The annual benefit dance for the Great River Folk Festival was a lively affair as usual with hundreds of dancers bobbing and weaving around the Concordia Ballroom dance floor to the lively tunes of the bands. Amid the shuffling feet of the dancers, Gretchen saw a little girl had dropped a piece of cake, which she picked up and, with a finger tip, swept a gob of frosting from the floor and into her mouth.

Gretchen told this story as we shared some appetizers before dinner with friends at our home the next night. There were some grimaces as we speculated that, while kids need to have a little exposure to germs to build up their immune systems, this was probably more germ exposure than necessary.

That conversation somehow segued into a discussion of other hand-to-mouth exposures that are not so evident, particularly in the meats that we eat. Those of us who have observed the huge feedlots that account for much of our beef production confessed that beef has become a less appetizing part of our diet.

Talk followed of the E. coli-caused beef recalls, the energy use of beef production, feed crops competing with food crops and the incredible concentration of wastes from feed lots that hold thousands of head of cattle. We mulled all this over even as the fragrance of dinner cooking wafted into the living room.

There was a pause and somebody said: “I bet we’re having beef for dinner.”

Gretchen laughed and said that was exactly right. But, she added, she had used it sparingly and it was locally grown, grass-fed beef. I think we all enjoyed the dish. There were no vegetarians at the table.

But people are beginning to question the industrial methods of meat production in the United States. The next morning one of the top listings in my Society of Environmental Journalists news alerts was a San Francisco Chronicle story about legislation sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sen. Olympia Snow, R-Maine, that would phase out the use of antibiotics in livestock production over a two-year period. It’s called the “Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act.”

The overuse of antibiotics in livestock production is cited as a main cause of the increase in antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70 percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. are used as feed additives for pigs, poultry and cattle. The American Medical Association went on record in 2001 opposing the routine feeding of medically important antibiotics to livestock and poultry.

It’s clearly time for action to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics by limiting the agricultural use that contributes to resistance. That way, if some little girl eating off the floor picks up one of those nasty germs or if someone is sickened by bad beef, doctors will be more likely to have an effective treatment.

The risk to the public of losing antibiotic efficacy is one of those externalities that economists talk about; it doesn’t get figured into the cost of raising cattle and other livestock and poultry using the so-called “industrial” methods. If prohibiting antibiotics in feed changes the economics of large-scale production to make other less concentrated operations more competitive, then that could be a good thing as well. Wisconsin is well suited to raising cattle on grass and other forages.