Where’s the Damn Beef?
The World Trade Organization has been a point of contention for me for years. Literally, years. I might find their practices questionable from time to time, but at the end of the day I generally think they mean well. But, they’re fucking with my meat now.
The WTO’s new policy is to undo the Country of Origin labels on beef products sold stateside. I might not worry completely about where my food comes from most of the time; hell, I didn’t stop buying beef after that pink slime nonsense. But, these labels aren’t a bad thing. Every month we hear about something terrible going on with our food overseas. Manure water on our cabbage, mad cow infested steak, shit covered bananas. Whatever. If I read that beef from Canada could contain something terrible, I’m going to avoid that beef. We avoid toys from China with lead paint, and honestly this is worse. You might ingest a toy covered in lead paint, but beef only has one real purpose. To be delicious.
The Made in China debate we have around here should be playing into this. We’re so up in arms about determining where our products are from, why don’t we care about what we eat? When I moved to the town I live now(a very liberal thinking, liberal loving town) I started to branch out into my world views more than I did when I lived in my American Dream hometown. I recycle actively, eat mostly organic when I can afford it, listening to a metric fuck-ton of NPR. I understand the free world trade stuff. I love that I can go to an Asian food market and buy food directly from the country where the label says it’s from. I like knowing everything about my day-my friends know full well how OCD I am about the details of my life-and this WTO announcement makes me want to avoid all store bought meat and just stick to local butcher shops.
If you have any story ideas, questions or just something you wanna holler. Hit me up.
-theangrynerd