Mad Cows = Mad Consumers!

Last year I went vegetarian for about 5 months..but I just couldn't do it...well now I'm beginning to rethink that action. This is because the USDA cannot uphold it's regulations and the FDA is promoting cloned meat.
Not long ago the USDA announced the biggest beef recall in American history recalling 143 million pounds of tainted beef. This meat was harvested from "downer" cattle that were kicked, shocked, and dragged to the slaughter house...can we say ewww!...The tainted meat was also found in the California Correctional Facility in Susanville, California. But, what the USDA isn't telling you is that 49 states may have actually purchased the contaminated meat, yet a complete list of buyers is only available in California. In other words, we could be eating this bad meat and not even know it. Obviously, with this kind of attention critics are going to begin probing, looking for flaws. This time their job was easy b/c lurking just below the surface are several problems with the USDA regulations.
First, they haven't learned from the past. The record breaking recall comes on the heels of last years huge e-coli and salmonella outbreaks. Not to mention there were 21 other beef recalls last year. There is no reason this should be repeating itself. Even more shocking, however, only 20% of all imported meats are inspected and less than 1% of seafood and all other frozen foods are even looked at before being stocked on grocery store shelves. Meat for pizza is inspected every week but the cheese for these pizzas are only inspected once every ten years. Because of this 76 million people a year fall ill from food born illnesses, 325,000 of them have to be hospitalized, and over 5,000 die. Not surprisingly, this comes in conjunction with the fact that inspections have dropped. The USDA housed 12,000 inspectors in 1978, now we only have 7,800. Unannounced inspections have dropped from 22,000 a year to under 15,000 a year. With the USDA only having 20% of food responsibility but getting 76% of the budget, there is no reason for these numbers to be so low. But, the USDA is not solely at fault, they only inspect the food, it is up to the FDA to actually recall it.
The FDA passed initiatives recently to allow cloned cattle meat to be sold. Grocery stores, like Kroger, have refused to sell the meat b/c of the risk to consumers. The FDA has of yet to answer questions or solve safety problems. They do, however, refuse to eat the meat themselves. Why should we trust the meat when the government agency promoting it refuses to eat it? They do admit though that there are serious risks b/c you can't tell the difference between meat being harvested from a cloned animal or the meat itself being cloned. This means that if the animal's health records aren't accurately kept diseases will be transmitted to others.
These things make me really wonder just what we are putting in our bodies...I'm seriously rethinking the whole eating meat thing..but I shouldn't have to...we should be able to trust governmental agencies enough that these problems aren't even here.
Either way, this is disgusting!