Animal Tagging To Be Required in US + Lab Meat Update

For all of you who are dreading possible National ID tags, and think life might be easier as a chicken, in the US at least, if you were to get your wish, apparently you might still be out of luck. All animals in the US are to be given ID tags through the NAIS legislation, says NoNAIS.org.



Just what is NAIS? The USDA's National Animal Identification System. According to the site's webmaster, Vermont farmer, Walter Jeffries, NAIS is harmful to small farmers, homesteaders, pet owners & consumers. All Americans who own any animals whatsoever will be required to tag them. This includes homesteaders with very small numbers of animals, as well as any and all pets owned by everyone in the US.

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PBS has pictures of lab grown meat (which look huighly unappetizing) plus an online survey to see if people would be willing to eat lab-cultured meat. They say that most tissue that has been engineered is from frog and goldfish stem cells.

Fowl Flavours in Your Meat?

If you think your burger tastes crappy, you might be onto something - some Canadian livestock producers are feeding utter crap to their animals. But the CFIA is on the case.

CFIA is short for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. And the CFIA's fine inspectors are today reminding all livestock producers not to feed of any form of poultry manure (including poultry litter) to livestock as this is still illegal in Canada. (It's legal anywhere else?!?) The Canadian CFIA originally published information on the ban in December of 1998, as "Information Note on the Feeding of Poultry Manure to Cattle". Apparantly that didn't stop some livestock producers and the CFIA has since "successfully prosecuted several producers who kept feeding animals destined for human consumption fowl feces. Yum! Somewhat reassuring is the fact that the agency's follow-up inspections have found a significant decline in the use of poultry manure as a feed ingredient.

ID Protection Entrepreneur in Litigation for Having Stolen Father's ID

LifeLock, a company that offers an anti-identity theft service consisting mainly of calling credit bureaus for you to put in fraud alerts in case your credit cards or other ID gets stolen, may not be as squeaky clean as its ads lead you to believe.

Today on dataloss a reference to the BNN article led me to an investigative article by Ray Stern in the Phoenix New Times about Maynard's shady crooked past.

According to BNN (Blogger News Network) Robert J. Maynard Jr. has a very questionable background, including convictions while he was running a credit-repair company that was was shut down by authorities in the early 1990s for false advertising and deceptive practices.

Forced closure means that a US federal court order banned Maynard from working in the credit-repair industry — forever. He isn't supposed to be running a business like LifeLock, the hot new anti-identity theft company, based in Tempe, Arizona.

Stern also unearthed information showing something interesting: Maynard Jr. is apparently lying about having had his data stolen. But, Stern's article says that Maynard did steal his own father's identity at one point. His dad, understandably, is no longer speaking with him and is litigating.

Nice.

Whatever good things I said in any previous columns about LifeLock - disregard them - get out while you still can - who knows what a guy who'd steal his own father's data will do with yours!

LifeLock has ads in many major mainstream media outlets and a very slick professional looking web presence. I recollect covering LifeLock in this column, at one point. The company's web presence was particularly shiny. Shiny as in too slick.

I figure, get out now and save your data while you still can. and if you're thinking of using the company - read Sterns article, that I've linked above - and see what you think!

I would not be touching this with a ten foot pole. Not even a 100-ft. pole, come to think of it.

Update: Melamine in the Food Chain

A least one North American manufacturer of a pet food ingredient is using melamine in their product. Melamine is a plastic and is not edible but has been used by Chinese manufacturers to jack the apparent protein content of their grain products. Chronic ingestion of melamine can cause kidney and bladder stones lading to bladder cancer. It was found to be recombining with another toxic ingredient,which is a pool additive, cyanuric acid, also being added for the same reason:unscrupulous profit, with no regard to safety. Together, the 2 compounds become toxic synergistically, causing kidney failure in some animals including cats and dogs, through the formation of crystalline structures in the kidneys.



two forms of cyanuric acid



melamine







melamine and cyanuric acid molecules forming bonds







If it is being used by one North American plant, are they the only one? Time will tell, but I do wonder where else the plastic will show up next.

Pork From A Petrie Dish - Brave New Meat

The Globe and Mail's article today about Dutch scientists attempting to plate out meat, the way others plate out microbes, reminded me of this bizarre research which we covered sometime last year or the year before. I'd have to check our script archive to see the precise date this came up. We didn't do much on it - just a mention, and also that the edible mammalian tissue the scientists are growing doesn't have blood vessels.

I've plated out organisms in biology class. You grow the critters on a medium. There are different types of this substrate you can grow things on. Many of you will have heard of agar as a medium. It's a protein rich gelatin derived from seaweed (which isn't having the best time of it, lately). Not every critter can be grown on the same stuff. The medium you use in your petrie dish amounts to food for the growing organisms - usually single celled creatures, but you can grow fungus just as well.

And so I am wanting to know what the culture medium is, what elements go in to produce this so-called meat. What are they putting in to the growth medium?

Will the finished labmeat have the same B-12 content as normal meat? B-12 is a necessary nutrient found only in meat and to some degree in some yeasts. B-12 helps us make blood cells, which you need if you are going to keep breathing - not enough and you can get anemia. Of course the blood cells also carry other nutrients. If it has no blood cells then will it have any B-12 or iron at all? Iron is another thing that is found largely in meat. The heme form of iron is found in animal tissue - the non-heme form is found in vegetables and is harder to access. I know this from bitter personal experience as an anemic. I had tried to cut back on meat consumption but it didn't work - at least for me.

Being curious, I did some poking online and found a very interesting site, called VAT FOOD, which has various articles on growing meat in the lab, in a vat or via plate culture. This last linked article is from Popular Science. The site has articles from all manner of media outlets. It's pro-lab meat, there doesn't seem to be any questioning of what nutrients will be in the chewy in vitro veal etc. but worth a read.

In the scarily named journal Tissue Engineering" there is a paper entitled In Vitro Cultured Meat. It's all about the different ways in which the different kinds of skeletal muscle tissue can be grown. The easiest to culture are myofibres - these are the fibres muscles are composed of. Such a cultured meat product would resemble hamburger.

I'm not so sure this is what the doctor ordered for anyone with celiac disease, (which can cause anemia), or anyone with any other type of anemia.

Of course anything is possible. But how likely remains to be seen.

The work comes out of some of NASA's stuff on providing protein for space travelers. It's not really completely 'cruelty free' they use stem cells form the animals to engineer the meat. Read more about it here. The scientists working on culturing meat in vitroh ave said that nutritional profiles of meats could be improved by tweaking the nutrients that are added. But the stuff still has to come from somewhere - the added nutrients and the myofibre's cultural media. Some of them have formed their own non-profit company, called board members.

I wonder what farmers think of this plan for 'brave new meat' It doesn't look as if it will solve the dilemma of the remaining family farms. How sustainable is this lab meat? There will be nutrients needed. The lab meat does not come out of nothing.

Click here to see more on the problems with factory farming versus family farms and modern heavily profit-driven agricorp processing of meat and dairy production.

Space Shuttle Atlantis Set to Blast Off on ISS Repair Mission

All systems are almost go for Space Shuttle Atlantis to launch. They're off to the International Space Station on June 8th. ARead more about the mission here. There's been some trouble with previous attempts to unfold the all solar arrays panels. They literally got stuck together the last time and failed to unfurl. This meant the cables that are meant to pull the arrays taut came off their pulleys, leaving the solar array hanging.

But this time the astronauts have a backup plan. Two of them will assist the arrays in unfurling.

You can check out the shuttle launch online.