E B Manning Son Inc

For Lloyd Manning, the owner of the last beef-packing plant in Los Angeles County, absolutely no part of a cow is sacred. "If I could sell the moo, I'd do it," said the tall, big-boned president of E.B. Manning & Son Inc., sitting in the office of his family's custom meatpacking house in Pico Rivera. Don't think he hasn't tried. A few years ago, he tape- recorded bawling Holstein steers as they entered his small corral and called Walt Disney Co.

For Lloyd Manning, the owner of the last beef-packing plant in Los Angeles County, absolutely no part of a cow is sacred. "If I could sell the moo, I'd do it," said the tall, big-boned president of E.B. Manning & Son Inc., sitting in the office of his family's custom meatpacking house in Pico Rivera. Don't think he hasn't tried. A few years ago, he tape- recorded bawling Holstein steers as they entered his small corral and called Walt Disney Co.

Meat safety regulations aimed at reducing the risk of mad cow disease will be particularly disheartening for those Latinos whose culinary favorites include tacos filled with brain and small intestines, soup with bits from the spinal cord and, at holiday times, the whole head of a cow. The rules, imposed after the Dec. 23 disclosure of the first case in the U.S. of mad cow disease, prohibit the sale of skulls, brains, eyes, vertebrae and spinal cords from cattle more than 30 months old.

U.S. Department of Agriculture officials on Wednesday continued to defend their campaign against the spread of "mad cow" disease -- even as some meat producers worried that newly imposed safety measures did not go far enough to appease foreign buyers. "I think the export market will dictate to us to do more," said Ken Conway, who heads GeneNet, an alliance of beef producers. "We're going to have to make some compromises to make them happy."