Choose Healthy Holiday Beef

For many people the holidays aren't complete without beef gracing the dinner plates. But controversy swirling over the impacts of conventional beef production—and its country of origin—can make meal-planning more difficult.

Conventional beef cattle are routinely given growth hormones and fattened on feed sprayed with pesticides and laced with antibiotics. There's mounting evidence that bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics in cattle feed, and that the drugs are contaminating the environment, making their way into local waterways and soil. What's more, now-defunct Topps Meat's September 2007 recall of nearly 22 million pounds of ground beef for potential E.coli contamination lends little comfort to shoppers worried about meat safety.

Also of little comfort is concern over BSE, or "mad cow" disease. Some American beef products have been temporarily banned in South Korea because producers here continue to use feed containing bone meal, which increases the risk of transmitting mad cow, and in May 2007, the tenth mad cow case was found in Canada. Both instances cast doubts over food safety and our own country's ability to screen for the disease.

While it might not guarantee perfectly healthy beef, country-of-origin, or "COOL," labeling, which now appears on seafood, promises to tell consumers the origins of beef, but the Bush Administration has pushed off regulations for meat. However, the political tide is turning. This year's Farm Bill, already passed by the House of Representatives and currently being debated by the Senate, includes COOL labeling for produce, beef, lamb, pork and peanuts. Such labeling wouldn't cover grains, and with spiraling demand for organic feed comes questions about grain sources from overseas—including China. "Their regulatory system is not built on transparency or the ability to do surprise inspections," says Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation. Scowcroft notes that concerns about the integrity of this organic feed have prompted some companies to travel to China and verify that the grain they're using is, in fact, grown organically.

Moreover, beef from cloned cattle could hit store shelves soon, but questions remain about animal welfare issues associated with the process. The Center for Food Safety notes that cloning can result in the deaths of cows, high percentages of failed pregnancies and ongoing health problems for the clone.