Food...

The Wall Street Journal reported on March 13, in their article Meatpacker Admits Ailing Cattle Used At Slaughterhouse that the head of Hallmark/Westland Meat Company in Chino, CA, the site of the much-publicized downer cow video, admitted that his employees had treated cows inhumanely but that “those cows. . .weren’t slaughtered for beef.”

Steve Mendell, president of Hallmark/Westland was presenting to the House and Energy Commerce Committee from the witness chair and watched the video of downer cows being pushed into “kill boxes” to be slaughtered for the first time—he said he’d never seen the video before and first learned about the inhumane treatment when a reporter contacted him.

From the fact that Mendell didn’t appear before the Congress until subpoenaed to his hedging while on the witness stand (first he said that it would “be logical” that the “downer cows went into the nation’s food supply” and then said they could have failed to pass inspection and not make it into the food supply) it’s evident that we still have a lot to discuss about how our cows are handled and exactly who knows what. (For more information, the WSJ article has a good overview of the key events in the recall.)

Photo credit: The Farm Sanctuary Campaign, www.nodowners.org.