Products may contain cow parts

PORTLAND, Ore. — Cow parts — including hooves, bones, fat and innards — are used in everything from hand cream and antifreeze to poultry feed and gardening soils.

In the next tangled phase of the "mad cow" investigation, federal inspectors are concentrating on the non-edible parts of the diseased cow, which might have gone to a half-dozen distributors in the Northwest, said Dalton Hobbs, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

First the meat from the cow was recalled, now it’s secondary products — the raw material for soil, fats, soaps — that officials are trying to locate.

Los Angeles-based Baker Commodities, Inc., announced Friday that it has voluntarily withheld 800 tons of cow byproduct processed in its Seattle and Tacoma plants, said company spokesman Ray Kelly. The company, like other "renderers," takes what is left of the cow after it is slaughtered and boils it down into tallow, used for candles, lubricants and soaps, and bone meal that is used in fertilizer and animal feed.

If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determines that the material is tainted, the company’s loss could total $200,000, Kelly said.

"It’s obviously a tragic thing for the whole beef industry, but it’s definitely a sizable hit for us," he said.

"Our first priority was to make sure it didn’t go into the food supply," said Hobbs, reiterating that meat sent to two Oregon distributors was recalled earlier in the week.

But tracing the sick cow to its final destination, including all its incarnations in household products, has proved challenging.

"It’s like the old Upton Sinclair line — ‘We use everything but the squeal,’ " Hobbs said. "We have nearly 100 percent utilization of the animal. But when you have so many niche markets, it makes it incredibly challenging to trace where this one cow may have gone."