Safe Beef, Luxury or Myth?

Almost anyone who eats meat, especially beef is asking themselves, "How safe is it?" When we're sick for 24 hours we call it "stomach flu" but the experts more correctly link it to tainted food—mostly meat. The ridiculously poor oversight of the meat industry has threated my very core of happiness. I mean, I never imagined that a forklift full of beef could ever bring tears to my eyes in a bad way.

I'm not naive, I know that you've got to kill a lot of cows (or pigs) to fill the empty grills of America. Heck, I need the ribs of at least two dead cows to lovingly finish with my special BBQ sauce after the smoker. The problem is, I don't want to be serving up animals that can't walk to their own slaughter—it just seems unsafe somehow.

The USDA has issued assurances that this most recent violation was an isolated incident, coincidentally uncovered on the day the Humane Society decided to plant a camera at the Hallmark/Westland meat packing house. Afterall, USDA (or FSIS) has the same dilligent inspectors (who failed to catch this singular incident) at every other slaughter it oversees. So rest assured, but pack your kids' lunch if you can afford to, since school lunches depend on meat from these suspect factories.

The USDA also asserts that most of the suspect meat from this plant has been eaten already and with no serious incident reported. Of course even if a thousand kids got sick to their stomach, it is not an unual thing. Still, somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand people die in the USA from gastrointestinal illness and the bulk of it is from unknown causes, so who's to say it isn't bad meat?

All I'm thinking is that the rules are there for some reason, presumably health-related. If I don't have assurance that the beef was handled according to minimal guidelines, I don't think I'll take my chances—even by following the handy cooking and handling proceedures stickered to every raw meat package. Call me pathic but I want to be able to eat my meat red and still count on being able to clean my grill the next day. Sure I drink a couple of beers with my steak but I checked, and the alcohol in beer doesn't kill the stuff I'm worried about.

In truth, I buy my meat mostly from suppliers who boast of their humane treatment of their livestock before it becomes dead. However, I've been known to occasionally eat out and that is even more terrifyingly risky. I not only have to rely on the process from slaughter to delivery, I also need to know that the people preparing the food are doing so in the safest possible manner. I am not really a man of faith.

So, USDA and Beef Council (whoever you are) be advised: I demand safe, quality beef that has been humanely raised, properly handled and can walk on its own. Use forklifts to carry the meat once it's packed into nice little boxes and not on animals that are still alive. But, it's not enough to tell me that this is what you are doing, since you've already lied to me. (Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.)

PROVE IT! Or, expect me to learn to grill eggplant.

Respect for the Devil

It was still dark when Henry, proud to be keeping to his program, took his bike into the first section of Panhandle Park. The park is a single block strip between Oak and Fell. It runs from Baker on the east to Stanyon on the west. There are two paths, the Oak street path's for pedestrians only and the Fell street path for bikes and pedestrians. None of this matters very much to the point, except that along the paths the park is split with an intersection at Masonic Street. It is at that intersection that the story actually occurs.

Up to Masonic, the ride was nice. It was early but there were a few joggers and a guy or girl with his or her dog. But, basically the park was empty and the shared purpose path was clear—from Baker to the crosswalk at Masonic. Even though it was dark, the crossing at Masonic was well lit. Henry saw the police car, sure he did. He saw it slide to a lazy stop halfway through the crosswalk.

"Nice," Henry thought to himself. Somehow it bothered him more that a cop was breaking the law.

This is where a man who grew up in south central LA might have played it smarter. Or, a kid on a skateboard would have stepped off his board and waited for the cop car to move on. But, a forty two year old white guy, who grew up in a mostly white suburb, has been cheated by the system, without the benefit of a street education on the police. Okay, the occasional "yes sir" from the citizen and "have a nice day" from the cop exchange that comes with a traffic ticket but not the real encounters police seem to thrive on.

"I should run into it," Henry thought, "right into the fender." Instead, he swerved in front of the police car, onto part of the crosswalk the car had left open.

"Cyclists need to obey traffic laws also," came a voice from the PA system in the police car.

It was the use of the word "also" that pissed Henry off. It carried the assumption that the police car was somehow obeying the law while stopped halfway into a crosswalk. It was also the fact that Henry was crossing legally, with the light on his side, and from any perspective he was obeying traffic laws.

"Fuck you," was what he said in response. Again, not the response from anyone with realistic police experience but the response from someone brought up on right and wrong, civil liberties and other trappings from a seventies education in California.

Obviously, the correct response would have been to yell, "sorry" or "okay." Maybe no response would have been accepted. "Fuck you," was absolutely the most incorrect response but somehow felt exactly correct in the situation—when a cyclist has to swerve to avoid a car in order to legally cross the street.

"Fair enough," Henry thought the cop would think. "I am in the wrong. My police car was illegally blocking this cyclists right of way," the cop would realize this and think "he called me on it and we'll leave it at that."

What Henry didn't imagine was that the cop had spent the morning putting a stop to all serious crime and had already restored the city to order. So, now with time on his hands, he had nothing more pressing to do than to drive up onto the grass to continue the encounter.

As it seemed, he didn't have anything better to do and the cop pursued Henry, by car, into the park. Turning on his red cop lights and scary cop siren. (Although clearly the siren was overkill on an empty park path.) The car tires dug into the damp grass, tearing a mud path through the grass on either side of the asphalt path. As Henry dismounted, the slightly younger-than-him cop bailed out of the driver’s side. For a moment the cop seemed startled, probably at Henry's age, as he would have been expecting only a younger person to be so obviously at odds with the law. He quickly recovered as he approached Henry, a hand menacingly tipped against his nightstick (or whatever they call them).

"I ought to smash your face in," came the less-than Adam-12ish police greeting from the less-than Martin Milnerish man in uniform.

Henry glanced inside the police car but was dismayed to see that the police partner was busily occupying himself with something—anything that might happen in the opposite direction. No doubt he wouldn't be much use as a witness, should his partner slip up on civil amenities. Add to this the fact that there were no real people anywhere in sight and a man could pretty much sum up his chances as zero if a crazy cop decided to hand out his own justice for crimes real or imagined.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," the red-faced cop continued. "A man your age who doesn't have respect for the badge."

Henry didn't say anything but he certainly didn't respect the particular guy wearing the badge. You might fear any street criminal who was threatening you but no one would consider respect a valid choice. "Really," Henry thought, "what is there to respect in this situation?"

"I ought to beat the shit out of you," the officer continued. "You make me sick."

There was a delightful silence and then the cop seemed a little more rational. "Maybe I should just write you up," the cop yelled but in a lower voice than before, "let me see your license."

A few things crossed Henry's mind at this point. One, that you don't need a license to ride a bike. Two, a cop can legally hold you if he can't identify you. Three, even if you don't break the law, a cop's word is gospel in a court with only a judge—everyone knows that. And finally, that he didn't have his license with him.

Now that the prospect of a beating seemed to go away, the silent partner's glance from the passenger seat turned to the situation. Henry decided that he might be able to bend low enough to appease this cop's fragile ego by bruising his own. Still, bruised egos repair faster than broken bones.

"Look, I'm sorry." Henry spoke in a low calm tone. "I was startled and yelled without thinking. I didn't mean anything and shouldn't have said what I said."

The cop seemed to relax a little. "You're damn right you shouldn't have. You're lucky I didn't kick the shit out of you to teach you some respect for this badge."

The cop briefly rested his hand on his gun to remind Henry that a beating wasn't the only thing at risk when you don't "respect the badge." But then, his blood sugar seemingly reduced to normal, the cop simply got back in his car and backed out across the grass and into the street.

Henry remounted his bike and resumed his ride toward Golden Gate Park. The remainder of his sixty-minute bike ride wasn't pleasant though. He kept thinking back to how helpless he felt when confronted by this criminal wearing a badge. Thankfully, he had now formed a protective opinion of the police that he had simply previously ignored. Now, when he passed a black guy with baggy pants down to his knees, he could imagine himself saying, "What's up brother?" Despite, if he actually ever did say it, the likelihood of a snicker from the other man.

E.W. Waits

E.W., a man who went by his initials for the obvious reason that he hated his first name and found his middle name a poor substitute, hopelessly checked his watch again. He was sure that the “Transit 511 Online Muni Schedule” showed the number 21 Hayes buses running eight minutes apart. Even if you assumed today to be a widely unknown holiday but one yet recognized by the city’s transit authority, it would be hard to explain a thirty minute wait. Well, hard unless you rode this particular bus line regularly. Clearly, the official frequency schedule was less a hard and fast objective and more a foggy average of sorts. Using a pen and paper to jot down the total number of buses in a day, dropping out the extremes, the “out of service” units and counting buses clumped together as individual vehicles (even if the near-empty ones failed to stop for passengers), one could just about calculate a mean somewhere near the published frequency—if you tried hard enough.

Certainly, other cities with complicated transit systems had managed to plan and schedule for the moving of riders from one place to another in a reasonably predictable pattern. Since he knew nothing about the inner workings of a metropolitan bus and rail system, E.W. was given to his own musings on how it might all work. Perhaps a man or woman (or committee) would suggest a certain number of buses be allotted to a route, maybe going so far as to favor the heavier traveled times with more buses and cutting back somewhat on the less heavily traveled times. Once the frequency was agreed upon and the decision to treat 3:00 AM ever so slightly less favorably than 8:00 AM, the task might be as simple as placing buses on the streets. Perhaps convincing the drivers to leave the various start/end points at pre-specified times instead of “at will” or based upon an indecipherable random formula. Recognizing that driving a bus in San Francisco might require some down time, the schedule should include a reasonable break at either end. (If drivers actually need thirty minutes to clear their thoughts, scheduling twenty would seem more whim than wisdom.)

True, seven buses had passed in the opposite direction, heading “outbound” and would presumably make their way back. However, as refreshingly assuring as their presence was, their current destination and the end stop of the line was about two miles away and they would not likely be seen for another forty minutes—at minimum. No, it was on some yet unknown bus and driver that E.W. and his employer were relying—joined together in some sort of silly, unpredictable work schedule made all the more serendipitous by the whisper of a bus transit plan. The seven empty buses heading up the hill, could be headed toward any number of matching buses heading in just the opposite and much more desirable direction. Perhaps these “inbound” buses were just over the crest, hiding for just the moment until their sparking power poles rise into view. It couldn’t hurt to step into the street for another look. Optimism aside, at some point there would have to be a payoff. At some point in time, when E.W. stepped from the curb, he would see that next bus a mere eight stops up the street. But for now, his freshly lit cigarette seemed safe from the gutter.