The anti-beef crusaders, led by Jeremy Rifkin, will be preaching to the partially converted when they come to Britain later this month. Roast beef may be famous for being England's national dish, but the country's per capita consumption of beef is less than half that of America. Hungarians, Austrians, Australians, Czechs, French, Germans, Argentinians and Italians all rank ahead of the British as carnivores. Not that we are about to become vegetarians - every year we consume about 4 million tonnes of meat and slaughter some 500 million poultry, 20 million sheep, 13 million pigs and three million cattle.
The main change over the past 40 years has been in the types of meat eaten. Annual consumption of beef and veal has dropped from 50lb to 38lb a head, while poultry has soared from 8lb to 44lb and is now the most-eaten meat. Lamb and bacon are down from 23lb to 16lb a head, while pork is up from 18lb to 30lb. Economics and changing fashions in healthy eating (notably a switch from red to white meats) are the main forces behind these trends. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease) seems to be only part of the reason for a 15 per cent drop in beef-eating over the past five years. The recession has probably been a more important factor.
All meat is cheaper in real terms than it was a generation ago, but poultry, once served as a treat, is the cheapest of all, the real cost having fallen by nearly 50 per cent since 1960. This has been achieved entirely by the much-deplored factory farming, where broiler fowl, crammed in their thousands into hangar-like sheds, go from egg to table in 42 days without ever seeing the light of day, many of them putting on weight so fast that by the end their legs can no longer support them. Reduced beef-eating has arguably been achieved by rearing chickens more cheaply and cruelly.
Unlike America, Britain has a relatively small specialist beef herd and the huge mechanised feed lots, where hundreds of animals are castrated and dehorned in assembly-line operations, have no parallel in this country. Dehorning and castration are permitted, but are more strictly regulated than in America. Dehorning is illegal without an anaesthetic. Castration of animals older than two months also requires an anaesthetic, although it is thought that about 50 per cent of bullocks are castrated before that age. "Teaser bulls", vasectomised under anaesthetic, are occasionally used to identify females on heat for the purposes of artificial insemination, according to Francis Anthony, president-designate of the British Veterinary Association. He says, however, that he has never heard of anyone being asked to perform the "sidewinder" operation described by Rifkin, and he doubts that it is common in America.
These are not issues that British animal welfare groups, such as Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA, have previously thought worthy of much attention. They are more concerned about the suffering of cattle during long-distance transport from British farms to slaughterhouses in other parts of the European Community. They have campaigned in particular against the continuing export of between 300,000 and 400,000 calves a year to the Continent, where most are confined throughout their short lives to narrow stalls and fed on low-iron, liquid diets, designed to produce the favoured pale flesh. The notorious "veal crate" is banned in Britain, but there is no restraint on the export of calves to other countries using it or on the re-import of the meat into this country.
Beef from Britain's suckler herds, so called because the mother is allowed to suckle her young until they are slaughtered at about two years of age, is excellent and, on the whole, humanely reared. Growth hormones are banned and antibiotic residues in beef, now regularly monitored, are found in microscopic amounts in no more than 1 per cent of samples.
Britain has a somewhat different problem compared with America, in that top-quality beef is in such short supply that most has to be imported, some of it from countries such as Brazil, where cattle-ranching is blamed for destroying the rain forest. More than two thirds of British-reared beef is a by-product of the intensive dairy industry, coming from calves born to dairy cows, and fit only to be made into pies, hamburgers and sausages.
This practice makes economic sense, but has created its own set of animal welfare and human health problems. Dairy cows have to be made pregnant annually in order to maintain the average yearly milk output of 5,000 litres. Only 20 to 25 per cent of a dairy herd needs to be replaced each year, so dairy farmers make most of their assets by inseminating half their cows with semen from bulls bred for beef production. The resulting progeny, with at best 50 per cent beef genes, make for indifferent but still saleable meat.
These dairy-beef crosses are allowed to suckle for only three or four days until the mother's milk is free of colostrum, which strengthens the calf's immune system but taints the taste of her milk for humans. The calf is then taken away from the mother to live for up to two years in a herd of other orphans, before being slaughtered for beef. The dairy mother, when her milk output begins to fall off after four to six years, is also destined for the abattoir, ending up as cheap mince, in burgers or as tinned beef. New technology is available which will make it possible for dairy cows, even after their milking days are over, to be pressed into further service as surrogate mothers for pure-beef embryos fertilised in test-tubes.
Britain's reliance on the dairy herd for so much of its beef is one reason why mad cow disease, which to date has killed about 70,000 dairy cattle, has caused such concern. BSE is thought to have come via high-protein dairy cattle rations containing the remains of sheep infected with scrapie, a similar brain condition. Once in the dairy herd, BSE spread because meat and bone meal of cattle origin, rendered from those parts of the carcass not wanted for human consumption, were also commonly fed back to dairy cattle. One of the few things known about the agent causing BSE is that it passes more easily between animals of the same species than from one species to another.
These feed practices have been banned since 1988. Other measures have been taken by the government to prevent cattle brain, spleen, spinal cord and other parts of the carcass thought capable of harbouring the BSE agent, from entering the human food chain. BSE has never been found in muscle tissue, the main component of lean meat. These precautions should have removed any danger to consumers. There remains the possibility that people exposed to BSE-infected material before these measures were introduced in 1988-89 might yet develop the disease. Most scientists believe humans will prove resistant to BSE, but certainty on this point may not be available for years to come.
A human form of spongiform encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Dementia (CJD), a rare but fatal brain condition that kills about one in every two million people, has been diagnosed since the Twenties. If BSE can affect humans, its pathological and clinical symptoms are likely to look much like those of CJD. So an increase or variation in the incidence of CJD might be the first warning sign. As the incubation period for human spongiform encephalopathy is anything from ten to 30 years, BSE could be a human health time bomb waiting to explode.
While waiting, Britain's first line of defence is the compulsory destruction of all cattle showing symptoms of the disease. As some animals may be incubating BSE without showing any outward signs and thus escape destruction, abattoirs are charged with the removal of all parts of the carcass thought to be susceptible to infection.
How confident can we be that abattoirs are observing these rules? Last year, for example, health inspectors found nearly 150 hygiene faults at two Welsh abattoirs, including flies in the cutting room, birds flying about in the slaughter hall, dirt on hanging meat, walls smeared in dried blood and muck, and slaughtermen with unwashed hands.
Such conditions may be quite common. Only about 10 per cent of the 700 abattoirs in Britain are certified as meeting the hygiene and structural standards required for exporting meat to other parts of the EC. About 350 of the others are expected to close down next year because they will not be able to afford the cost of upgrading their premises to meet these standards, which will become obligatory for all but the smallest plants in the post-1992 single market. In addition, slaughtermen will, for the first time in Britain, be legally required to undergo minimum training in hygiene.
