What The Beef Is All About

The Age

Tuesday July 15, 2003

BRIAN COURTIS

Television preview: The Cutting Edge: Modern Meat

So you cannot imagine anything more scary, gruesome or nauseating than turning on Channel Nine's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation tonight? Well, once dinner is out of sight and mind, turn to SBS TV and see just what you might have missed.

Its plat du jour is not for the queasy of heart or stomach. Modern Meat, the Doug Hamilton documentary sizzling on the grill for this week's The Cutting Edge (8.30pm, SBS), presents us with the full horror of the happy meal, the barely credible and questionably edible realities of our favourite fast food, the hamburger.

Hamilton's report, based on American journalist Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, was produced for the highly regarded PBS Frontline series and is not simply another wowser rant on behalf of the massing vegans. It is not just another spoilsport, biodynamic, tofu-pushing, waistline-checking assault on takeaway treats; more a serious warning to consider where our food is coming from.

Modern Meat is, however, one of those pieces that will send the kids reeling back with yelps of ``too much information". Perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate the analysts haven't yet moved in on the Aussie meat pie.

Every Tuesday morning, a team of American health professionals gathers in the ``war room" of the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta to collate America-wide reports of food-born illnesses.

What fun this gathering must be. If there are 2000 step-dancing competitors in Colorado being sick on stage, or 70 children in Iowa suddenly feeling poorly after school lunches, Atlanta will decide whether it is a local, national or bigger problem.

As Hamilton shows, these doctors, scientists and food experts battle to prevent poisoning from meat contaminated with bacteria. And it seems that the speed and demand of meat processing and handling are making their checks for the big enemy, E.coli 0157:H7, increasingly necessary.

There are 5000 deaths a year in the US attributed to food poisoning in meat. One in four Americans suffer from food poisoning. Many children are among its victims.

As horrific as the facts are, it is what we see behind the scenes tonight that will probably most alarm those of us who still relish a burger. Watch them at the ``disassembly plant" blend together 2000 pounds of lean meat and 2000 pounds of fat to make 4000 pounds of burger, which contains parts of hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-biotic pumped cows, and your appetite will surely start to falter.

See where those poor cows come from, a city of manure with a feedlot providing them with corn, and you will even think twice about going for the sesame seed buns.