I’m obsessed with mad cow disease. I became obsessed with it about 15 years ago when I was working on the bovine growth hormone issue and found out that if you inject cows with bovine growth hormone, there’s a good chance you will kill them unless you feed them supplemental fat and supplemental protein, because the hormone is causing them to shed their fat and protein into increased milk production. So guess where that supplemental fat and protein is coming from? It’s coming from slaughterhouse waste. This, in fact, is what has amplified and spread mad cow disease—a fatal, food-borne disease that causes dementia.

The story behind Love Canal is not the story of Lois Gibbs. Love Canal was a community of low-income, working-class, blue-collar families—my husband made $10,000 a year; I thought I was middle class—with high school or less education. Without any training, this community brought the President of the United States to our backyard, under our command, to do what was right. If we could do that as a small community, think of what could happen if all of us focused very carefully on a few, over-arching things, what change we could make.