The Atlantic
By James McWilliams
For all the environmental angst being expressed over livestock, we rarely mention its counterpart: deadstock. Most of a slaughtered farm animal cannot be transformed into edible flesh. About 60 percent of it — offal, bones, tendons, blood, and plasma — becomes abattoir waste and, as such, has to be either recycled or disposed of. Despite our earnest efforts to better understand our increasingly complex food system, deadstock reminds us that the highest costs of food production are often hidden in places we rarely venture as we track our food’s journeys from farm to fork.
The livestock industry in the United States produces 1.4 billion tons of waste every year. Ranchers, butchers, and slaughterhouses have traditionally sent carcass remains to rendering plants. Relatively cost-effective and environmentally efficient, these operations — comprising what’s often called “the silent industry” — have efficiently recycled the unsavory by-products of meat production, as well as downer cows, road kill, and euthanized cats and dogs, into a variety of commercial products (such as animal feed, soap, lard, candles, and “personal care products”). All things considered, rendering plants, although by no means without problems, have kept deadstock mercifully out of sight and out of mind.
But rendering plants have fallen on hard times of late. Mad cow disease, which was first identified in the U.K. in 1986, has led to costly regulations that rendering plants have passed on to their customers. In 1997, it became illegal in the United States to feed the remains of a dead ruminant to a live ruminant, thus eliminating one of the industry’s largest markets: cattle feed. Read Full Article »
Posted in Opinion/Editorial
