Um mundo de Sonho The Sandman, de Neil Gaiman.
Se você não conhece, conheça; é uma coletânia de histórias realmente impressionante, que tem como personagem mais ou menos principal o Sonho, e seus irmãos Destino, Morte, Desejo, Desespero, Destruição e a caçula Delírio, os sete são chamados de Eternos, e existem desde o começo dos tempos.
Morpheus, o Sonho, com sua carismática irmã Morte
Outros personagems, mais “normais” também aparecem, e muitas das narrativas são sobre meros mortais que de alguma forma foram tocados pelos Eternos no decorrer da trama; algumas vezes o foco é realmente desviado da história principal, mas tudo é muito bem bolado e o resultado é um universo à parte, não muito diferente do nosso, já que tudo é tão familiar, mas um universo em que todos os mitos são verdadeiros, todos os deuses nascem e morrem à medida que o imaginário das pessoas vai mudando e essa estranha família permanece, afinal, eles representam tudo que sempre será encontrado em qualquer civilização, de uma forma ou de outra…
Enfim, são várias histórias maravilhosas que se entrelaçam de uma forma impressionante, em um universo aonde qualquer personagem, histórico mítico ou fantástico, que você já conheça pode aparecer
Precisa dizer mais?
Um mundo de Sonho
The Sandman, de Neil Gaiman.
Se você não conhece, conheça; é uma coletânia de histórias realmente impressionante, que tem como personagem mais ou menos principal o Sonho, e seus irmãos Destino, Morte, Desejo, Desespero, Destruição e a caçula Delírio, os sete são chamados de Eternos, e existem desde o começo dos tempos.
Morpheus, o Sonho, com sua carismática irmã Morte
Outros personagems, mais “normais” também aparecem, e muitas das narrativas são sobre meros mortais que de alguma forma foram tocados pelos Eternos no decorrer da trama; algumas vezes o foco é realmente desviado da história principal, mas tudo é muito bem bolado e o resultado é um universo à parte, não muito diferente do nosso, já que tudo é tão familiar, mas um universo em que todos os mitos são verdadeiros, todos os deuses nascem e morrem à medida que o imaginário das pessoas vai mudando e essa estranha família permanece, afinal, eles representam tudo que sempre será encontrado em qualquer civilização, de uma forma ou de outra…
Enfim, são várias histórias maravilhosas que se entrelaçam de uma forma impressionante, em um universo aonde qualquer personagem, histórico mítico ou fantástico, que você já conheça pode aparecer
Precisa dizer mais?
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VEJA - A TÁTICA DO CINISMO@ Le Monde Diplomatique BrasilUma forma de desvendar a revista Veja é ler as cartas dos leitores, de um entusiasmo algo monótono: “um farol iluminando o mar de lágrimas de nosso mundo político”; “não somente uma bússola [ética], mas também fonte de constância e competência”; uma publicação “livre, corajosa e obcecada pela busca da verdade”. Outra é, simplesmente, folhear um exemplar.
A Veja é a revista mais influente da América Latina, com uma tiragem de aproximadamente 1,2 milhão de exemplares, dos quais 925 mil por assinatura, e recruta três quartos de seus leitores entre os 12% de brasileiros mais abastados – população que, parece, não se incomoda com uma visão de mundo conservadora. A seção “Panorama”, por exemplo, exibe regularmente imagens e citações de homens e mulheres públicos: os primeiros, de terno, expressam sempre suas preocupações políticas; elas, pouco vestidas, se inquietam sobre o peso ou as nádegas. Já a publicidade ocupa em média mais de setenta das 140 páginas da publicação. Na edição de 7 de novembro de 2012, os leitores depararam com dezesseis páginas seguidas de propaganda da Procter & Gamble.É necessário, contudo, desembolsar R$ 9,90 para comprar a Veja em uma banca – o equivalente a 1/60 do salário mínimo. Essa proporção, na França, significaria desembolsar mais de 18 euros por uma L’Express ou Le Nouvel Observateur. Papel fino e principalmente cinza, manchetes capitulares, capa sensacionalista: a Veja não é propriamente uma revista elegante. Sua ambição? Figurar entre as instituições “indispensáveis ao país que desejamos ser”, como proclama seu slogan. E o país a que a Veja aspira não gosta nada do Estado.Na edição de 15 de agosto de 2012, o editorial enalteceu um programa de privatização que coloca o Brasil “em harmonia com a lei da gravitação universal”. Não sem advertir: “a presidente Dilma Rousseff vai se chocar contra as resistências evidentes de seu partido, o PT, e contra outras forças reacionárias da esquerda. Trata-se de uma batalha na qual necessitará do apoio da opinião pública. O apoio da Veja já está garantido”.Editada pelo Grupo Abril, a Veja surgiu em 1968, mesmo ano do Ato Institucional n. 5, que marcou a radicalização da repressão exercida pela junta que chegou ao poder em 1964. Se, por um lado, a revista sempre teve uma relação ambígua com a ditadura, por outro se engajou a favor das reformas neoliberais desde o retorno da democracia, em 1985 – com a mesma devoção com que anuncia sua linha editorial de “jamais refugiar-se no conforto da imparcialidade”.Em 1989, na primeira campanha presidencial democrática após a queda dos militares, a Veja apoiou Fernando Collor, cuja base política era frágil em relação à candidatura de Lula. Barbudo, sindicalista, sem diploma universitário, este entoava um discurso que ameaçava os poderosos. Na época, o proprietário do grupo Globo, Roberto Marinho, também escolheu seu lado. Sobre Collor, alertava seus funcionários: “Não criticamos esse jovem”. A Veja atuava da mesma forma, construindo a imagem de um candidato “jovem e sedutor” e grande “caçador de marajás”.Nos anos seguintes, uma questão obcecou os economistas ortodoxos: a inflação, que acabava com as economias dos rentistas. E aterrorizou a Veja, que consagrou várias capas ao tema com, por exemplo, um vampiro com olhos esbugalhados (9 maio 1993), um crocodilo fotografado de frente e com a boca aberta (9 mar. 1994) ou ainda um dragão cujas labaredas de fogo parecem queimar a capa (4 dez. 2002).A Veja também se alarma diante de protestos e manifestações populares: os organizados pelo Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) e os dos sindicatos. Assim, no dia 31 de maio de 1995, publicou na capa uma fotomontagem que apresenta o presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso usando um capacete de soldado. A publicação o felicita por “domar” a central sindical mais importante do país ao reprimir uma greve de petroleiros com o Exército.* * * * *As “ditaduras populistas”Preocupada com a chegada ao poder dos dirigentes progressistas na América Latina, a revista se empenhou em denunciar as “ditaduras populistas”. No dia 10 de maio de 2006, com a manchete “Essa doeu!”, representa um Lula visto de costas após ter recebido um chute no traseiro. A imagem era uma burla da suposta ingenuidade do chefe de Estado perante seu homólogo boliviano, Evo Morales, que acabava de nacionalizar o gás e o petróleo bolivianos, explorados por empresas brasileiras – porque, para a Veja, os interesses das multinacionais devem prevalecer. No dia 4 de julho de 2012, a revista denunciou uma tentativa de golpe de Estado no Paraguai: não a de Frederico Franco, exitosa, e sim a do presidente venezuelano Hugo Chávez, que teria tentado destituir Franco com o Exército paraguaio…Até o início da década de 2000, o PT era o assunto que mais preocupava a publicação. No dia 23 de outubro de 2002, às vésperas da eleição que levou Lula à presidência, a Veja pegou pesado. A manchete “O que querem os radicais do PT” titulava uma imagem do candidato do partido segurando uma coleira com um cachorro de três cabeças – as de Lenin, Marx e Trotski –, que o desequilibrava. Enquanto Lula enviava sua “Carta aos brasileiros”, destinada a tranquilizar os especuladores, o periódico chamava a atenção para as franjas “extremistas” do partido.A Veja se considera na vanguarda da luta contra a corrupção: um editorial de 5 de setembro de 2012 apresenta a revista como a “bússola ética” do Brasil. Mas esse comportamento desempenha, em primeiro lugar, a função de despolitizar. “Ao colocar a corrupção no centro do tratamento da informação política, a Veja transforma o político em policial e omite o fato de que sua própria conduta policial é eminentemente política”, analisa o jornalista Roberto Efrem Filho. Assim, em vez de se apresentar como a ponta de lança da campanha anticorrupção que acabaria por levar Collor a renunciar, a Veja o apoiava sempre que possível. Mais tarde, reinventaria a própria imagem e o papel que desempenhava na queda do presidente corrupto. Da mesma forma, em 2005, a Veja reivindicou a revelação do mensalão, quando em realidade a denúncia havia sido feita pela Folha de S.Paulo.Mais grave, a própria revista está envolvida em casos de corrupção. Há ligações entre Policarpo Júnior, diretor da Veja em Brasília, e empresários como Carlinhos Cachoeira, acusado de desvio de dinheiro. O caso desencadeou a criação de uma comissão parlamentar de inquérito batizada de “CPI Cachoeira”. Policarpo, nomeado redator-chefe em janeiro de 2012 e encarregado das páginas políticas, aparece em gravações que o implicam na publicação de artigos e reportagens cujo único objetivo era promover o interesse de empresários.Confrontada pelo ressentimento anticorrupção que ela mesma ajudou a alimentar, notadamente na internet, a Veja reagiu violentamente, chegando até a denunciar na capa as “táticas de guerrilha destinadas a manipular as redes sociais” (16 maio 2012). Nessa nota, acusa o PT de colocar um robô encarregado de publicar mensagens anti-Veja no Twitter. Solidário, O Globo apoiou a revista em nome da “defesa da liberdade”.* * * * A autora, Carla Luciana Silva, é autora do livro “Veja: indispensável partido neoliberal (1989-2002)”, Edunioeste, Cascavel, 2009. Ilustração: André Dahmer.Fonte original* * * * *Saiba mais: “O caso Veja” por Luis Nassif](http://25.media.tumblr.com/35b2a365a1ae02b0db670a619c326969/tumblr_mf86x8gpCk1qkp2xyo1_400.jpg)
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Adaptado para o cinema por Richard Linklater [download do filme completo], “Fast Food Nation” é um livro best-seller do jornalista investigativo Eric Schlosser que escancara as realidades sórdidas por trás do “McDonald’s Way-of-Life”.
Segue abaixo um artigo de Schlosser publicado pela ROLLING STONE norte-americana, em sua edição 794, de 3 de Setembro de 1998.“The injury rate among meatpackers is the highest of any occupation in the United States. Working in a slaughterhouse is three times more dangerous than working in an average American factory. Every year about one-third of all slaughterhouse workers - roughly 50,000 men and women - suffer an injury or an illness that requires first aid on the job. Aside from the automated production lines and a variety of power tools, most of the work in American slaughterhouses is still performed by hand. Poultry plants have been largely mechanized, thanks to the breeding of chickens that are uniform in size; but cattle come in all sizes and shapes, varying in weight by hundreds of pounds and preventing the mechanization of beef plants. A sharp knife is still the most important tool in a slaughterhouse. Lacerations are the most common injury suffered by meatpackers, who often stab themselves or someone working nearby. Tendonitis and Cumulative Trauma Disorders are also quite common. Many slaughterhouse workers make a knife cut every three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight-and-a-half-hour shift. If the knife is not sharpened regularly and grows dull, additional pressure is placed on a worker’s tendons, joints and nerves. A large number of meatpackers develop shoulder problems, carpal tunnel syndrome and “trigger finger” (a disorder in which fingers become frozen in a curled position). The slippery floors in slaughterhouses, the carcasses rapidly swinging past, and the cutting tools and heavy machinery are responsible for back injuries, falls, broken bones, dismemberments and fatal accidents. Perhaps the leading determinant of the injury rate at a slaughterhouse is the speed of the production line. Meatpackers often work within inches of each other, wielding large knives. As the pace increases, so does the risk of accidental cuts and stabbings. About seventy-five cattle an hour were slaughtered in the old meatpacking plants in Chicago. Twenty years ago, the Monfort plant in Greeley slaughtered about 175 cattle an hour. By the early 1990s, the Monfort plant slaughtered as many as 400 cattle an hour, about half a dozen animals every minute, sent down a single production line, carved by workers under tremendous pressure not to fall behind.Beef slaughterhouses now operate at a low profit margin. The three giant meatpacking companies - Monfort, IBP and Excel - try to increase earnings by maximizing the volume of production at their plants. A faster pace means higher profits. Declining beef consumption in the United States has been prompted less by health concerns than by the price of beef compared with the prices of other meats. The same factors that make beef slaughterhouses inefficient (the lack of mechanization, the reliance on human labor) also encourage companies to make them even more dangerous (by speeding up the pace).The slaughterhouse workers I met in Greeley talked about the difficulties of their jobs, as well as a few of the rewards. Felipe (not his real name) was originally from Chihuahua, Mexico. He learned about job openings at the Monfort plant in the late 1980s from a friend who was already in the United States. Felipe crossed the border illegally, made it to Greeley, applied for a job at the plant and anxiously waited to see whether Monfort would hire him. For two weeks he lived outdoors in Greeley, sleeping under bridges and working at construction sites during the day. Monfort hired Felipe, not at all concerned about his lack of English, and asked whether he knew of other people back home who might want to work at the plant. His first day at the slaughterhouse was confusing. “Nobody helped train me - no training how to use the knife,” Felipe said. “So you see how the people on either side of you do the work, and then you do it.”Jose (not his real name) had been employed at the slaughterhouse for more than ten years. During that time many workers had lost fingers, mainly while using power saws. One man lost an arm in the box-making machine. People get cut all the time, trying to keep up with the pace. “The knives don’t know any difference between cow meat and human meat,” he said. Jose hurt one hand while operating a machine and badly injured a shoulder during a fall. A company doctor told him the shoulder was just fine; six months later an orthopedist told him surgery was necessary; years later, the shoulder still bothers him sometimes. His toughest stretch at the slaughterhouse was working a double shift. Jose didn’t want to do it but thought he’d be fired for refusing. And so he worked a double shift six days a week. He would put in seventeen hours straight, drive forty miles home, sleep for a while and then return to the slaughterhouse. He did this for four months. “I’ll remember that till the day I die,” he says. Jose now works forty-eight hours a week at the Monfort plant and about twenty-five hours a week at a local fast-food restaurant. His wife works fifty-six hours a week at two different restaurants. They still have payments to make on their trailer home, and they have two teenage children. Though he has worked at the Monfort beef plant for more than a decade, Jose earns an hourly wage that is only twenty cents higher than the starting wage. “But the whole thing is,” he tells me, as though revealing a dark secret, “if they’d just pay a decent wage so I didn’t have to pull two jobs, you know, it wouldn’t be a bad place to work.”The speed of the production line at a slaughterhouse is largely responsible not only for the high injury rate but also for the contamination of the meat. The problem starts in the feedlots. A government health official, who prefers not to be named, compares the sanitary conditions at a modern feedlot to those of a crowded European city during the Middle Ages, when people dumped their chamber pots out the windows, raw sewage ran in the streets and epidemics raged. The cattle now packed into feedlots get little exercise and live amid pools of manure. Far removed from their natural habitats, the cattle become more prone to illnesses. And what they are fed often contributes to the spread of disease. The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less-expensive materials to cattle, especially substances with a high protein content that can accelerate growth. About eighty percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed slaughterhouse wastes - the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle - until August 1997. The USDA banned the practice, hoping to prevent a domestic outbreak of mad-cow disease. Millions of dead cats and dead dogs, purchased from animal shelters, are being fed to cattle each year, along with dead ducks, geese, elk and deer. Steven P. Bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat and Poultry, is appalled by what often winds up in cattle feed. “Goddamn it, these cattle are ruminants,” Bjerklie says. “They’re designed to eat grass and, maybe, grain. I mean, they have four stomachs for a reason: to eat products that have a high cellulose content. They are not designed to eat other animals.” The slaughterhouse tasks most likely to contaminate meat are the removal of an animal’s hide and the evisceration of its digestive system. The hides are now removed by machine; but if a hide has not been adequately cleaned first, pieces of dirt and manure may fall from it onto the meat. Stomachs and intestines are still pulled out of cattle by hand; if the job is not performed carefully, the contents of the digestive system may spill everywhere. Workers being rushed are bound to make mistakes. The consequences of one error are quickly multiplied. Knives are supposed to be cleaned and disinfected every few minutes, something that workers in a hurry tend to forget. “If a knife gets contaminated,” Bjerklie says, “then it’s just going to spread that contamination to everything it touches.” The literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: fecal coliform levels, food-borne pathogens, total plate counts, et al. Behind them all lies a simple explanation for why most people get sick: There is shit on the meat. One night I visit a slaughterhouse somewhere in the high plains. The slaughterhouse is one of the nation’s largest. About 5,000 head of cattle enter it every day, single file, and leave in a different form. Someone who has access to the plant, who is upset by its working conditions, offers to give me a tour. The slaughterhouse is an immense building, gray and square, about three stories high with no windows on the front and no architectural clues to what’s happening inside. My friend gives me a chain-mail apron and gloves, suggesting I try them on. Workers on the line wear about eight pounds of chain mail beneath their white coats - shiny steel armor that covers their hands, wrists, stomach and back. The chain mail is designed to protect workers from cutting themselves and from being cut by other workers. But knives somehow manage to get around it. My host hands me some Wellingtons, the kind of knee-high rubber boots that English gentlemen wear in the countryside. “Tuck your pants into the boots,” he says. “We’ll be walking through some blood.”I put on a hard hat and climb a stairway. The sounds get louder - factory sounds, the noise of power tools and machinery, bursts of compressed air. We start at the end of the line, the fabricating room. Workers call it “fab.” When we step inside, fab seems familiar: steel catwalks, pipes along the walls, a vast room, a maze of conveyor belts. This could be the Lamb Weston plant, except hunks of red meat ride the belts instead of french fries. Some machines assemble cardboard boxes, others vacuum-seal subprimals of beef in clear plastic. The workers look extremely busy, but there’s nothing unsettling about this part of the plant. You see meat like this all the time in the back of your local supermarket.The fab room is refrigerated, kept at about forty degrees. As you head up the line, the feel of the place starts to change. The pieces of meat get bigger. Workers - about half of them women, almost all of them young and Latino - slice meat with long, slender knives. They stand at a table that is chest high, grab meat off a conveyor belt, trim away fat, throw meat back on the belt, toss the scraps onto a conveyor belt above them and then grab more meat, all in a matter of seconds. I’m now struck by how many workers there are, hundreds of them, pressed close together, constantly moving, slicing. You see hard hats, white coats, flashes of steel. Nobody is smiling or chatting; they’re too busy, anxiously trying not to fall behind. An old man walks past me, pushing a blue plastic barrel filled with scraps. A few workers carve the meat with Whizzards, small electric knives that have spinning round blades. The Whizzards look like the Norelco razors that Santa rides in the TV ads. I notice that a few of the women near me are sweating, even though the place is freezing cold.Sides of beef suspended from an overhead trolley swing toward a group of men. Each worker has a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other. They grab the meat with their hooks and attack it fiercely with their knives. As they hack away, using all their strength, grunting, the place suddenly feels different, primordial. The machinery seems beside the point, and what’s going on here has been going on for thousands of years - the meat, the hook, the knife, men straining to cut more meat.On the kill floor, what I see no longer unfolds in a logical manner. It’s one surreal image after another. A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then the halves swing by me into the cooler. Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. My host stops and asks how I feel, whether I want to go any farther. This is where some people get sick. The kill floor is hot and humid. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. It stinks of manure. Carcasses swing so fast along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly, dodge them, watch your step, or one will slam you and throw you onto the bloody concrete floor. It happens to workers all the time.I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless-steel rack of tongues; Whizzards peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. We wade through blood that’s ankle deep and that pours down drains into vats below us. As we approach the start of the line, for the first time I hear the steady pop, pop, pop of live animals being stunned.The cattle suspended above me look just like the cattle I’ve seen on ranches for years, but these ones are upside down, swinging on hooks. For a moment, the sight seems unreal; there are so many of them, a herd of them, lifeless. And then I see a few hind legs still kicking, a final reflex action, and the reality comes hard and clear.For eight and a half hours, a worker called a sticker does nothing but stand in a river of blood, being drenched in blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing its carotid artery. He uses a long knife and must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely. He hits that spot again and again. We walk up a slippery metal stairway and reach a small platform, where the production line begins. A man turns and smiles at me. He wears safety goggles and a hard hat. His face is splattered with gray matter and blood. He is the knocker, the man who welcomes cattle to the building. Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner - a gun attached to the ceiling by a long hose - which fires a column of compressed air that knocks the cattle unconscious. The animals keep strolling up, oblivious to what comes next, and he stands over them and shoots. For eight and a half hours, he just shoots. As I stand there, he misses a few times and shoots the same animal twice. As soon as the steer falls, a worker grabs one of its hind legs and shackles it to a chain, and the chain lifts the huge animal into the air.I watch the knocker knock cattle for a couple of minutes. The animals are powerful and strong one moment and then gone in an instant, suspended from a rail, ready to have their necks slit. A steer slips from its chain, falls to the ground, and gets its head caught in a conveyor belt. The line stops as workers struggle to free the steer, stunned but alive, from the machinery. I’ve seen enough.I step out of the building into the cool night air and follow the path that leads cattle into the slaughterhouse. They pass me, driven toward the building by workers with long white sticks that seem to glow in the dark. One steer turns and tries to run. But workers drive him back to join the rest. The cattle lazily walk single file toward the muffled sounds, pop, pop, pop, coming from the open door.The path has hairpin turns that prevent cattle from seeing what’s in store, keeping them relaxed. As the ramp gently slopes upward, the animals may think they’re headed for another truck, another road trip - and they are, in unexpected ways. The ramp widens as it reaches ground level and then leads to a large cattle pen with wooden fences, a corral that belongs in a meadow, not here. As I walk along the fence, a group of cattle approaches me, looking me straight in the eye, like dogs hoping for a treat, and follow me, out of some mysterious impulse. I stop and try to absorb the whole scene: the cool breeze, the cattle and their gentle lowing, a cloudless sky, steam rising from the plant in the moonlight. And then I notice that the building does have one window, a small square of light on the second floor. It offers a glimpse of what’s hidden behind this huge, blank façade. Through the little window you can see bright-red carcasses on hooks, going round and round. In the early part of this century, hamburgers had a bad reputation. According to the historian David Gerard Hogan, the hamburger was considered “a food for the poor,” tainted, unsafe to eat. Restaurants rarely served hamburgers; they were sold at lunch carts parked near factories, at circuses, carnivals and state fairs. Ground beef was rumored to contain old, putrid meat heavily laced with chemical preservatives. “The hamburger habit is just about as safe,” one food critic warned, “as getting your meat out of a garbage can… .” White Castle, the nation’s first hamburger chain, worked hard in the 1920s to dispel the hamburger’s tawdry image. As Hogan notes in his history of the chain, Selling ‘em by the Sack, the founders of White Castle placed their grills in the direct view of customers, claimed that fresh ground beef was delivered two to four times a day, chose a name with connotations of purity and even sponsored an experiment in which a University of Minnesota medical student lived for thirteen weeks on “nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water.”The success of White Castle in the East and the Midwest helped to popularize hamburgers and to remove much of their social stigma. The chain did not attract a broad range of people, however; most of its customers were urban, working-class and male. The rise of drive-ins and fast-food restaurants in Southern California elevated the once-lowly hamburger to the status of America’s national dish during the 1950s. Ray Kroc set out to attract families to McDonald’s. Hamburgers seemed an ideal food for children: convenient, inexpensive, hand-held and easy to chew. Prior to World War II, pork was the most widely consumed meat in the United States. Rising incomes, the growth of the fast-food industry and the mass appeal of the hamburger pushed American consumption of beef higher than that of pork. By the early 1990s, beef production was responsible for almost half of the employment in American agriculture, and the annual revenues generated by beef, nearly $50 billion, were the highest of any agricultural commodity in the United States. Every day, about one-third of the American people ate a hamburger. Roughly seventy percent of those hamburgers were bought at fast-food restaurants. And children between the ages of seven and thirteen ate more hamburgers than anyone else - an average of six a week.In January 1993, doctors at a hospital in Seattle noticed that a large number of children were being admitted with bloody diarrhea. Some were suffering from hemolytic uremic syndrome, a disorder that often causes kidney failure. Health officials soon traced the outbreak of food poisoning to under-cooked hamburgers served at Jack in the Box restaurants. The hamburgers contained a potentially lethal microbe: Escherichia coli O157:H7. Jack in the Box issued an immediate recall of the contaminated ground beef, which had been supplied by the Vons Co. in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, more than 700 people in five different states were sickened by Jack in the Box hamburgers, about 195 were hospitalized, and four died. Most of the victims were children; Jack in the Box accepted responsibility for their medical costs, and the chain was nearly destroyed by the publicity surrounding the outbreak. But this was not the first outbreak of E.coli O157:H7 linked to fast-food hamburgers. As Nichols Fox reveals in her book on food-borne pathogens, Spoiled, dozens of children were sickened in 1982 by contaminated McDonald’s hamburgers in Oregon and Michigan. McDonald’s had quietly cooperated with investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, providing ground-beef samples that proved to be tainted with E.coli O157:H7. In public, however, the McDonald’s Corp. denied that its hamburgers were responsible for any illnesses. Reports on the outbreak never mentioned McDonald’s, referring to the chain simply as “Restaurant A.”In the five years since the Jack in the Box outbreak, perhaps 100,000 Americans, the majority of them children, have been made seriously ill by E.coli O157:H7. Every week, on the average, a few Americans die from eating hamburgers. E.coli O157:H7 is a mutated version of a bacterium found abundantly in the human digestive system. The E.coli bacteria in our digestive system help the body synthesize vitamins and ward off dangerous organisms. E.coli O157:H7, on the other hand, releases a powerful toxin that can destroy the lining of the intestine. In most cases, the ensuing bloody diarrhea subsides within a week or so. In about six percent of the cases, however, the toxins produced by E.coli O157:H7 enter the bloodstream, interfering with kidney function and causing hemolytic uremic syndrome. Children and the elderly are the most vulnerable to developing HUS - although perfectly healthy adults can develop it, as well. The illness can cause kidney failure, anemia, internal bleeding and the destruction of vital organs. It can cause anyone to suffer seizures or strokes, or to lapse into a coma. The painful and debilitating symptoms of the illness may last for weeks. About five percent of the people who develop HUS are killed by it. Those who survive often have permanent disabilities, such as blindness or brain damage. E.coli O157:H7 is now the leading cause of kidney failure among American children.Antibiotics have proven ineffective in treating illnesses caused by E.coli O157:H7. Some evidence indicates that treatment with antibiotics actually makes these illnesses worse. At the moment, little can be done for people with HUS, aside from the provision of fluids, transfusions and dialysis. E.coli O157:H7 infections are extraordinarily easy to transmit. To be infected by most food-borne pathogens, such as salmonella, you have to consume a fairly large dose - thousands or even millions of organisms. An infection with E.coli O157:H7 can be caused by as few as ten organisms. The microbe can survive on counter tops for days and in moist environments for weeks. Children have been infected by hand-to-mouth contact, by swimming in a contaminated water park and by crawling on contaminated carpeting at a day-care center. A microscopic particle of uncooked hamburger tainted with the bug is enough to kill you.Although outbreaks of E.coli O157:H7 have been linked to lettuce, alfalfa sprouts and apple cider, cattle manure has ultimately been the cause of most infections. Cattle seem to be the primary host for the microbe; it thrives in their digestive systems without making the animals sick. A recent study of cattle manure at one feedlot found that about 1.6 percent of the samples carried E.coli O157:H7. Given that rate of infection, perhaps five cattle bearing the microbe are eviscerated at a large slaughterhouse every hour. The centralization and concentration of beef processing has spread E.coli O157:H7 far and wide. Steven P. Bjerklie, the former editor of Meat and Poultry, believes that “the structure of this industry is just beautifully conducive to massive contamination of ground beef.” A single large plant can produce 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat daily - and just one animal infected with E.coli O157:H7 can contaminate 32,000 pounds of that meat because of the way ground beef is made today. A single fast-food hamburger now contains the meat of anywhere from forty to one hundred different cattle, raised in as many as half a dozen different countries.During the 1980s, as changes in the meatpacking industry increased the risk of widespread contamination, the federal government cut funding for meat inspections and largely dismantled the public-health infrastructure that tracked the spread of infectious diseases. The Reagan and Bush administrations staffed the USDA - the agency responsible for meat safety - with officials who were more interested in deregulation than in careful oversight. President Reagan’s first secretary of agriculture was a hog farmer; his second was a former president of the American Meat Institute (an industry lobbying group). During those same years, the National Academy of Sciences issued three reports warning that the nation’s meat supply could be spreading a variety of dangerous microbes undetected.Within days of the Jack in the Box outbreak, the chain hired David M. Theno to investigate what had gone wrong and then to fix it. Theno was a scientist who had helped Foster Farms, a family-owned poultry processor in California, eliminate most of the salmonella from its chicken. He was a strong advocate of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points programs, embracing a food-safety philosophy that tried to combine rigorous scientific analysis with common sense. The essence of HACCP plans is prevention; the most vulnerable steps in a food-production system are identified and monitored; stacks of records are kept in order to follow what goes where. Theno created the fast-food industry’s first HACCP plan, a “farm to fork” policy at Jack in the Box that examined the threat to food safety at every level of production and distribution. The company gave him a mandate to do whatever was necessary, whatever the cost. Five years after the outbreak, Theno has emerged as a maverick in the fast-food business, applauded by consumer groups but considered “the Antichrist,” he says, by many people in the beef industry. Theno wants the meatpacking industry to adopt a system of “performance-based grading.” Regular microbial testing would encourage slaughterhouses to install the latest meat-safety equipment, the acid washes and steam vacuums. Slaughterhouses that produced consistently clean meat would receive a grade of A. Plants that performed moderately well would receive a B, and so on. Plants that earn only a C or a D would have to do better or stick to making dog food. The meatpacking industry has not rushed to endorse a grading system based on the cleanliness of meat. Theno thinks the industry’s resistance to microbial testing is a form of denial. “If you don’t know about a problem,” he says, “then you don’t have to deal with it.” He has an optimistic faith that science and reason can halt the spread of E.coli O157:H7. The companies that manufacture hamburger patties for Jack in the Box have to test their beef every fifteen minutes for a wide range of dangerous microbes. “You can fix this problem,” Theno contends. “You can actually fix the whole industry in six months… . This is a matter of will, not technology.” The entire Jack in the Box food-safety program increases the cost of the company’s ground beef by less than one penny per pound. The Food Safety Act, passed in 1996 by Congress, requires that slaughterhouses develop some form of HACCP plan and regularly conduct microbial testing. Those tests, however, will be performed by company inspectors - not federal inspectors - and the results will not be made available to the public. Many USDA inspectors argue that the meatpacking firms have essentially been given the power to regulate themselves. These inspectors warn that under the new privately run schemes, HACCP will stand for “have a cup of coffee and pray.” Ever since the Jack in the Box outbreak, the Clinton administration has sought the legal authority to issue a recall of contaminated beef and to fine the meatpacking company responsible for it. The Republican-dominated Congress, with the support of the American Meat Institute, has consistently refused to grant such powers. “We can fine circuses for mistreating elephants,” Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman said earlier this year, “but we can’t fine companies that violate food-safety standards.”Nichols Fox, the author of Spoiled, has studied the recent outbreaks of E.coli O157:H7 and interviewed the parents of its victims. Fox’s research has left her “a reluctant vegetarian.” She regards the rising incidence of food poisoning in the United States as a form of “just deserts,” the payback for a system that allows a narrow measure of efficiency - the cheapness of food - to override much more important human values, such as a respect for animals, workers and the environment. Steven P. Bjerklie still enjoys a good steak every now and then. But he no longer eats hamburgers. The risks of E.coli O157:H7 were bad enough; the final straw for Bjerklie was learning that the Advanced Meat Recovery Systems - machines that scrape off every last piece of meat - now used at slaughterhouses have introduced pieces of spinal cord and bone marrow into ground beef. He was outraged by the health implications (spinal cord can transmit mad-cow disease) and by the greed (spinal cord should not be sold as ground beef). The meat industry has placed its faith in irradiation as a solution to many of the problems associated with contaminated meat. Bjerklie, however, says irradiation is a means to avoid dealing with the real flaws in the process: “I don’t want to be served irradiated feces along with my meat.” Today, the safest hamburgers in the United States are probably the ones being sold at fast-food restaurants. All of the major fast-food companies have recently adopted some sort of microbial testing. More important, the buying power of the fast-food giants gives them access to the cleanest meat. Jack in the Box now has the ability to trace a shipment of beef all the way back to its source; the USDA does not. McDonald’s will not purchase ground beef that has been made with Advanced Meat Recovery machines - and yet that meat is now routinely sold, unlabeled, at supermarkets throughout the country. Last year, Hudson Beef voluntarily recalled 25 million pounds of ground beef that was potentially contaminated with E.coli O157:H7. Hudson Beef was one of Burger King’s largest suppliers, but an investigation later revealed that none of the contaminated meat was shipped to the fast-food company; it was shipped to supermarkets nationwide. People who bring ground beef into their kitchens must now regard it as a potential biohazard, one that may carry an extremely dangerous microbe, infectious at an extremely low dose.Still, no matter how many steps fast-food chains take to ensure meat safety, no matter how highly automated the grills, the safety of the food at any restaurant ultimately depends on the workers in its kitchen. Dr. Patricia Griffin, the CDC’s leading expert on E.coli O157:H7, believes that education in food safety should be mandatory for people who work in commercial kitchens. “We place our lives in their hands,” she says, “in the same way we entrust our lives to the training of airline pilots.” Griffin worries that a low-paid, unskilled work force composed of teenagers and recent immigrants may not always be familiar with proper food-handling procedures. She has reason to worry. In an undercover investigation last year, reporters from KCBS-TV in Los Angeles videotaped local kitchen employees sneezing into their hands while preparing food, licking salad dressing off their fingers, picking their noses and smoking while cooking. The teenage fast-food workers I met in Colorado Springs told me similar stories. Many workers would not eat the food unless they prepared it themselves. A Taco Bell employee said that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. An Arby’s employee told me that one kitchen worker never washed his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. And several employees at the same McDonald’s told me about a cockroach infestation in the milkshake machine and about armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw in the kitchen every night.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/309759cd37c373d645b9e462f7cc2dfc/tumblr_mf942pkmtq1qkp2xyo1_400.jpg)
