In 1865, the Bill of Fare for President Lincoln’s first Inaugural Ball included pretty much every type of meat you can think of. There were oysters and turtles, chicken, turkey grouse, beef four different ways, duck, quail ham, tongue, and venison. (OK, no horse meat — this was still America, after all.) Even the salads were meat salads — chicken and lobster. Perhaps there was some chopped celery mixed in with the mayonnaise. We’re guessing not, though.

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But in more than a century and a half, it appears Americans have warmed somewhat to vegetables. The menu for today’s inaugural lunch features its own luxurious and exotic seafood and meat – lobster, clams, bison. But there’s also spinach, butternut squash, beets, green beans, red cabbage, and wild huckleberry reduction. A vegetarian might almost be able to put a whole meal together!

French people might enjoy horse meat every now and again, but the British, as a rule, do not. Nor do the Irish. And they certainly do not enjoy the idea that their juicy cow hamburger is actually a juicy horseburger. But when the Food Safety Authority of Ireland tested a bunch of burgers for DNA contents, it found not only traces of pig DNA in a bunch of cowburgers, but burgers that were 29 percent horse meat.

No one’s sure quite how this happened. The pig DNA’s easy to explain: Pork and beef get processed in the same facility, and some pig particles sneak into the beef. But the horse meat? Ireland’s agriculture minister said that at one processor in Northern Ireland, “an imported additive used to make the burger” had horse meat in it. (Sounds a little pink slimy to us.)

Irish people are upset, the Associated Press reports:

“In Ireland, it is not in our culture to eat horse meat and therefore, we do not expect to find it in a burger,” said Alan Reilly, the [food safety] authority’s chief executive.

Plenty of people do eat horse meat, of course. A French Canadian chef in New York almost put it on the menu before the idea was shot down by animal rights people. And as The New York Times has written, if you don’t know to ask, you might not know the difference:

Some people can’t tell the difference between horse and beef. I once overheard an American couple complain in a Paris restaurant that they could not find a decent hamburger in the French capital. When a waiter came by to take their order, he pointed to the “Steak haché (chevaline)” listed on the menu. He did not mention that “chevaline” means horse meat. They ordered it.

Ten minutes later they were all happily munching their horse burgers.

OK, not being able to understand French is a little bit different than eating mislabeled meat. But who knows? Maybe that’s what happened in the food processing plant, as well. We feel a little bad if right now there’s some about-to-be fired person protesting to their boss — “But the label said steak!”

Today is National Scrapple Day, and if you’re already thinking “eeeeeewwwwww,” stop. Scrapple may not be pretty and it may not be healthy. But it’s a great, old-school example of nose-to-tail cooking, and sustainability advocates should embrace it.

Meat’s not exactly the most energy-efficient form of sustenance. So if people are going to eat meat, they should eat every last bit of it that they can. Scrapple definitely fits the bill:

Per chef Andrew Little of Sheppard Mansion in Hanover, Pennsylvania, “Scrapple is affectionately known as ‘everything but the squeal.’ It is traditionally a loaf made with the leftover bits of the butchering of hogs. Spices and buckwheat flour are added while the pork is cooking, and the entire mix is poured into loaf pans to chill and set.”

OK, it’s not the most appetizing when you think about it that way. Serious Eats has a better way to wrap your head around the idea:

Think: a sort of fried polenta, were it injected with as much porky character as possible. (Although scrapple is traditionally made with pork, you could just as well use beef or lamb parts.)

See, that sounds pretty good.

Lou and Bill lived a good life at Green Mountain College, one of the more green-minded campuses in America. As a team, the two oxen worked at the college’s sustainable Cerridwen Farm for 10 years. At age 11, Lou and Bill aren’t particularly old for oxen, which can live about two decades, but after Lou stepped in a gopher hole earlier this year and injured his leg, the college retired the team.

Now, as part of its “circle-of-life” philosophy of sustainability, Green Mountain College is thinking of turning Lou and Bill into “more than a month’s worth of hamburger” meat.

The idea is not going over well, not just on campus but in the community beyond. More than 30,000 people signed a petition on Facebook to save Lou and Bill, Vermont Public Radio reports, and an animal sanctuary has offered to adopt them.

But the college so far is still planning on serving the oxen for dinner. About three-quarters of the students eat meat, and part of the farm’s purpose is to teach students about what that means, VPR says:

12 years ago, when the college began developing its sustainable farm program, vegetarian students specifically asked that livestock be included to confront the realities of eating meat. [Philip Ackerman-Leist, head of the college's Farm and Food project] says this debate goes way beyond Bill and Lou, and faculty and students have spent a lot of time discussing it.

Our bet? There’ll be a rash of vegetarianism on campus … but plenty of students will decide that Bill and Lou taste just as good (maybe better) than the cattle they normally eat.

If there weren’t enough reasons to be totally terrified and grossed out by ticks (they drop on your head from the trees, they suck your blood, they burrow into your skin, they transmit a terrible disease you’ll never be fully rid of), the bite of a lone star tick can trigger allergies that mean eating a hamburger can lead to anaphylactic shock.

Helen Chappell writes in Discover Magazine about her experience with this relatively unknown danger, and her account is pretty dire:

Tick saliva is “a really good provocateur of an immune response, even outside of an infection,” Commins told me, though they are not yet sure whether it’s bacteria carried in tick saliva or the saliva itself that is responsible. But they believe that something in some ticks’ saliva stimulates the human immune system to produce antibodies to a sugar present in mammalian meat, though not poultry and fish, called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal for short). The next time an unsuspecting meat lover chows down on a hamburger, those antibodies could rally a systemic allergic reaction.

Except not right away. Maybe not until hours later.

You can have a steak for dinner and not know anything’s amiss until the middle of the night. Add to that the fact that different kinds of meats — or even different cuts of the same kind of meat — can cause more or less severe reactions, and you’ve got a recipe for confusion.

Now, normally, we’ll all in favor of people eating less meat, but no one should have to undergo a near-death experience to get to that place. Ugh, ticks!

Sysco — the giant, often-invisible food distributor — offers 400,000 products to the bulk of the nation’s restaurants and other institutions. It has a 17.5 percent market share, made $37 billion in sales in 2010 alone, and dispatches a cavalcade of silver trucks daily from 180 locations across the U. S.

In other words, Sysco is wholesale food in America, the same way Cargill is farming and Walmart is, well, all of retail. Or, as Salon put it back in 2009, Sysco has “come to monopolize most of what you eat.” So when the company changes a policy — like it announced it was doing on Monday, when it pledged to do away with meat from pigs raised in gestation crates — there is bound to be a striking ripple effect.

In a statement to the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS), the company wrote: “Sysco is committed to working with its suppliers to create a gestation crate-free supply system, for the good of all. Like many of our customers, we’re going to work with our pork suppliers to develop a timeline to achieve this goal.”

As their name implies, gestation crates are essentially steel cages that keep pregnant sows confined in a space roughly the size of their bodies. They’re commonly seen — along with battery cages for egg-laying hens — as among the least humane livestock practices. Animal behavior expert Temple Grandin describes gestation grates as the equivalent of “asking a sow to live in an airline seat” (without lavatory privileges).

Over the course of the last year, thanks to consumer demand, and an ongoing effort by HSUS, most major players in the fast food, grocery, and food service industries have gone — at least on paper — gestation crate-free. The list includes Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr., Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Kraft, and Hormel (the maker of Spam). Even Smithfield Foods — the nation’s largest pork producer — has agreed to phase out the crates by 2017.

So Sysco can’t, by any means, say it’s first to make the pledge (and the company has yet to specify a timeline for the switch), but its move might have the largest impact so far on the practices farmers are using on the ground.

“The power of Sysco is the size,” says Josh Balk, manager of corporate strategy at HSUS. “This will make it so much easier for smaller restaurants to adopt a no-gestation crate policy if they’d like — because it’s what their main distributor delivers. It will also change the buying practices of many companies who they deliver to without those companies even knowing it.”

It’s still hard to say how all this pledging — most of it attached to dates that are five to 10 years in the future — will truly impact animal agriculture, but Balk is optimistic. He says that although Smithfield still has five years to make the change, for instance, it does report the percentages of its corporate hog farms that have switched to so-called “group housing” in its last few annual reports. The agriculture giant Cargill has also reportedly moved 50 percent of its operations to group housing.

And of course there are notable holdouts. This spring we reported that Domino’s Pizza was applauded by the American Farm Bureau Federation when it announced it would not be following the trend (I’ll take a large meat lover’s with extra cruelty, please!). And Tyson Foods, says Balk, has been the “most outspoken opponent” of the change, and the most likely to actively defend the use of the crates.

Just how Tyson plans to do business in a system that is rapidly moving away from the practice is a mystery. But it’s likely that the company is hoping that consumer attention to the issue dies down before many of its partner companies (like Sysco, for instance) have to follow through on their pledges. But I have a feeling — if the HSUS has anything to do with it, at least — that probably won’t be the case.

The Guardian reports on two competing efforts to generate lab-grown meat — all of the tastiness, none of the nastiness. The intent isn’t to make a niche product for vegans, but to formulate something that’s indistinguishable from real meat — and to thereby end meat production as we know it.

Winston Churchill actually predicted the rise of this industry in 1932, saying, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He was off by a few decades, but scientists and entrepreneurs are working hard to make up for lost time.

Mark Post heads up a Dutch team that’s trying to grow animal muscle tissue without the animal — sometimes called in-vitro meat, or shmeat:

Post envisages a future where huge quantities of high-quality meat are gown in vats, incorporating not only muscle fibres but layers of real fat and even synthetic bone. “In 25 years,” he says, “real meat will come in a packet labelled, ‘An animal has suffered in the production of this product’ and it will carry a big eco tax. I think in 50-60 years it may be forbidden to grow meat from livestock.”

An animal does need to be killed to kick off the in-vitro process, but “in theory, a single specimen could provide the seed material for hundreds of tonnes of meat.” The process of making shmeat is not yet cost effective, however. A single burger made with the stuff will be served for the first time this October and will cost an estimated $331,000 to make.

In a separate effort, Patrick Brown leads a secretive, well-funded Silicon Valley startup, Sand Hill Foods, that’s working to develop synthesized meat and dairy products. His approach is “to manipulate plant material to create a meat-facsimile” — no animals involved at all.

If either venture succeeds, the meat industry will be on the defensive.

This is a disruptive technology — one that threatens to overturn a powerful and established order. The global meat industry, which is populated by some very ruthless people, is going to fight this hard. “I think the meat industry will be an adversary, and maybe a dangerous one,” Post says.

Another challenge will be overcoming the “yuck” factor. But today’s meat eaters already avert their eyes from the factory farms and other unsavory systems that currently bring meat to our tables, so will eating meat from a lab really be that much of a stretch? As reporter Michael Hanlon puts it, “In terms of yuckiness, real meat is at the top of the scale.”

When the Des Moines Register ran a front-page story last week calling into question the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the state, it wasn’t environmentalists or animal rights activists who went on record against the facilities. No, the article featured ex-hog farmers who have been vocal in opposing new factory farms, as well as several Iowans who don’t want to see huge facilities — nor the “poo lagoons” that go along with them — take over the landscape.

Some 19.7 million pigs are raised in Iowa CAFOs every year, and that number is likely to keep climbing. A chart of livestock construction permits that ran with the Register story certainly projects growth. It reads:

2006……………310
2007………….. 252
2008………….. 218
2009……………. 60
2010…………….. 62
2011……………. 132
2012 (by 6/07).. 91

That’s right, after a “slump” in 2009 and 2010, the industry is back to its CAFO-building ways, with 91 permits issued so far this year. And remember, these are not small facilities; according to the Register, each facility contains around 4,400 hogs in two buildings.

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Looking at these numbers, it’s easy to wonder: How much longer can the state (or the region for that matter) handle this kind of growth? When the nonprofit advocacy group Food and Water Watch created this Factory Farm Map back in 2007, Iowa was already one of the states most saturated with CAFOs (see image). According to the chart above, over 500 CAFOs may have been built since then. Of course not all that growth has to mean new operations — some permits may be for the expansion of preexisting buildings — but if even half that number resulted in new facilities, it’s a cause for concern.

Some of the manure created in these facilities gets spread on farm fields, which do absorb a portion of the nitrogen (while the rest erodes into waterways, leaches into the groundwater, and — ultimately — adds nitrous oxide (N2O), a dangerous greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere). I won’t even get into the number of antibiotics and other drugs each CAFO requires — both to boost the animals’ growth and to keep them from getting sick in crowded facilities. The bottom line is that the more CAFOs are built, the further out of balance the ratio of manure-to-farm-field becomes. In addition, the Register article points out that “such large-scale spreading of liquid manure is vulnerable to spills and tank ruptures.”

Eyes on the prize

Why exactly do we need so many new CAFOs if American meat consumption has gone down? The answer — as it is with so much economic growth these days — is China. Apparently, they’ve gone a little pork-crazy over there. And China just surpassed us as the nation with the biggest meat-tooth in the world (we’re still ahead of them on a per capita basis, but they have a lot more people than we do).

Another recent article in the Iowa Farm Journal reports on new free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, but zeroes in on China as the ultimate target of U.S. pork industry expansion. It quotes Laurie Hueneke, U.S. director of international trade policy, saying, “The biggest prize is China.”

Of course, there’s a catch-22 at work here. Along with antibiotics, the American pork industry relies heavily on ractopamine, or “paylean,” a controversial drug that promotes leanness in pigs. And, as Helena Bottemiller reported on MSNBC earlier this year, as part of an investigation for the Food and Environment Reporting Network, China wants nothing to do with ractopamine. The drug was shown to lead to an increase in the number of “downer pigs” — lame animals unable to walk in slaughter plants — and the company that makes the drug has apparently received hundreds of complaints from farmers about sick livestock. Chinese health officials, however, seem most worried about the traces of the ractopamine found in meat, which Bottemiller reported “can still be detected in animals more than a week after they’ve consumed the drug.”

Nonetheless, it’s hard to see how the pork industry isn’t expanding with China in mind. In fact, Hueneke told the Iowa Farm Journal the nation had “been encouraged to reassess the ractopamine issue.”

The sacrifice generation

The presence of more and more CAFOs isn’t the only way the highly consolidated meat industry has changed the Midwest in recent years. A Reuters article that ran on Friday told the story of a small Illinois town that’s home to a giant Cargill meatpacking plant. The (oddly upbeat) article details the way the town has been flooded with an influx of people from Africa and Latin America — some on a legal “diversity visa lottery.”

If you’ve read any of the recent coverage of the meatpacking industry’s treatment of its workers — such as last year’s groundbreaking coverage of a Minnesota-based Hormel factory, or my recent post about workers throughout the food chain — you know that it’s a brutal, often inhumane industry. But it does tend to pay better than much of the other work that new immigrants can find. For that reason, Cargill plants like the one in the article, which is described as “a 430,000-square-foot concrete slaughterhouse that turns almost 20,000 hogs a day into meat,” are more or less changing the face of immigration in this country. The plant and the surrounding community it employs are described as emblematic of the way job-seeking immigrants have begun moving to rural and suburban areas, rather than big cities like Chicago and New York.

And despite the Reuters article’s somewhat cheerful description of the new ethnic population of this Illinois town, it also admits to the grim reality:

Many immigrants at meatpacking plants are “the sacrifice generation” — people who know they’ll have to work at hard, menial jobs so their children can rise to something else.

And really, the scale of this shift probably shouldn’t surprise us. There’s been much coverage of the way rural America has essentially been emptying out in recent years. So, on the face of it, I can see why some residents may be encouraged to see some form — heck, any form — of industry return.

But taken alongside the expansion of CAFOs in states like Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, the expansion of meatpacking plants in the same states suggests that companies like Cargill — “the biggest private company in the United States and the third-largest U.S. meatpacker” — might just be gearing up to rebuild vast swaths of the middle of the nation as the source of the world’s cheap meat. I can see the signs now: “You are now entering the Meatwest.”

Despite a high-profile lawsuit, a recent court order, and a much-hyped set of voluntary rules, it’s still not clear that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to do anything of substance to stop meat producers from using antibiotics on a massive — and massively destructive — scale. It has been three decades since the FDA first identified the use of these drugs in livestock production as a problem. But they’re still mulling it over, apparently. Thinking long and hard.

While they think, 80 percent of all the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are being used on animals to spur growth and compensate for crowded, dirty conditions. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria or “superbugs” continue to show up in food and cause infections in tens of thousands of people every year (99,000 people died of hospital-acquired infections in 2002, the most recent year for which data are available).

It’s no coincidence then that Meat Without Drugs, the campaign launched today by Consumers Union, doesn’t target the FDA or any government agency, for that matter. Instead, the advocacy group, which has been pushing for a ban on antibiotics in agriculture since the late 1970s, is targeting grocery stores.

After all, grocery chains are a little like small nations, aren’t they? (Maybe that’s why the checker at Kroger always wants to see your passport.) And — truth be told — even if half of those chains were to stop carrying antibiotic-laden meat, the thinking goes, most producers would be motivated (read: forced) to change their practices.

“After three decades, you could say we’re a little frustrated with the rate of change at FDA,” says Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union. “It’s discouraging to see that the industry lobbies have prevented the agency from acting.” (And by that she means both the meat industry and the pharmaceutical industry. After all, sales of so-called “animal health products” to agricultural operations were already worth a total of $3.3 billion a year by 1995.) And so, Halloran says, they’re trying another entry point — supermarkets.

In a companion report released today called “Meat On Drugs: The overuse of antibiotics in food animals and what supermarkets and consumers can do to stop it” [PDF], the Consumers Union looked at the cost, labeling, and availability of antibiotic-free meat in grocery stores and combined that data with a consumer survey.

The group’s “secret shoppers” recorded information about 1,100 products (including 200 organic ones) and identified Whole Foods as the only grocery store that currently carries solely antibiotic-free meat. Trader Joe’s ranked second, with a fairly wide selection of options. Now, with the Meat Without Drugs campaign, the Consumers Union is channeling online signatures to Trader Joe’s asking them to follow in Whole Foods’ footsteps and go cold turkey with their turkey. (And pork, beef, and chicken.)

“It could make a huge a difference,” says Halloran. “They’re a national chain with stores in 30 states. People already look to them for some sensitivity on social concerns.”

The price is right

“Farmers say they have to feed the drugs to animals to keep them healthy and meet America’s growing appetite for cheap meat,” a recent USA Today article reads.

Conventional producers are fond of talking about how taking the antibiotics out of the equation will cause the retail price of meat to skyrocket. And while having less cheap meat may not be such a bad thing (many would rather eat less meat and eat better meat, as author and rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman likes to suggest), the Consumers Union found that most consumers don’t actually have to choose between antibiotic-free and affordable.

The report points a 2001 study funded in part by the National Pork Producers Council. It found that “if antibiotics were no longer added to feed for hogs in the U.S., the cost of producing a 250-pound hog would most likely rise by $5.24. The increased cost to the consumer would be around 5 cents per pound. Given average pork consumption, that amounts to $2.75 per person per year.” They also found that antibiotic-free poultry farming was just as likely to cost the farmers less than farming with antibiotics does.

The prices they recorded in grocery stores suggested a similar reality. The report reads:

The Consumer Reports shoppers gathered data on the prices of “no antibiotics” products, including organic meat and poultry, at the 119 stores that carried them. Based on this data, it appears that “no antibiotics” meat and poultry is not as costly as many might assume. While shoppers found beef products priced up to $19.99 per pound for organic steak, virtually all of the “no antibiotics” chicken, turkey, and pork products found in the stores were priced under $10 per pound. Such chicken could be had at three chains — Trader Joe’s, Jewel-Osco, and Publix — for as little as $1.29 per pound. Moderately priced “no antibiotics” products (under $5 per pound) were available at almost every chain that carried such meat.

This is good news for eaters, many of whom want better access to this meat. Around one-quarter of the people Consumers Union surveyed said meat raised without antibiotics was not available at their supermarket, while 82 percent of those said they would buy it if it were. And a full 86 percent of the shoppers they talked to think it should be available in supermarkets.

Consumers Union also found a huge range of labels, from “natural” to “grass-fed” to “no antibiotic residue” and “never given antibiotics.” Halloran thinks that inconsistency might pose an obstacle down the road when it comes to clear demands from consumers.

“We think the USDA should have one term and post the definition. And then have some mechanism for enforcing it,” she says.

Of course, ever since the FDA suggested this April that antibiotics should not be used to enhance growth or improve feed efficiency in livestock, but rather to “prevent, control or treat illnesses in food-producing animals under the supervision of a veterinarian,” there has been much more gray area in terms of exactly what practices should warrant a label.

“What we hear is that most antibiotics are now used to ‘prevent disease,’” says Halloran. “But preventative use, wholesale, in the water for a thousand chickens at once … well, it still needs to stop. Often in the past antibiotic use has served both purposes. They can easily say that they’re using it for disease prevention. And then — oh, by the way — as a nice side effect it also helps the animals grow bigger.”

But to truly phase out antibiotics, Halloran adds, farmers have to change their other husbandry practices. “What we know from farms in Europe, where they have scaled back on the drugs considerably, is that you have to pay much more attention to sanitation; you clean the facilities thoroughly, and do a lot more to keep disease from entering.” In other words, the kinds of changes to animal agriculture that most consumers would like to see anyway.

Here’s a related video from Robert Kenner, director of Food, Inc., and co-founder of the website, FixFood. (And yes, that’s Bill Paxton narrating.)

Why a burrito? Well, there’s the practical explanation, according to Manriquez:

Burritos are a natural choice because most of their ingredients are easily extrudable.

What’s that again?

Extrude — to shape (as metal or plastic) by forcing through a die. Remember when you were a kid and you pushed PlayDough through pre-cut holes (e.g. stars, rainbows, etc.) sculpting crazy shapes? Well, you were extruding 3d objects, even back then. Good for you!

There’s also a fancy explanation. Burritos dredge up ideas about fast food, assembly lines, the environmental consequences of quick consumption, and nutritional values.

But we know what you’re really curious about. Does it taste good?

Not quite yet to be honest.

Here’s a hint why:

So unfortunately, ingredients like lettuce, or chunky bits of meat or salsa are not going to extrude out of a tiny 18 gauge syringe hole. You’re just not going to get that desired mouth feel of carne asada.

If you don’t have an image for “18 gauge,” think “slightly larger than a standard earring.” So, yeah. Meat threads.

Luckily, Burritob0t can do a better job of making people think twice about mass-produced food if the food it creates is gross. Otherwise they’d just be thinking “burrito robot, fuck yes, I have to get me one of these,” which would probably defeat the purpose.