January 6, 2004 Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) by Phillip Morris

That's worrisome news, of course, to anyone who finds something ignoble about the prospect of being killed by dinner. It's one thing to be fatally gored or stomped while running with the bulls in Spain. But death by a hamburger or a scallion-laden dish from Chi-Chi's is about as pedestrian as being killed by a house cat.

Still, something particularly useful has emerged from the discovery of a case of mad-cow disease in Washington last month and the low-level fear it has prompted. And that "something" is an interesting glimpse of the unscientific process used to identify potential problems with livestock headed for your stomach.

A cow apparently is assumed to be healthy and fit for consumption if she is able to walk into the slaughterhouse under her own power. This visual inspection criteria turns up very few sick cows. Which means we have very limited knowledge of how many sick animals are actually ending up in America's tacos.

Only the beast that stumbles and falls as she slowly limps to the slaughterhouse and to your plate is looked at any differently from the cow that proudly struts to become part of a takeout order. But even the cows that fall - "downers," as they are called - are routinely looked at as meat.

Until 2002, only about 2 percent of downers were inspected for mad-cow disease; last year, that figure rose to 10 percent. Now the U.S. Department of Agriculture will require that any downer be tested, which still remains a far cry from the standard employed by Japan, where all cows headed for human consumption are tested, or Europe, where 25 percent of all such animals are tested.

On Monday, the USDA said that it would kill all 450 calves in the Washington state herd where the mad-cow case was found. The cow in question had one calf, but no one knows which of the 450 it is, so they all have to go.

Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle," the 1906 eye-opening expos of the Chicago slaughterhouse industry and the man who single-handedly created a generation of vegetarians, would have a field day with this information. In the ensuing 98 years since his seminal work, the nation has done a better job of making sure that pigs and cows are turned into meat in a much more humane fashion than the savage butchery involving electric shocks, sledgehammers, chains and knives described by Sinclair in his work.

But efforts to ensure that the animals that enter slaughterhouses are free of diseases that can harm humans lag far behind what would be expected of this nation.

As a regular beef eater, I'm troubled by this information. Not to the point where I will stop eating cows, as 7 percent of those polled by CNN last week said they would. But I do count myself among the 27 percent polled who have concerns that the nation's food supply may be unsafe.

Of course, that food supply has always been vulnerable to mistakes or deliberate manipulation. But with additional concerns that our enemies would love nothing better than to target our food - or at least make us think they had - lax USDA standards in regard to meat inspection and safety standards are no longer acceptable.

In "The Jungle," Sinclair describes a government meat inspector who routinely inspected slaughtered hogs for tuberculosis - a man who did not have the manner of one who was worked to death. He was apparently not haunted by a fear that a hog might get by him before he had finished his testing.

Little has changed. The General Accounting Office warned in 2002 that the nation's food supply was quite vulnerable to mad-cow disease, given that bans on feeding infected mad-cow tissue to other animals was not being enforced by the Food and Drug Administration. That does not inspire confidence.

The cattle lobby is powerful, and it has championed well the notion that cattlemen can best police and regulate their industry. But cowboys and ranchers are more than willing to let sick cows limp to your dinner table.

The USDA, which is mandated to champion agriculture products and to protect the nation's food supply, is having trouble serving two masters.