Add Louisiana to the list of state and local governments around the United States that are forcing homeless people who look to shelters and soup kitchens for meals toward an all processed food, junk diet.
The former Mayor of New York City, otherwise known as Nanny Bloomberg, famously banned food donations to homeless shelters, even from charities donating freshly cooked traditional foods that had long-standing and excellent track records.
Now, the Department of Health and Hospitals in Louisiana has ordered the privately funded Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission to dump 1,600 pounds of venison donated by Hunters for the Hungry into garbage bins. It seems the state would have be more comfortable if the hunters had donated this form of venison instead!
Yes, just as ridiculous!
Here’s the kicker. The staff was also instructed to split open the packages of meat and pour Clorox on them as an “extra precaution so that animals would not eat it from the dumpster and become sick or die.”
Wild animals getting sick from eating what they’ve always been eating … wild game? What planet are these bureaucrats living on?
While there would have been good reason for this order had deer in the area been found to have some sort of infectious illness or the meat itself was tested and found to be tainted, the fact is that there was no good reason for this order.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with this meat.
It is simply another case of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats running amok and crazed with their own power, barking out orders to privately run organizations and law abiding citizens.
It seems that health authorities would rather homeless people be eating drug residue laced meat from sick animals confined on filthy, disease ridden feedlots than from healthy wild game freely roaming and eating natural forage.
Henry Martin, executive director of the mission, said that the staff has been serving deer meat for years in dishes such as deer chili and deer spaghetti.
“This was really good meat. It’s high in protein and low in cholesterol. It’s very healthy.”
Martin continued by saying that he was extremely concerned about the way state health inspectors handled the situation. No due process was followed. They just ordered the meat to be destroyed and that was that.
Martin said that the rescue mission serves 200,000 meals a year and not one cent comes from the state or federal government. He estimated that the senseless confiscation resulted in as many as 3,200 healthy meals being lost.
“It seems like this was a senseless act, I don’t think hungry people who come to our mission appreciate the fact they could have been eating some really good venison and as it is now — no one can eat it.”
Louisiana State Rep. Jeff Thompson, a hunter himself who has personally donated deer to this mission before, was outraged.
“You hear about these stories anywhere and it’s a concern — but when it happens in your own backyard it’s insulting.”
Thompson said that he intends to meet with the heads of the state agencies along with state lawmakers over the incident. He said that the meat should, at the very least, have been returned to the hunters who donated it.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Sources: Health Dept: Homeless Can’t Eat Deer Meat
The soup kitchen in our area gets venison meat from state inspected facilities that must receive the deer within two days of being shot. Neat thing is, they mix with 20% pork lard, and the soup kitchen says folks can’t taste the difference!
Does a state food inspector’s waist measurement need to equal or exceed his height to meet state employment requirements, or is that just a coincidence?
My dictionary defines the word “sociopath” as “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
I would say these state appointed authorities were acting in a very anti social way and behavior, destroying perfectly good food for no particular good reason.
Sadly, Today, In the land of the free, Sociopaths are elected by a dumbed down population into Government positions where they then appoint their sociopathic acquaintances to positions of power.
If I had been there I would have said to these sociopaths NO.
We all should be saying NO more often.
Sure it’s an outrage, but it make perfect sense. Sorry, but the time has come to wear the badge of conspiracy theorists and rehabilitate the term: they want us dead or sick – which makes more money for them. How else can you explain all this?
Actually, it’s conspiracy FACT.
so why not donate to another homeless shelter so we destroy perfectly good food,this country wastes so much sad
That is just outrageous! Not only is it depriving the homeless of healthy meals, but it’s such a disgusting waste of venison. I feel bad enough that animals have to die for our food (I am a reformed vegetarian!!), but for them to die senselessly and have their meat thrown out just makes me so sad…
This whole thing just makes me sick and disgusts me.
Let me first say, I agree and have benefited from Sarah’s blog–I like her practical and down to earth advice. For instance I’m taking cod liver oil now, and trying to get my kids on it too (still trying).
I totally see how people here would, on the face of it, see nothing wrong with eating wild deer too–since it is in nature, etc. But, let me throw out a differing opinion, and perhaps it saves/helps someone from getting a mysterious/frightening brain wasting disease–mad cow. This info is not widely known (and I’m sure Louisiana officials have no idea–I’m not siding with them for their reasons), but what if deer happen to be highly susceptible to catching an unnatural disease from their interactions with each other and farm animals?
Sarah, if you read these comments, you seem intelligent, and diligent. Look into this. Here is a link to get you started.
http://www.outdoorlife.com/articles/hunting/2007/09/mad-deer-disease-can-venison-kill-you
I’m with the Weston Price ideals, paleo ideals, mercola ideals– I fuse all 3, but you don’t want to get mad cow. It cannot be cooked away. Prions aren’t alive. Perhaps it is misdiagnosed as Alzheimers, since the symptons are similar (eats holes in your brain). Mad cow isn’t just for cows, it also infects sheep (in England, called scrapie), and people (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease).
Unfortunately, all meat products aren’t tested for it in the US, (perhaps 1 in a 1000? perhaps less). I believe in Japan they test ever cow, or used to. Yet even with the very lax testing in the US, they still find an odd dairy cow with it every now and again–and that is ok, because it didn’t enter the food supply. But would you, given the choice, be delighted to know you’ve been drinking the milk from a cow with mad cow disease, and whose milk was mixed in huge vats with 100 other cows milk?
I like this sites skeptism and not taking everything the gov says for truth blindly. Don’t believe mad cow has been eliminated from conventional farms, and don’t think that deer could never pick it up by their interactions first with these cows & pastures, and then with each other. The gov will not be of any help here, as they use trade embargos and pressure against other countries that have banned US beef (like Taiwan, Japan) for the reason of mad cow.
I knew a woman who suffered and died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; it was confirmed by biopsy and then the $30,000+ diagnostic tool had to be destroyed because there’s no way to sterilize away prions, because, as you mentioned, they aren’t alive to kill. Her symptoms weren’t terribly similar at all to Alzheimer’s. But hey, there aren’t many diagnosed cases of C-J out there so who knows? Maybe more people with Alzheimers actually do have C-J. Or maybe the just have Alzheimers.
Yes, one of the big problems is the cost to diagnose–once someone has passed away, how many families are willing to go through the expense to do this? I’d be curious what were the symptons of this woman who suffered through that? If you ever donate blood, also you will read that you are disqualified if you ever had C-J disease, or even a brain procedure, because, as you say, it can be transferred even from the stainless steel instruments. Quite scary.
It’s about who owns me, and who decides what I am permitted to eat.
I totally agree with you, and think the same way. I purchase raw milk (luckily it is legal in CA), and got angry when it was taken off shelves for 2 weeks because a few people who got sick had it their frig (it was never linked). But I made this comment more as an education which we are more and more required to do ourselves, instead of rely on the government. It is a lot of work to educate yourself on the potential problems of a kind of food (like deer meat), when you have a full time job and life. I hope that my comment will save others time on that quest, and if anyone finds out differently, I’d be happy to cross off this concern when looking at healthy meat choices. By the way, if the government were to offer these poor people normally raised (CAFO) beef/pork/chicken, I believe that is better to skip the meat altogether anyway.
If this homeless shelter did not receive state or federal funding, how does the state have jurisdiction? It would be no different if a restaurant owner had meat donated to them and they served it in their restaurant. A confiscation of the said product wouldn’t be applied until proper testing and/or an illness was reported.
Give a man some venison and he’ll eat for a week…give him a gun and teach him how to hunt, and he’ll become independent of the system. And, we all know that is not part of the program.