Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

you gotta read this book. read it before the movie comes out. the movie is a drama - this is for real.

"To make matters worse, the animals used to make about one-quarter of the nation's ground beef - worn out dairy cattle - are the animals most likely to be diseased and riddled with antibiotic residues. The stresses of industrial milk production make them even more unhealthy than cattle in a large feedlot."

wait for it...

"the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one - there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit."

there it is.. here is some more..

"At SIS-C slaughterhouses, visible diseased animals - cattle infected with measles and tapeworms, covered with abscesses - were being slaughtered. Poorly trained company inspectors were allowing the shipment of beef contaminated with fecal material, hair, insects, metal shavings, urine and vomit."

"An investigation by NBC News said that the Cattle King Packing Company - at the time, the USDA's largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy's - routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat. Cattle King's facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. Rudy "Butch" Stanko, the owner of the company, was later tried and convicted for selling tainted meat to the federal government. He had been convicted just two year’s earlier on similar charges. That earlier felony conviction had not prevented him from supplying one-quarter of the ground beef served in the USDA school lunch program."

need more? this book is filled with it - give it a read and decide for yourself where and what you want to consume.