Good books

I recently read a book called "Reefer Madness". I could never remember the name of the author but he also wrote the famous "Fastfood Nation" which I have not read yet.

Here I just wanted to summarize a few facts that I found incredible or horrible from these books.

Although I have not been enlightened by the Fastfood Nation, I saw a short interview with the author in the Supersize Me DVD. One fact struck me so hard from that interview. A beef patty in a MacDonald hamburger could contain meat from over 1000 cows! The author talked about the potential of mass food poisoning, but I was thinking of the mad cow's disease. I used to be a big beef person until last summer, when I stopped touching any beef product for fear of mad cow disease. Granted there was only one cow found to be positive in the US, and that cow seemed to have originated from Canada. Granted my chances of dying from mad cow disease is probably lower than dying from a plane crash. I do not wish a death from mad cow's disease. Anything but neurodegenerative diseases please.

After talking to a few people who are intellectuals but are not in biological sciences I realized that many people have no idea what mad cow's disease really is. Cooking doesn't get rid of the prion, which is the causing agent for mad cow's. I don't know if autoclaving would work, but I'm sure no one would want to eat an autoclaved steak. You also have no idea of kowing whether you have it or not before the symptoms begin to show, and it could take a decade before they do. I could already have it now from my years of beef consumption.

I am not saying that everyone should be as paranoid as I am and stop eating beef. Most of my friends, scientists in biology who are fully aware of the danger, still enjoy beef. There is always some deadly threat out there as long as you are alive. However, a scientifically informed government should not allow a practice of food preparation that seems tailor-made for spreading mad cow's. If one of the 1000 cows used to make that whole shipment of burgers were sick, the tens of thousands of people who eat the burgers could get sick. If it were food poisoning, a small percentage of these people will die from it, whereas most people will be very sick for a number of days in the hospital. However, had it been mad-cow's, all of the people who contracted the disease (not all the people who ate the burgers), will die. There is no cure. There is not even a way to supress that disease yet.

I wonder what the government's action would be should there ever be a proven case of mad-cow outbreak. It would be a huge blow to the economy if everybody gets scared and stop eating beef, and ironically, because of that, lots of people will get scared that the government may not tell us the severity of the outbreak. If that happens, we wouldn't even know about it until years after the beef was consumed.

I do not have a solution to the problem. As usual, most of our current social problems come from over-population. I have already discussed the over-population problem in my essay on abortion. The only way out is for people to find other goals in life that means as much to them as making children. In Taiwan there is currently a concern of an aging population due to lowered reproduction. The government is trying everything to encourage people to have children. I think that is foolish. Let the population drop and you might have some economy problems for one generation, but that will pass and the result would be worth it. From my own experience living in Taiwan, the island was ~3X more crowded for individuals to be comfortable. I think encouraging reproduction is like, say, drinking poison to quench the thirst.

I didn't mean to devote so much room on a book I haven't even read. But now that I did, Reefer Madness would have to wait till the next post.