Rachel Laudan

An older but interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about how Brasilian beef carcasses are dismembered for the global trade. Nasal cartilage goes off to Hong Kong for soup, diaphragm fat goes to France for stroganof, and heart valves end up as shish kebab in Peru.

Shouldn’t these facts be taken in to account in the recent flurry of chat about meat eating in the United States? It’s not enough to talk just about the United States. My goodness, where does all the spinal cord in Mexico (for the glorious sopa de medula) come from? Or sweetbreads in Argentina (for those glorious parillas).

It’s a global world. And the bits of the American beef carcass that we Americans don’t want, just like the old clothes we don’t want, are a major export business.