An open letter to the Minneapolis School Board: At your board meeting today, you will be discussing the continuation of your policy to not purchase irradiated beef for the school lunch program. I urge you to continue your support of a ban on purchasing irradiated beef. The decision to date by the board is the right one and I would be very concerned if irradiated beef became a part of school lunches.
Without knowing the true health impacts of irradiated beef, irradiation is being pushed by the powerful beef industry as a quick fix to the industry's lack of safe meat production. Meat contaminated with deadly bacteria (and mad cow disease, which irradiation doesn't fix) is the unnecessary result of the way cattle is raised and the way meat is processed. If we fixed these problems (and they are very fixable, but I don't expect the meat industry to do it anytime soon), we wouldn't be faced with the choice of buying unsafe or irradiated beef. If the District can't buy safe beef (whether to avoid e-coli infection or mad cow disease), it shouldn't buy it at all. Kids don't have to eat beef for lunch and there are plenty of healthy substitutes for the protein and iron benefits beef offers. There is much written about the practices of the beef industry that put us all at risk of infection and disease (see links below for a very short list) and I support your decision to date to not purchase irradiated beef as part of the lunch program. But banning irradiated beef may not be sufficient to ensure our children eat safe meat at school. I ask you further to consider a study into the safety of beef and other meat purchased for the Minneapolis lunch program and to explore whether the District should consider an alternative, organic meat purchasing policy. http://www.foodsafety.gov/ http://www.madcowboy.com/01_BookOV.000.html http://www.prwatch.org/books/madcow.html http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/GregerBSE.cfm http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1230-13.htm Jeanne Massey Kingfield resident with a child at Barton Elementary REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
