|
Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
billybrobby
Joined: 09 Dec 2004
|
 Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:33 am Post subject: What happened to the American beef critics? |
 |
|
Vegetarians are known for frequently criticizing the state of American agribusinesses. And rightly so, as far as I'm concerned. But now, on this board, people are pretending that American beef is sweet manna from heaven. Have we gone crazy?
Maybe my facts are wrong, but aren't these cows stuck in cruel, tiny pens all day long and fed the remains of other dead cows? Don't they live in deplorable conditions? Does nobody care about this?
Are we all so caught up in American nationalism that we fail to see the horrible way that these agribusiness corporations treat these animals? Are we grouping together like senseless cattle? Can we not find it in ourselves to be like Koreans and fight against the powers that be? |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
MANDRL
Joined: 13 Oct 2006
Location: South Korea
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:41 am Post subject: Re: What happened to the American beef critics? |
|
|
| I'll take it you have never had a double-double from In-n-Out. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Bibbitybop
Joined: 22 Feb 2006
Location: Seoul
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 1:02 pm Post subject: |
|
|
US farmers aren't allowed to feed the cows other cow parts anymore.
I'm not a vegetarian, but your post mentions corporations and I know you are expecting this from me:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0602-01.htm
| Quote: |
Published on Sunday, June 2, 2002 in the San Francisco Chronicle
On Corporate Responsibility: A Ronald McDonald Fantasy
by Paul Hawken
McDonald's April 14 "Report on Corporate Social Responsibility" is a low- water mark for the concept of sustainability and the promise of corporate social responsibility. It is a melange of generalities and soft assurances that do not provide hard metrics of the company, its activities or its impacts on society and the environment.
While movements toward corporate transparency and disclosure are to be applauded, there is little of either in the report.
This is not a report about stakeholder rights, as McDonald's would have one believe. It is a report about how a corporation that's been severely stung by bad publicity, poor service and declining earnings now wants to plead its case to its critics. It states that critics don't want to make things better, but it ignores what their critics care about.
The McDonald's Social Responsibility Report presupposes that we can continue to have a global chain of restaurants that serves fried, sugary junk food produced by an agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies, standardization and destruction, and at the same time find a path to sustainability. Having worked in the field of sustainability and business for three decades, I can reasonably say that nothing could be further from the idea of sustainability than the McDonald's Corp.
The report states, "being a socially responsible leader begins a process that involves more awareness on the issues that will make a difference." Yet the company has known for decades that the food it serves harms people, promotes obesity, heart disease and has detrimental effects on land and water. On May 1, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report stating that childhood obesity and related diseases had doubled in the past 10 years, specifically citing high-fat fast-food as a cause. Addressing that one issue would make a difference.
McDonald's has known about the harmful effects of its food just as the tobacco companies understood the impact of their products. Yet McDonald's has done little to modify its menu.
It is good to see ideas about materials and reduced waste being promoted by major corporations. But it is equally important to distinguish among corporations that offer progressive rhetoric but don't change their internal practices or impact on society and the environment and those that actually do. If corporations can make more money by using less stuff, less waste, less pollution, so much the better. To be sure, McDonald's has made progress on recycling, but the underlying nature of its corporate activity has not changed and the larger impact of these underlying activities is dramatic and troubling.
For McDonald's to announce that it now wants to have antibiotic free chickens is a slap in the face to the thousands of small poultry farmers who could not compete and were forced out of business by the agricorporations that introduced the very industrial chicken-raising practices that required antibiotics to avoid massive die-off of their flocks. Simply stated, standardized food destroys agricultural and biological diversity. Nothing could be more antithetical to the recovery of over-stressed farmlands than fast-food.
It is important that good housekeeping practices such as recycled hamburger shells not be confused with creating a just and sustainable world. McDonald's publicly embraces "sustainability" as long as it can make money and it doesn't change its purpose, which is to grow faster than the overall world economy and population, and to increase their share of the world's economic output to the benefit of a small number of shareholders.
The question we have to ask is: "What is enough for McDonald's? Is it enough that 1 in 5 meals in the United States is a fast-food meal? Does McDonald's want to see the rest of the world drink the equivalent of 597 cans of soda pop a year, as do Americans? Do they think every third global meal should be comprised of greasy meat, fries, and caramelized sugar? They won't answer those questions because that is exactly their corporate mission.
A valid report on sustainability and social responsibility must ask the question: What if everybody did it? What would be the ecological footprint -- the impact on the natural world -- of such a company? What is McDonald's footprint now?
The report carefully avoids the corporation's real environmental impacts. It talked about water use at the outlets, but failed to note that every quarter-pounder requires 600 gallons of water. It talked about recycled paper, but not the pfisteria-infected waters caused by large-scale pork producers in the Southeast United States. It talked about energy use in the restaurants, but not in the unsustainable food system McDonald's relies on that uses 10 calories of energy for every calorie of food produced.
An honest report would tell stakeholders how much it truly costs society to support a corporation like McDonald's. It would detail the externalities -- the societal and environmental costs not counted in corporate annual reports and accounting documents -- borne by other people, places and generations.
Unless the core values of the company are to nourish and protect children, you cannot make the supply chain sustainable because the final outcome is destructive to life. McDonald's corporate initiative is best described by the poet Henry Thoreau: "Improved means to an unimproved end."
McDonald's view McDonald's Corp. was invited to comment on its report but declined the offer. To read the report yourself, click on http://www.mcdonalds.com/corporate/social/report/index.html
McDonald's factoids
1. McDonald's spends more on advertising than any other brand in the world.
2. It runs more playgrounds than any other private entity in the world.
3. It gives away more toys than any other private entity in the world.
4. The Golden Arches are more widely known in the world today than the Christian cross.
5. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's said this: "We have found that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry. The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization."
6. The vast majority of workers at McDonald's lack full-time employment, do not have any benefits, have no or little control over their workplace, and quit after a few months.
7. The average American now consumes three hamburgers and four orders of french fries per week.
8. Due in part to the industrialization of agriculture driven by the fast- food industry, the United States is losing farmers so fast that it now has more prisoners than farmers.
9. Every month, 90 percent of the children between 3 and 9 in America visit a McDonald's.
10. In a survey of 9 and 10-year-olds, half of them said they thought that Ronald McDonald knew best what kids should eat. In China, kids said that Ronald McDonald was kind, funny, gentle and understood children's hearts.
11. McDonald's uses a computer program called Quintillion that uses satellite imagery, GPS maps and demographic tables to automatically site new restaurants. As one observer noted, McDonald's uses the same equipment developed during the Cold War to spy on their customers.
12. McDonald's jobs have been purposely de-skilled so as to be able to hire minimum-wage workers on an interchangeable basis. One-third of fast-food workers speak no English.
13. McDonald's and other chains are aiming for automated equipment that will require zero training and are nearly there. Nevertheless, they fight hard to retain hundreds of millions of dollars of government subsidies for "training" their workers. A worker has only to work for 400 hours for the chain to receive its $2,400 subsidy. In essence, the American taxpayer subsidizes low wages, automation and turnover at fast-food chains.
14. Fast-food pays a higher proportion of minimum wage to its workers than any other industry in America.
15. McDonald's is the largest purchaser of beef in the world.
16. McDonald's buys from five large meatpackers. These companies have gained a stranglehold over the industry (just as in potatoes) that has driven down prices. Over the past 20 years, 500,000 cattle ranchers have gone out of business. Over that time, the rancher's share of every beef dollar has fallen from 63 cents to 46 cents.
17. To satisfy and take advantage of the worldwide growth of fast-food, the large chicken and beef packers in the United States are buying out local companies all around the world. Cargill, IBP and Tyson's control the world meat industry because of fast-food chains.
18. Chicken McNuggets were also cooked in beef tallow until public outrage caused McDonald's to stop. Even in vegetable oil, Chicken McNuggets contain twice the fat per ounce as a hamburger.
19. Every time you eat a hamburger, you are eating anabolic steroids, antibiotics and fecal matter. You can read it again. And it will still be true.
20. Feedlot cattle are also given shredded packaging, cardboard boxes, cement and sawdust to put on weight.
21. In 1991, only four states had obesity rates of 15 percent or higher. Today, 37 states do. Fifty million Americans are obese or super obese. Obesity is second only to smoking as a cause of mortality in America today.
22. The annual health costs to America stemming from obesity are $240 billion. The costs are exactly double fast-food chain revenues.
23. Between 1984 and 1993, the number of fast-food restaurants doubled in Great Britain. Obesity doubled there over the same period.
24. The EU found that 95 percent of the ads there encouraged kids to eat foods high in sugar, salt and fat. The company running the most ads aimed at children was McDonald's.
Source: Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation," (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). The book is extensively footnoted with citations for the above.
Paul Hawken is the author of "The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism." He is the founder of the Sausalito-based Natural Capital Institute and is on the advisory board of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Bryan
Joined: 29 Oct 2007
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 1:08 pm Post subject: |
|
|
What happened to them? Those wackos are still around. It's just that most people don't care about cows because they are retarded animals that literally shit and piss on each others heads without noticing. I personally care about my health, nutrition, and pleasure over the well-being of a cow I've never met before.
It's somewhat different from dog meat, where dogs are intelligent creatures with a prefrontal cortex. Also, cattle are slaughtered as quickly as possible, unlike the way dogs are tortured in Korea. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ramen
Joined: 15 Apr 2008
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 1:24 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I love my beef steak.  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
d-rail
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: Gangnam
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 2:54 pm Post subject: Re: What happened to the American beef critics? |
|
|
| billybrobby wrote: |
Vegetarians are known for frequently criticizing the state of American agribusinesses. And rightly so, as far as I'm concerned. But now, on this board, people are pretending that American beef is sweet manna from heaven. Have we gone crazy?
Maybe my facts are wrong, but aren't these cows stuck in cruel, tiny pens all day long and fed the remains of other dead cows? Don't they live in deplorable conditions? Does nobody care about this?
Are we all so caught up in American nationalism that we fail to see the horrible way that these agribusiness corporations treat these animals? Are we grouping together like senseless cattle? Can we not find it in ourselves to be like Koreans and fight against the powers that be? |
if someone has never been to a farm they might think this from what they see on tv, but my dad was a beef farmer and my unkle is. the majority of the day the farmers will let the cattle graze in the field. farmers know that if the cows get some walking exercise they get more meat per head. during feeding time of course the cattle will often me herded into the barn. if there are any dairy cows they spend much more time in smaller pens, and i think that is what most of the public thinks about when they think of beef farms. they dont know the difference between a dairy farm and cattle that are headed for the slaughterhouse. the animals arent treated like your dog or cat, but they arent treated totally bad. keep in mind that their purpose is consumption and their lives are pretty short. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
browneyedgirl
Joined: 17 Jul 2007
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:31 pm Post subject: Re: What happened to the American beef critics? |
|
|
| billybrobby wrote: |
Maybe my facts are wrong, but aren't these cows stuck in cruel, tiny pens all day long and fed the remains of other dead cows? Don't they live in deplorable conditions? Does nobody care about this? |
No. The ranchers in my state and surrounding states lease land (thousands of acres) from the state and let the cows graze (where they eat tumble weeds and wild grasses). If you like Angus beef, it probably didn't spend its life in a little pen.
Dairy cows (in my state) usually don't graze and are kept all in one smelly area. If someone is being cheap and using bad feed it's usually a dairy chain.
There are some dairy chains that are putting in giant waterbeds for the cows to rest on, and they are trying to improve what they feed the cows so they can charge more for their milk.
Dairy calves used for veal are kept in horrible, cruel conditions but most people don't eat veal because of the price. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
BS.Dos.
Joined: 29 Mar 2007
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:54 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Korea, unfortunately, appears to want it both ways; industry protectionism and free trade/FDI, but as we all know, you can't have both. I think it'll go one of two ways; either the Korean dietary habits will succomb to 'hoofs, lips and assholes' in a bun, probably because of market saturation aimed at kids or, Korea will dig in like the French did and tell Ronnie in no uncertain terms that he isn't wanted on every street corner.
The good news however, is that that other fascist American corporation, Starbucks, has announced the closure of 600 stores, which certainly gives me something to smile about. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Gollywog
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Debussy's brain
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
BS.Dos.
Joined: 29 Mar 2007
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:45 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| edit. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
5600
Joined: 07 Apr 2008
Location: At an undisclosed FEMA camp.
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 5:09 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| I don't care about how cattle is treated. I dont wear Crocs. I dont listen to Phish. I dont care about CO2 levels, My carbon footprint is 6 miles wide. If they torture cows, treat them bad or whatever, so be it. It's a f'n cow. It doesn't pay taxes, doesn't hold an elected office, doesn't do anything but stand around. Kill the thing and eat it. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
oskinny1
Joined: 10 Nov 2006
Location: Right behind you!
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 5:43 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| 5600 wrote: |
| It doesn't pay taxes, doesn't hold an elected office, doesn't do anything but stand around. |
Sounds like most people on this board. I guess there is more imported meat for the Koreans to protest now (with a hell of a lot more diseases). |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 6:05 pm Post subject: Re: What happened to the American beef critics? |
|
|
| billybrobby wrote: |
Are we all so caught up in American nationalism that we fail to see the horrible way that these agribusiness corporations treat these animals? Are we grouping together like senseless cattle? Can we not find it in ourselves to be like Koreans and fight against the powers that be? |
It seems to me that if Koreans were genuine about protesting meat consumption and horrible industry practices, they would start at home.
| Quote: |
Korean livestock farmers spent 0.91 kilograms per one-ton of livestock in 2002, which is about three times more than the Japan's 0.35 kilograms, according to a report of the Korean Animal Welfare Association.
The use of antibiotics was followed by the United States with 0.14 kilograms, New Zealand with 0.04 kilograms, Denmark with 0.04 kilograms and Sweden with 0.03. The association conducted the survey with the support of the U.K.-based civic group, the World Society for the Protection of Animals. |
But, Billyrobby, this is about politics and protectionism. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Gollywog
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Debussy's brain
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 7:28 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Ummmm, you missed this quote, Kuros:
| Quote: |
Economics of Giving Antibiotics to Animals
The Korean Animal Welfare Association (KAWA) said in its report that the unclean, enclosed and artificial environment for livestock requires farmers to administer various medicines. |
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/special/special_view.asp?newsIdx=5376&categoryCode=180
You ever get the feeling that Koreans, especially the Korean mad kow kritics, like to accuse the other party of exactly what is wrong with Korea?
Or is it that they assume that everyplace else is like Korea, only worse, that the U.S. is MORE crowded than Korea, dirtier, and Americans lie like Koreans, only worse?
Well, it ain't. And America's streets, sidewalks and parks aren't covered with litter and garbage, either.
If you want to show your students what America looks like, perhaps those cow photos would make nice wallpaper for your computer, or a screen saver. Just download the photos into one file, go to the screen saver setting, choose "my pictures," find the file, and that's it. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Dome Vans
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:36 pm Post subject: |
|
|
5600 wrote:
| Quote: |
| doesn't do anything but stand around. |
I'm no Bill Oddie but I'm sure I've seen them sit down as well. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
