Nature & Animals Quote by Ann Veneman

Safety gets staged here as certainty, and the staging is the point. Ann Veneman’s sentence is built like a press conference barricade: “fact of the matter,” “all scientific evidence,” “based upon what we know.” Each clause piles authority on top of authority, not to advance knowledge but to contain anxiety. The careful narrowing to “muscle cuts” (not organs, not processing, not “downer” cattle, not cross-contamination) is a classic governance move in a food scare: concede complexity elsewhere while carving out a consumer-friendly zone of normal life. Keep buying steak. Keep the system moving.

The subtext is two-sided. To the public: trust the experts, return to routine, your dinner is not a referendum on industrial agriculture. To markets and producers: the government is drawing a defensible line that limits disruption and liability. That phrase “based upon what we know” is a small escape hatch, acknowledging uncertainty while performing confidence. It’s technocratic reassurance with a lawyerly hinge.

Context matters because “this disease” reads like BSE-era panic, when prions turned cows into a cultural nightmare and “scientific evidence” became a political instrument as much as a method. Veneman speaks in the idiom of risk management, not moral clarity: not “zero risk,” but “should not cause any risk,” a probability disguised as a promise. The rhetoric works because it turns a frightening, invisible threat into a controllable category - and because it asks people to accept that control is synonymous with safety.