Cows have friends in high places (Hopp)
April 29th, 2008 | Published in Animals, Food, Quotes, Politics
Cows must have some friends in high places. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary. Apparently it is more important to protect the cows than the people eating them. Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.
—Steven Hopp in Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 230.