What's in YOUR Hamburger?

Book Reveals the Grisly Horror of Hamburgers

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. - Albert Einstein

by Philip Delves Broughton

The grisliest description of fast food ever published is proving a hit with Americans desperate to know what lurks inside their hamburgers, while raising the hackles of the fast food industry.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser offers a deeply disturbing account of the fast food industry. Since 1993, he claims, half a million children in America have been made ill by the E coli bug. If their parents knew what was really in the minced meat found in thousands of hamburgers, tacos and pizza toppings, he argues, they would never take their children to another fast-food restaurant again.

Feeding dead cats and dogs to cattle was legal in the United States until 1997, when the government banned the practice because of fears over mad cow disease. Dead horses and pigs, however, are still routinely ground into cattle feed. One quarter of America's minced beef, writes Schlosser, is made from worn-out dairy cattle, likely to be riddled with disease and the meat containing antibiotic residues.

The book has been called unduly alarmist by the American Meat Association, which represents packers and processors, and "unfortunate" by the National Council of Chain Restaurants. - Daily Telegraph

Sources: The Dominion 12 March 2001

http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/animals/holy_cow.htm