You gonna eat that...things we feed cows...

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/12/cow-feed-chicken-poop-candy-sawdust

Chicken sh-t: What's not to love about the fecal waste of America's 36-million-plus broiler chickens? It's plentiful and cheap. But according to a recent OnEarth story by Brad Jacobson, the problem may be less the poop itself than the smorgasbord of other substances it frequently comes with, including feathers, heavy metals, bacteria, antibiotics, and bits of rodents. Jacobson also notes that the practice could promote the spread of mad cow disease.

A central California cow tested positive for mad cow disease.

As we’ve previously noted, the government’s policy is ensuring additional cases of mad cow:

The government is so protective of the current model of industrial farming that private citizens such as ranchers and meat packers are prohibited from testing for mad cow disease, and even investigating factory farming may get one labeled as a terrorist, even though a paper in the American Society of Microbiology’s newsletter mBio shows that overuse of antibiotics by factory farmers creates “superbugs”.

And the government allows cows to be fed animal parts, which causes mad cow:

[Cows] are fed parts of other animals, which can give them mad cow disease.

Well-known food writer (and meat-lover) Michael Pollan gave a must-read account of modern beef practices in the New York Times in 2002:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/mad-cow-found-in-california-because-cows-are-being-fed-blood-animal-parts-and-feces.html