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>Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001.

Saw a Dirty Jobs segment some time ago in which a Nevada pig farmer picks up all the waste from several casinos' buffets, hauls it out to his farm, hand-picks the plastic and other inedible crud out of it, liquefies it, steams it to kill off some of the bacteria, then feeds it to his hogs.

My first thought was that it was pretty clever of him to find a near-zero-cost source of food for his pigs. Then I thought a while longer and realized that those buffets serve a whole lot of pork. Some of which goes uneaten and into the trash... he's turning his pigs into cannibals! And then slaughtering them and selling the meat to the buffets. "Better eat that bacon, boy; three generations of pigs gave their lives for it!"

Pigs are omnivorous and naturally eat carcasses of other pigs or in the case of packs of wild boar, sometimes even kill other pigs to eat them. Feeding pigs with food containing bits of pig meat (like human food leftovers) is not ideal but it's not a very serious situation.

Cows, on the other hand, are herbivores. Their digestive system cannot properly handle animal protein and this can have disastrous consequences. BSE, aka. mad cow decease is a symptom that is caused by feeding cows with animal protein, in particular from other cows. This decease is not caused by a bacteria or a virus, but a wrong kind of protein that ends up in the brain.

BSE has nothing to do with a digestive system that can't handle animal protein. After all, the human digestive system handles animal protein just great, but we can catch BSE by eating contaminated food even so.

Humans can get BSE (or Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease) from eating contaminated meat, but the meat gets contaminated in the first place because cows or other animals eat protein that they can't handle and produce misfolded proteins called a prions.

Is there any evidence that the misfolding occurs due to the inappropriate digestive system? I've never heard of this, and some quick searching around shows nothing of the sort.

Pigs are safe from BSE, so feeding pigs pig meat has nothing to do with BSE.

Of all the animals, I get the feeling trying to regulate what goats or pigs eat is going to be a loss. Pigs have been used as "garbage disposals" for a long time by many groups. There is a decent historical reason for some religions to ban the eating of such animals. Parts of the Old Testaments are after all a health manual for their time period.

Is there a health concern from pigs eating pig meat, or is it just something that seems gross?

My understanding is that it increases the risk of an infection spreading - any agent that survives the slaughter/cooking process could infect a much larger number of animals. See the BSE epidemic we had in the UK a number of years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

I saw that episode but never thought about that part. Waiter! I'll have the eggplant tartine today.

> "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001."

I think this came in the aftermath of the Mad Cow Disease that affected the UK in the mid-'90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...). I know that UK does not necessarily mean Europe, but nevertheless, that was really huge no matter where in Europe you happened to live, it showed that an entire industry could vanish over night just because of bad industry practices.

Prions absolutely terrify me. Primarily because they are so difficult to kill, er.. destroy. They are basically the zombies of infectious particles.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080701/full/news.2008.926.ht...

Alzheimer and other dementia are also probably the result of an a priori prion-like phenomenon.

I'm interested to see someone else take this stance. A large part of my PhD is based on ideas relating to this, but it's not a (currently) widely held train of thought. Are you involved in this area at all?

I recall an article a year or so back that implied that Alzheimer’s could be transmitted between mice if certain proteins were moved from a ‘sick’ mouse to a healthy one. I cannot recall the authors or even the journal, but I am sure you read it, if it was of relevance in any way.

Here's the paper: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/3/1024.full.pdf?sid=c461...

Open-access version: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575082/

Mad Cow Disease did not hit only the UK (France, for instance, was also significantly hit). But anyway, for this kind of regulations, it is definitely at the European level and it is quite likely MCD is the reason for it

UK was hit worst, but other european countries were affected as well. I was pretty young when that happened but I still remember the images of piles of cow carcasses being burned on the open field.

The MCD was the reason to ban feeding animal proteins to cows. Before MCD it was common practice to feed ground animal (cow) bones and leftovers from the slaughterhouse to cows.

I did some work with a guy who was asked to figure out how much accelerant was needed to burn a pile of cows. I knew burning them was a last resort, I hadn't figured that it was actually hard to do.

There's a lot of water in animal bodies. I guess it's like trying to light a log of very wet wood, if not worse.

> For the other regulatory practices mentioned in the article, especially washing chicken carcasses, I'd like to see more detailed evidence of the safety trade-offs involved in the practices of the United States and of Europe.

There was the relatively recent story in Forbes[1] (HN comments at [2]) about the difference in US/UK treatment of eggs, where the UK standard is to leave them unwashed to protect a natural anti-microbial coating, and the US policy is to wash and artificially disinfect them (at the cost of removing the original coating)

There are some similarities there, and I'm curious about whether the additional cleansing steps are necessary, or part of a process optimisation that allows for more variation in the cleanliness of incoming birds (ie: permitting a faster/messier slaughter or whatever)

The alternative, that it's something like the ammonia used to kill dangerous pathogens in 'recovered meat', is (IMO) more of a concern.

Purely speculation on my part though.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-ame...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325540

I'd lean more toward your second comment. One of the comments on the previous HN coverage inferred that leaving the eggs unwashed was so that dirty eggs would never make it to the consumer -- thereby encouraging farmers to keep a cleaner chicken coop.

This is going to be a bad post because I'm not where I can look up and provide links to the supporting material, but from what I recall the cleansing of eggs also had to with different egg distribution models between the US and UK.

No, the different distribution model (refrigerated in the US, not so in the UK) is because washed eggs have to be kept cold, while unwashed eggs do not.

As far as I can tell, the only reason for the US clean-disinfect-keep cold regime is that it ensures consumers get pretty-looking poop-free eggs -- and, as a not inconsequential byproduct, don't accidentally get bird poop and its assorted nasties into their food.

The fact that you have to qualify your comment with your links to farmers puzzles me. I mean, I understand why you did it, but it's puzzling to me that attitudes are such that you need to. The Brave New Antibiotic-Resistant Apocalypse will hurt farmers just as much as the rest of us, after all.

The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current situation is causing a tragedy of the commons. The commons in this case is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Every individual farmer is better off if they use non-medicinal antibiotics than if they don't, but they're all collectively better off (along with the rest of us) if none of them do. In short, the current market is forcing them to act in ways that are bad for humanity. If I were a farmer, I'd seriously dislike that, and lobby for laws that made it possible to do the right thing.

You'd be right, if farmers were free actors.

For poultry farms, farmers are essentially sharecroppers. They are paid a fixed fee to grow chickens owned by Tyson/Perdue/etc.

For beef farms, ranchers birth and keep cattle for a specific period of time, at which point they are sold to feedlot operators. The feedlots have thousands of cattle are where many of the nasty issues with disease/etc come from.

Farmers are not very politically powerful anymore. The next layer up in the agribusiness chain can control pricing and have all of the power.

Surely the same argument applies - mass agri-business can see the coming apocalypse too.

Sorry, you'll need to speak up. I can't hear you over next quarter's share price hitting the floor.

I said "You will have to merge your agri-business with the daily delivery of fresh food to my house, making around 20x the profit on your produce if you capture the end to end market"

Hell, I agree but there has to be some solution - look at Mr Money Mustache. I know what he says is sensible. But I still have an unaffordable mortgage (my kids need a good school!) and buy lattes each day (I like them)

This is just exactly the same thing.

You know what, I like a Nanny state. I need more Nanny.

Sorry, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I'm here to do something for you.

Excuse me, my shareholders are calling me.

No, that's the bell, tolling

:-)

Except that farmers are also addicted to the hormones and other supplements that cause animals to grow larger and quicker, which in turn requires antibiotics to deal with the subsequent infections. Modern agriculture is on a downward spiral of alternating new practices with needing to mitigate health effects.

This American Life had a great TV episode on modern pig farming that I highly recommend watching on this subject. I believe it's this episode titled Pandora's Box:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-31gON1Ius

It's not a qualification, he's establishing his credibility and impartiality in the discussion.

This has nothing to do with "farmers". Cow 'production' uses only factory workers now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Ranch#cite_note-post-9

"Cow 'production' uses only factory workers now."

I suppose I should ask the folks around here (ND) about that line. On second thought, I am pretty sure they would have some words for me.

Feeding cows chicken litter isn't a big deal, it's not just chicken poo, but the uneaten or spilled food, the bedding material, and pieces of feathers. Runoff from chicken litter causes a lot of issues for rivers and streams, and it can't always be used for fertilizer. Feeding it to cows to improve their mineral uptake, it has about the same caloric value as hay, and it's higher in protein.