Posted on 12/05/2006 10:27:50 AM PST by freemarket_kenshepherd
“Is there a dirty bird on your dinner plate,” wondered CBS anchor Katie Couric as she hatched a brief and biased news item centered around a new Consumer Reports study on chicken.
“Bad news,” “Evening News” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi summed upon the December 4 program. Consumer Reports magazine found that the chicken on your dinner table is “dirtier than ever.”
Alfonsi aired a clip of a researcher for the publication, Urvashi Rangan, complaining about an “astronomical rate of pathogen contamination.” While Alfonsi did concede that the bacteria is killed when chicken is cooked properly, she added that scientists such as Rangan want “more testing” on poultry.
That’s not all Rangan and her employer demand of the poultry industry, however.
A USA Today report by Elizabeth Weise in the December 5 paper quoted Jean Halloran of Consumers Union, which publishes the magazine, saying that more regulation by the government is “beyond overdue” and that the government is “not doing any testing at all.”
It’s not just Rangan’s boss who has an agenda when it comes to the food industry. Far from being a dispassionate scientist, Rangan has a bone to pick with the food industry. In a March 2005 interview with the online environmentalist magazine Grist, Rangan was asked what “one environmental reform” she could “institute by fiat” if she had the power.
In her answer, Rangan complained about the “economics in this country” being “all about the bottom line.” The director of the Consumer Union’s Eco-Labeling Project added that “each hamburger sucks up a half-gallon of gasoline” and that chickens are fed arsenic to get them “fatter faster.” Rangan suggested “tax incentives for companies and people who make better environmental choices.”
While arsenic is administered in chicken feed, it’s not merely to plump up a bird. It also helps to ward off bacterial infection, Virginia Tech’s Susan Trulove noted in an Oct. 10, 2005, item for that university’s news service.
Of course, Rangan is neither a veterinarian nor bacteriologist. According to the Consumers Union Web site she holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in Environmental Health Science and a bachelor’s in chemistry from Boston University.
In contrast to Alfonsi’s brief, unbalanced report, USA Today’s Weise turned to experts at both the U.S. government and the National Chicken Council (NCC) for comment on the Consumer Reports study.
NCC’s Richard Lobb told Weise that the numbers Consumer Reports released are “greatly exaggerated.” “That’s 500 samples out of 9 billion chickens slaughtered a year,” Lobb complained.
Weise also noted that the Consumer Reports numbers are wildly different from previous studies conducted by the government. For example, “A 2005 study by the USDA and National Chicken Council found only 26% of 4,200 broiler carcasses tested were infected.”
No dear, you're on our TV. Well, somebody's TV anyway, not mine.
I'd drop my chicken on the floor and ignore the "ten-second rule" before I'd turn to CBS.
Like your mother told you thoroughly rinse the chicken and cook it properly and you have no worries.
He responded "No, my dear, fish f@ck in it".
I'm trying to think through the economics of this. Unless she is talking about 10+ pound hamburgers, I'm going to have to call BS on this one.
I have never, and will never, watch MSM evening news, but knowing that 25% of the chicken out there is infected doesn't make me feel too good. I treat it all like it is infected anyway.
There may be a punctuation error here. If it is 26 out of 4200 tested, that would be 0.6%, which is a fairly high number, but not a disaster. If it is 26% of 4200 birds, that's 1092 sick birds, and a huge problem.
This means that if gasoline costs a dollar a gallon, there's a cost factor of $.50 in each hamburger, before you even consider all the other costs of producing beef.
And of course, gasoline generally costs more than a dollar a gallon.
This falls into the same category of "If we don't have undocumented workers to pick lettuce, it'll cost $4 a head."
Well, I've been eating it for 60 years and never got sick on it once, that I know of. Of course, if it's underdone, I won't touch it.
If 25% of it is infected, and I never got sick, I must be luckier than I thought. I think I'm gonna play the lottery tonight!
Who was it that was big on "food safety"...Oh yeah, it was Hillary Clinton!
The MSM well knows that the game is to frame the discussion in such a way that it favors their agenda and their candidate.
They would never frame the discussion such that "raw meat, poultry and fish needs to be cleaned and properly cooked."
Even more unlikely than never is to frame the issue that "the individual is personally responsible for what he eats and does with his body; and parents are rewponsible for what their kids eat."
(don't here confuse their concept of responsibility with their concept of freedom.)
A dozen posts under this title and no mention of Dan Rather? You're slipping, folks....
I like to eat hal cooked chicken wrapped in raw spinach from California.
So then the relevant information would be how often chicken is not cooked properly (and I guess, eaten raw). But that info is not provided. Why is that?
No mystery. That would be the consumer's mistake, and these people are only interested in issues that they can pin on Big Bad Business.
They would never frame the discussion such that "raw meat, poultry and fish needs to be cleaned and properly cooked."
Big Jounalism frames the discussion to favor their agenda. And their agenda is that Big Journalism is more important to you than the people that put food on your table are.You can trust CBS News. Everyone else is out to kill you. </sarcasm>
Is Dan a raw chicken or a cooked goose?
Love, Ivan
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