Can we stop using these products?
Glue made from cow’s blood is widely used to make plywood.
The cow’s nasal septum is processed into chondroitin sulfate, an alternative medical treatment for arthritis.
Extracted protein from horns and hooves goes into foam for fire extinguishers.
The root gland of the tongue yields pregastric lipase, which is used in cheese production as a curdling agent.
Tissue from the small intestines becomes catgut for racket strings or surgical sutures.
And, of course, cowhide becomes leather shoes or sporting goods. According to “Scientific Farm Animal Production,” a 1998 textbook, one cowhide can yield about 144 baseballs, or 20 footballs, or 18 soccer balls, or 12 basketballs.
British inventory of uses The most extensive inventory of the uses of cow parts was completed in 2000 by the British government, which held an inquiry into mad cow disease and its human counterpart, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, in the United Kingdom.
That inventory documented that cow heads, meat, organs, blood, hide, feet and fluids made their way into a variety of human food, pet food, animal feed, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and industrial uses.
“Indeed, it has been said, and not altogether facetiously, that the only industry in which some part of the cow is not used is concrete production,” the inquiry reported.
Even that is no longer true. France and Switzerland now allow incinerated meat and bonemeal to be added to cement, according to the London Sunday Telegraph.
“Until the latter half of the 20th century, the only major uses for beef byproducts were leather and soap and candles,” wrote author Verlyn Klinkenborg in the August 2001 issue of Discover magazine. “But given an extraordinary spike in beef consumption after World War II, as well as a parallel explosion in industrial diversity, cows were suddenly fractionated right down to the molecular level.”
Though most byproducts go into animal feed, there is perhaps no more miraculous use of a cow than in pharmaceuticals.
Many health products Heparin, an anticoagulant used to thin blood, comes from a cow’s lungs and intestines.
Epinephrine from the adrenal gland can treat hay fever, asthma or other allergies, or stimulate the heart in the event of cardiac arrest.
Catalase, a liver enzyme, goes into contact lens care products.
Cholesterol, which is used to make male sex hormone, comes from the cow’s spinal cord, a tissue at high risk for containing prions, the rogue protein that causes mad cow disease.
Vaccines, he noted, are grown in fetal calf serum, not central nervous system tissue.
But the preapproval process doesn’t cover dietary supplements, which are regulated as food, not drugs.
So supplements such as Brain 360, which are 360-milligram tablets of raw cow brain concentrate made by Illinois-based Atrium, face less stringent regulations.
Limits on supplements Banning potentially dangerous dietary supplements isn’t easy under FDA food regulations. The FDA’s recently announced ban on ephedra, for example, took place only after the herbal supplement was linked to more than 100 deaths.
“On something like bovine brain, the law says they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that people have died as a result,” said Jean Halloran, a food safety expert with the Consumers Union.
Lumpkin said foreign-made supplements are governed by import laws, which restrict the importation of supplements made from ruminants such as cows. But U.S.-made supplements face no such restrictions.
“We’re going to have to look at companies sourcing domestically,” he said, adding the agency will act against sellers of food “to the extent it’s not fit for human consumption.”
Cattle byproducts also find other ways into the human food supply, largely through the use of gelatin, which is created by treating bones with acid. According to the 2000 British government report, 60 percent of gelatin is used in food preparation. The rest is used to coat tablets, bind chemicals to photographic film and other nonfood uses.
Take a simple example of pie a la mode. The pie crust probably is made with gelatin. The dollop of ice cream probably contains gelatin for a binder. In addition, the sugar for the pie filling may have been bleached with cow bone.
Other gelatin-based foods include jelly beans, marshmallows and, naturally, instant gelatin.
Plenty to render, recycle Only about half of a beef cow ends up in the meat case, according to the National Renderers Association. The castoffs from beef production — 35 million cattle slaughtered annually — would quickly overflow the nation’s landfills if they weren’t rendered and recycled.
So the humble cow continues to yield fertilizer from dried blood, buttons from hooves, neat’s-foot oil from shin bones and toothpaste from fats. Even the lowly gallstone is exported to China, where it is thought to have mystical values, according to “The Meat We Eat” (Interstate Publishers, 1994, 1,193 pages).
