Eat Shit and Die

He sits in a swivel chair, the space around him cramped with books, papers, and generic dishevelment. Mitchell's protest sign hangs in a prominent place, but apparently his patients don't notice it. "Only one person said anything. I know if I walked into a doctor's office and saw a sign saying 'Ban chicken feces in cow feed,' I'd sure ask about it."

Asking about it has taken up a lot of the doctor's time lately. He guesses he spends "about 10 or 20 hours per week" researching, e-mailing, and calling folks about the topic. Luckily he takes rejection well, an advantageous trait for a prophet of doom.

He even seems to relish telling stories concerning the media's disinterest, gleefully recalling that after he carefully explained the matter to Herald features editor Joan Chrissos, "she connected me with Georgia Tasker, the gardening editor!" A laugh explodes.

This isn't Mitchell's first foray into controversial subject matter. He previously wrote The Dragon Option, a "factual fiction" in which global warming causes subglacial Antarctic bacteria to be released into the atmosphere after thousands of years under ice. Disaster ensues. His other book, Syphilis as AIDS, theorizes that the organism responsible for a long-ago strain of the former disease is related to that which causes the latter.

Mitchell has contacted some 65 media outlets about feces-filled feed, as well as pet food companies, health organizations, and the top four beef conglomerates. His e-mails are exceedingly lengthy and excruciatingly thorough, the gist being a listing of "AAFCO-approved and FDA-nonregulated ingredients" permitted as legitimate animal food, followed by half a dozen questions including whether live cattle on the company's grounds are given feed containing any of the itemized ingredients, whether vendors who supply cattle to the company use such feed, and how the company's certification process operates — if it even has one.

Mitchell's most ambitious and ironic correspondence was the one he sent to Mr. Chen, "first secretary of the commercial section, agricultural officer, the Embassy of the People's Republic of China." The 10-page e-mail included 80 related links. "Given the recent concerns over consumer safety and health issues, and the importance of these issues to world trade between nations," he queried, "what is the People's Republic of China's opinion on the United States cattle industry practice of feeding chicken feces to cattle?"

Mr. Chen did not reply. Nor has anyone else. "Which," laments Mitchell, "is a statement in itself." He also allows that "maybe people think it's some sort of hoax."

The shit has hit the fan: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta now estimates that foodborne illnesses affect 80 million Americans annually. Over 300,000 require hospitalization, and roughly 5,000 of them die — more than the number killed since the war in Iraq began.

Who's in charge of the hen house?

Chickens get packed into vertically stacked cages so that droppings from the top row bespatter the birds underneath, and their feces foul the fowl below, and so forth. The government's bureaucratic chain of command concerning inspection and regulation of our food supply works according to a similar trickle-down theory.

At the top of the pecking order are the USDA and FDA. George Hayslip, environmental manager of Florida's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, has been supervising the state's commercial feed and seed programs for the past six years. "The FDA is responsible for overseeing human food and animal feed," Hayslip clarifies. "The USDA has responsibility for inspecting the animals."

Neither agency endorses waste in feed, but their policies are to resist regulation unless a shipment crosses state lines. Manure, though, rarely travels that far, because transport costs would undercut the price advantage. Farmers now place chicken coops on one side of the road and cow feedlots on the other, so they can simply shift the shit across the street.

Florida laws are likewise laissez-faire. "As far as the department goes, we don't condone it," Hayslip says of using processed plop. "But at the same time, we don't prohibit it. It's something that's gone on for a long time, and as much as you can run into problems with parasites and things like that, I guess the science isn't really there to say that if the litter is processed correctly, it's going to cause that many problems."

But isn't it incorrect processing that leads to the problems? "Yes, exactly, and that's an issue. We've looked at this over the past several years and considered whether there was anything we could do about it." The department "sent out a fact sheet a couple of years ago, outlining some of the risks involved with that practice."

Hayslip mentions an interim rule the FDA put forth in 2004 that would have prohibited use of poultry litter, among other things, owing to BSE-related fears. "Unfortunately," he continues, "the proposed rule was not adopted." Instead the onus for imposing such restrictions fell to the states.

Plop.

The FDA and USDA may relieve themselves of responsibility like top-row fowl, but they really have more in common with the foxes guarding those coop dwellers.

The USDA increasingly uses "risk-based inspection," in which visits are determined by the safety risk posed by each plant. Now it is pushing to inspect only plants with past violations, permitting the rest to submit records by fax — a drastic deviation from the "continuous government inspection" once required of meat-processing facilities.