they are sent to slaughter, Marsh said. Thus, try
as they might to avoid the problem, renderers could
unknowingly introduce infected animals into animal feed and start an epidemic.
Deer
and elk also have a spontaneous mad-cow-like disease, Gibbs said. If they
die in the woods, the disease would not be transmitted. But if they are killed
on the road, they are sent to zoos or greyhound tracks or, more often, go
straight to the rendering plant to end up as cattle feed or pet food.
NATURAL
PET FOOD
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The
Dark Side of Recycling
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by
Keith Woods
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(Note:
In February 1990, the San Francisco
Chronicle carried a macabre two-part story detailing how stray
dogs and cats and pound animals are routinely rounded up by meat renderers and ground up into -- of all things -- pet
food. According to Keith Wood, thc researcher who
brought the information to the Chronicle, the paper buried the story and
deleted many of the charges Wood had documented. A report Wood worked on
for ABC television's 20/20 was similarly watered
down. In exasperation, Wood brought his story to Earth Island Journal. A warning to readers: this
report is not for the squeamish.)
A RENDERING
PLANT SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA -- The rendering plant floor is
piled high with "raw product". Thousands of dead dogs and cats;
heads and hooves from cattle, sheep, pigs and horses; whole skunks; rats
and raccoons -- all waiting to be processed. In the 90 degree heat, the
piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own as millions of
maggots swarm over the carcasses.
Two bandanna-masked men
begin operating Bobcat mini-dozers, loading the "raw" into a
ten-foot deep stainless steel pit. They are undocumonted
workers from Mexico doing a dirty job. A giant
auger-grinder at the bottom of the pit begins to turn. Popping bones and
squeezing flesh are sounds from a nightmare you will never forget.
Rendering is the
process of cooking raw animal material to remove the moisture and fat. The
rendering plant works like a giant kitchen. The cooker, or
"chef", blends the raw product in order to maintain a certain
ratio between the carcasses of pets, livestock, poultry waste and
supermarket rejects.
Once the mass is cut
into small pieces, it is transported to another auger for fine shredding.
It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour. The continuous batch cooking
process goes on non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week as meat is
melted away from bones in the hot "soup". During this cooking
process, the "soup" produces a fat of yellow grease or tallow
that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are sent
to a hammermill press, which squeezes out the
remaining moisture and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker
screens sift out excess hair and large bone chips. Once the batch is
finished, all that is left is yellow grease, meat and bone meal.
A Meaty Menu
As the American Journal of Veterinary Research
explains, the recycled meat and bone meal is used as "a source of
protein and other nutrients in the diets of poultry and swine and in pet
foods, with lesser amounts used in the feed of cattle and sheep. Animal fat
is also used in animal feeds as an energy source." Every day, hundreds
of rendering plants across the United States truck millions of tons of this
"food enhancer" to poultry ranches, cattle feed lots, dairy and
hog farms, fish feed plants and pet food manufacturers where it is mixed
with other ingredients to feed the billions of animals that meat-eating
humans, in turn, will eat.
Rendering plants have
different specialties. The labelling designation
of a particular "run" of product is defined by the predominance
of a specific animal. Some product label names are: meat meal, meat by-products,
poultry meal, poultry by-products, fish meal, fish oil, yellow grease,
tallow, beef fat and chicken fat.
Rendering plants
perform one of the most valuable functions on Earth: they recycle used
animals. Without rendering, our cities would run the risk of becoming
filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and bacteria
would spread uncontrolled through the population.
The Dark Side
Death is the number one
commodity in a business where the demand for feed ingredients far exceeds
the supply of raw product. But this elaborate system of food production
through waste management has evolved into a recycling nightmare. Rendering
plants are unavoidably processing toxic waste.
The dead animals (the
"raw") are accompanied by a whole menu of unwanted ingredients.
Pesticides enter the rendering process via poisoned livestock, fish oil
laced with bootleg DDT and other organo-phosphates
that have accumulated in the bodies of West Coast mackerel and tuna.
Because animals are
frequently shoved into the pit with flea collars still attached, organo-phosphate-containing insecticides get into the
mix as well. The insecticide Dursban arrives in
the form of cattle insecticide patches. Pharmaceuticals leak from
antibiotics in livestock and euthanasia drugs given to pets are also
included. Heavy metals accumulate from a variety of sources -- pet ID tags,
surgical pins and needles.
Even plastic winds up
going into the pit. Unsold supermarket meats, chicken and fish arrive in styrofoam trays and shrink wrap. No one has time for
the tedious chore of unwrapping thousands of rejected meat packs. More
plastic is added to the pits with the arrival of cattle ID lags, plastic
insecticide patches and the green plastic bags containing pets from
veterinarians.
Rendering Judgements
Skyrocketing labor
costs are one of the economic factors forcing the corporate flesh peddlers
to cheat. It is far too costly for plant personnel to cut of flea collars
or unwrap spoiled T-bone steaks. Every week
millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering
process and become one of the unwanted ingredients in animal feed.
The most
environmentally conscious state in the nation is California, where spot
checks and testing of animal feed ingredients happen at the wobbly rate of
once every (* ....missing words)
The supervising state agency is the Department of Agriculture's Feed and
Fertilizer Division of Compliance. Their main objective is to test for
truth in labelling - does the percentage of
protein, phosphorous and calcium match the rendering plant's claims; do the
percentages meet state requirements? However, testing for pesticides and
other toxins in animal feeds is incomplete.
In California, eight field inspectors
regulate a rendering industry that feeds the animals that the state's 30
million people eat. When it comes to rendering plants, however, state and
federal agencies have maintained a hands-off policy, allowing the industry
to become largely self-regulating. An article in the February 1990 issue of
Render, the industry's
national magazine, suggests that the self- regulation of certain
contamination problems is not working.
One policing program
that is already off to a shaky start is the Salmonella Education/Reduction
Program, formed under the auspices of the Nalional
Renderers Association. The magazine states that
"...unless US and Canadian renderers get
their heads out of the ground and demonstrate that they are serious about
reducing the incidence of salmonella contamination in their animal protein
meals, they are going to be faced with ... new and overly stringent
government regulations."
So far the voluntary
self-testing program is not working. According to the magazine, "..only about 20 percent of the total number of companies
producing or blending animal protein meal have signed up for the program.. " Far fewer have done the actual testing.
The American Journal of Veterinary Research
conducted an investigation into the persistence of sodium phenobarbital in the carcesses
of euthanized animals at a typical rendering
plant in 1985 and found "virtually no degradation of the drug occurred
during this conventional rendering process ... the potential of other
chemical contaminants (e.g. heavy metals, pesticides, and environmental
toxicants, which may cause massive herd mortalities) to degrade during
conventional rendering needs further evaluation."
Renderers are the silent partners in our
food chain. But worried insiders are beginning to talk and one word that
continues to come up in conversation is "pesticides." The
possibility of petrochemically poisoning our food
has become a reality. Government agencies and the industry itself are
allowing toxins to be inadvertently recycled from the streets and
supermarket shelves into the food chain. As we break into a new decade of
increasingly complex pollution problems, we must rethink our place in the
environment. No long hunters, we are becoming the victims of our technologicaly altered food chain.
Keith Wood is an
independent television producer based in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Copyright 1990, Earth Island Journal
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