Power Steer
MICHAEL POLLAN
/ NY Times 31mar02
Meat-eating may have
become an act riddled with moral and ethical ambiguities, but
eating a steak at the end of a short, primordial food chain
comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and light is
something I'm happy to do and defend. |
Garden City, Kan., missed out on the
suburban building boom of the postwar years. What it got instead
were sprawling subdivisions of cattle. These feedlots -- the
nation's first -- began rising on the high plains of western Kansas
in the 50's, and by now developments catering to cows are far more
common here than developments catering to people.
You'll be
speeding down one of Finney County's ramrod roads when the empty,
dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban
grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see -- which
in Kansas is really far. I say ''suddenly,'' but in fact a swiftly
intensifying odor (an aroma whose Proustian echoes are more
bus-station-men's-room than cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach
of a feedlot for more than a mile. Then it's upon you: Poky Feeders,
population 37,000. Cattle pens stretch to the horizon, each one home
to 150 animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that
it eventually dawns on you isn't mud at all. The pens line a network
of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to
the feedlot's beating heart: a chugging, silvery feed mill that
soars like an industrial cathedral over this teeming metropolis of
meat.
I traveled
to Poky early in January with the slightly improbable notion of
visiting one particular resident: a young black steer that I'd met
in the fall on a ranch in Vale, S.D. The steer, in fact, belonged to
me. I'd purchased him as an 8-month-old calf from the Blair
brothers, Ed and Rich, for $598. I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a
day for his room, board and meds and hoped to sell him at a profit
after he was fattened.
My interest
in the steer was not strictly financial, however, or even gustatory,
though I plan to retrieve some steaks from the Kansas packing plant
where No. 534, as he is known, has an appointment with the stunner
in June. No, my primary interest in this animal was educational. I
wanted to find out how a modern, industrial steak is produced in
America these days, from insemination to slaughter.
Eating
meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has become problematic
in recent years. Though beef consumption spiked upward during the
flush 90's, the longer-term trend is down, and many people will tell
you they no longer eat the stuff. Inevitably they'll bring up
mad-cow disease (and the accompanying revelation that industrial
agriculture has transformed these ruminants into carnivores --
indeed, into cannibals). They might mention their concerns about E.
coli contamination or antibiotics in the feed. Then there are the
many environmental problems, like groundwater pollution, associated
with ''Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.'' (The word ''farm''
no longer applies.) And of course there are questions of animal
welfare. How are we treating the animals we eat while they're alive,
and then how humanely are we ''dispatching'' them, to borrow an
industry euphemism?
Meat-eating
has always been a messy business, shadowed by the shame of killing
and, since Upton Sinclair's writing of ''The Jungle,'' by questions
about what we're really eating when we eat meat. Forgetting, or
willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters, a
strategy abetted by the industry. (What grocery-store item is more
silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?) Yet I
recently began to feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I
was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as
well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the
invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals
we eat. I'd try to own it, in other words.
So this is
the biography of my cow.
The Blair
brothers ranch occupies 11,500 acres of short-grass prairie a few
miles outside Sturgis, S.D., directly in the shadow of Bear Butte.
In November, when I visited, the turf forms a luxuriant pelt of
grass oscillating yellow and gold in the constant wind and sprinkled
with perambulating black dots: Angus cows and calves grazing.
Ed and Rich
Blair run what's called a ''cow-calf'' operation, the first stage of
beef production, and the stage least changed by the modern
industrialization of meat. While the pork and chicken industries
have consolidated the entire life cycles of those animals under a
single roof, beef cattle are still born on thousands of
independently owned ranches. Although four giant meatpacking
companies (Tyson's subsidiary IBP, Monfort, Excel and National) now
slaughter and market more than 80 percent of the beef cattle born in
this country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a
funnel that starts out as wide as the great plains.
The Blairs
have been in the cattle business for four generations. Although
there are new wrinkles to the process -- artificial insemination to
improve genetics, for example -- producing beef calves goes pretty
much as it always has, just faster. Calving season begins in late
winter, a succession of subzero nights spent yanking breeched babies
out of their bellowing mothers. In April comes the first spring
roundup to work the newborn calves (branding, vaccination,
castration); then more roundups in early summer to inseminate the
cows ($15 mail-order straws of elite bull semen have pretty much put
the resident stud out of work); and weaning in the fall. If all goes
well, your herd of 850 cattle has increased to 1,600 by the end of
the year.
My steer
spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his
mother, No. 9,534. His father was a registered Angus named GAR
Precision 1,680, a bull distinguished by the size and marbling of
his offspring's rib-eye steaks. Born last March 13 in a birthing
shed across the road, No. 534 was turned out on pasture with his
mother as soon as the 80-pound calf stood up and began nursing.
After a few weeks, the calf began supplementing his mother's milk by
nibbling on a salad bar of mostly native grasses: western
wheatgrass, little bluestem, green needlegrass.
Apart from
the trauma of the April day when he was branded and castrated, you
could easily imagine No. 534 looking back on those six months
grazing at his mother's side as the good old days -- if, that is,
cows do look back. (''They do not know what is meant by yesterday or
today,'' Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, with a note of envy, of grazing
cattle, ''fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure,
and thus neither melancholy or bored.'' Nietzsche clearly had never
seen a feedlot.) It may be foolish to presume to know what a cow
experiences, yet we can say that a cow grazing on grass is at least
doing what he has been splendidly molded by evolution to do. Which
isn't a bad definition of animal happiness. Eating grass, however,
is something that, after October, my steer would never do again.
Although
the modern cattle industry all but ignores it, the reciprocal
relationship between cows and grass is one of nature's
underappreciated wonders. For the grasses, the cow maintains their
habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold; the
animal also spreads grass seed, planting it with its hoofs and
fertilizing it. In exchange for these services, the grasses offer
the ruminants a plentiful, exclusive meal. For cows, sheep and other
grazers have the unique ability to convert grass -- which
single-stomached creatures like us can't digest -- into high-quality
protein. They can do this because they possess a rumen, a 45-gallon
fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria turns
grass into metabolically useful organic acids and protein.
This is an
excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the animals
and for us. What's more, growing meat on grass can make superb
ecological sense: so long as the rancher practices rotational
grazing, it is a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing
food on land too arid or hilly to grow anything else.
So if this
system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn't tasted a blade of
grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply
take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer
diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening
a beef calf's allotted time on earth. ''In my grandfather's day,
steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter,'' explained Rich Blair,
who, at 45, is the younger of the brothers by four years. ''In the
50's, when my father was ranching, it was 2 or 3. Now we get there
at 14 to 16 months.'' Fast food indeed. What gets a beef calf from
80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous quantities of corn,
protein supplements -- and drugs, including growth hormones. These
''efficiencies,'' all of which come at a price, have transformed
raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not
everybody is convinced that this is progress. ''Hell,'' Ed Blair
told me, ''my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on 850.''
Weaning
marks the fateful moment when the natural, evolutionary logic
represented by a ruminant grazing on grass bumps up against the
industrial logic that, with stunning speed, turns that animal into a
box of beef. This industrial logic is rational and even irresistible
-- after all, it has succeeded in transforming beef from a luxury
item into everyday fare for millions of people. And yet the further
you follow it, the more likely you are to wonder if that rational
logic might not also be completely insane.
In early
October, a few weeks before I met him, No. 534 was weaned from his
mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for
animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will
mope and bellow for days, and the calves themselves, stressed by the
change in circumstance and diet, are prone to get sick.
On many
ranches, weaned calves go directly from the pasture to the sale
barn, where they're sold at auction, by the pound, to feedlots. The
Blairs prefer to own their steers straight through to slaughter and
to keep them on the ranch for a couple of months of ''backgrounding''
before sending them on the 500-mile trip to Poky Feeders. Think of
backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: the animals are
confined in a pen, ''bunk broken'' -- taught to eat from a trough --
and gradually accustomed to eating a new, unnatural diet of grain.
(Grazing cows encounter only tiny amounts of grain, in the form of
grass seeds.)
It was in
the backgrounding pen that I first met No. 534 on an unseasonably
warm afternoon in November. I'd told the Blairs I wanted to follow
one of their steers through the life cycle; Ed, 49, suggested I
might as well buy a steer, as a way to really understand the
daunting economics of modern ranching. Ed and Rich told me what to
look for: a broad, straight back and thick hindquarters. Basically,
you want a strong frame on which to hang a lot of meat. I was also
looking for a memorable face in this Black Angus sea, one that would
stand out in the feedlot crowd. Almost as soon as I started
surveying the 90 or so steers in the pen, No. 534 moseyed up to the
railing and made eye contact. He had a wide, stout frame and was
brockle- faced -- he had three distinctive white blazes. If not for
those markings, Ed said, No. 534 might have been spared castration
and sold as a bull; he was that good-looking. But the white blazes
indicate the presence of Hereford blood, rendering him ineligible
for life as an Angus stud. Tough break.
Rich said
he would calculate the total amount I owed the next time No. 534 got
weighed but that the price would be $98 a hundredweight for an
animal of this quality. He would then bill me for all expenses
(feed, shots, et cetera) and, beginning in January, start passing on
the weekly ''hotel charges'' from Poky Feeders. In June we'd find
out from the packing plant how well my investment had panned out: I
would receive a payment for No. 534 based on his carcass weight,
plus a premium if he earned a U.S.D.A. grade of choice or prime.
''And if you're worried about the cattle market,'' Rich said
jokingly, referring to its post-Sept. 11 slide, ''I can sell you an
option too.'' Option insurance has become increasingly popular among
cattlemen in the wake of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease.
Rich
handles the marketing end of the business out of an office in
Sturgis, where he also trades commodities. In fact you'd never guess
from Rich's unlined, indoorsy face and golfish attire that he was a
rancher. Ed, by contrast, spends his days on the ranch and better
looks the part, with his well-creased visage, crinkly cowboy eyes
and ever-present plug of tobacco. His cap carries the same
prairie-flat slogan I'd spotted on the ranch's roadside sign:
''Beef: It's What's for Dinner.''
My second
morning on the ranch, I helped Troy Hadrick, Ed's son-in-law and a
ranch hand, feed the steers in the backgrounding pen. A thickly
muscled post of a man, Hadrick is 25 and wears a tall black cowboy
hat perpetually crowned by a pair of mirrored Oakley sunglasses. He
studied animal science at South Dakota State and is up on the latest
university thinking on cattle nutrition, reproduction and medicine.
Hadrick seems to relish everything to do with ranching, from calving
to wielding the artificial-insemination syringe.
Hadrick and
I squeezed into the heated cab of a huge swivel-hipped tractor
hooked up to a feed mixer: basically, a dump truck with a giant
screw through the middle to blend ingredients. First stop was a
hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will
consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves
have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as
they're placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick.
Why? The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the
feed. The shift to a ''hot ration'' of grain can so disturb the
cow's digestive process -- its rumen, in particular -- that it can
kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by
antibiotics.
After we'd
scooped the ingredients into the hopper and turned on the mixer,
Hadrick deftly sidled the tractor alongside the pen and flipped a
switch to release a dusty tan stream of feed in a long, even line.
No. 534 was one of the first animals to belly up to the rail for
breakfast. He was heftier than his pen mates and, I decided,
sparkier too. That morning, Hadrick and I gave each calf six pounds
of corn mixed with seven pounds of ground alfalfa hay and a
quarter-pound of Rumensin. Soon after my visit, this ration would be
cranked up to 14 pounds of corn and 6 pounds of hay -- and added two
and a half pounds every day to No. 534.
While I was
on the ranch, I didn't talk to No. 534, pet him or otherwise try to
form a connection. I also decided not to give him a name, even
though my son proposed a pretty good one after seeing a snapshot.
(''Night.'') My intention, after all, is to send this animal to
slaughter and then eat some of him. No. 534 is not a pet, and I
certainly don't want to end up with an ox in my backyard because I
suddenly got sentimental.
As fall
turned into winter, Hadrick sent me regular e-mail messages
apprising me of my steer's progress. On Nov. 13 he weighed 650
pounds; by Christmas he was up to 798, making him the
seventh-heaviest steer in his pen, an achievement in which I,
idiotically, took a measure of pride. Between Nov. 13 and Jan. 4,
the day he boarded the truck for Kansas, No. 534 put away 706 pounds
of corn and 336 pounds of alfalfa hay, bringing his total living
expenses for that period to $61.13. I was into this deal now for
$659.
Hadrick's
e-mail updates grew chattier as time went on, cracking a window on
the rancher's life and outlook. I was especially struck by his
relationship to the animals, how it manages to be at once intimate
and unsentimental. One day Hadrick is tenderly nursing a newborn at
3 a.m., the next he's ''having a big prairie oyster feed'' after
castrating a pen of bull calves.
Hadrick
wrote empathetically about weaning (''It's like packing up and
leaving the house when you are 18 and knowing you will never see
your parents again'') and with restrained indignation about ''animal
activists and city people'' who don't understand the first thing
about a rancher's relationship to his cattle. Which, as Hadrick put
it, is simply this: ''If we don't take care of these animals, they
won't take care of us.''
''Everyone
hears about the bad stuff,'' Hadrick wrote, ''but they don't ever
see you give C.P.R. to a newborn calf that was born backward or
bringing them into your house and trying to warm them up on your
kitchen floor because they were born on a minus-20-degree night.
Those are the kinds of things ranchers will do for their livestock.
They take precedence over most everything in your life. Sorry for
the sermon.''
To
travel from the ranch to the feedlot, as
No. 534 and I both did (in separate vehicles) the first week in
January, feels a lot like going from the country to the big city.
Indeed, a cattle feedlot is a kind of city, populated by as many as
100,000 animals. It is very much a premodern city, however --
crowded, filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads and
choking air.
The
urbanization of the world's livestock is a fairly recent historical
development, so it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky
Feeders would recall human cities several centuries ago. As in
14th-century London, the metropolitan digestion remains vividly on
display: the foodstuffs coming in, the waste streaming out.
Similarly, there is the crowding together of recent arrivals from
who knows where, combined with a lack of modern sanitation. This
combination has always been a recipe for disease; the only reason
contemporary animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval
counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.
I spent the
better part of a day walking around Poky Feeders, trying to
understand how its various parts fit together. In any city, it's
easy to lose track of nature -- of the connections between various
species and the land on which everything ultimately depends. The
feedlot's ecosystem, I could see, revolves around corn. But its food
chain doesn't end there, because the corn itself grows somewhere
else, where it is implicated in a whole other set of ecological
relationships. Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed
livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical
fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2
gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city
floating on a sea of oil.
I started
my tour at the feed mill, the yard's thundering hub, where three
meals a day for 37,000 animals are designed and mixed by computer. A
million pounds of feed passes through the mill each day. Every hour
of every day, a tractor-trailer pulls up to disgorge another 25 tons
of corn. Around the other side of the mill, tanker trucks back up to
silo-shaped tanks, into which they pump thousands of gallons of
liquefied fat and protein supplement. In a shed attached to the mill
sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen; next to these
are pallets stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin and tylosin,
another antibiotic. Along with alfalfa hay and corn silage for
roughage, all these ingredients are blended and then piped into the
dump trucks that keep Poky's eight and a half miles of trough
filled.
The feed
mill's great din is made by two giant steel rollers turning against
each other 12 hours a day, crushing steamed corn kernels into
flakes. This was the only feed ingredient I tasted, and it wasn't
half bad; not as crisp as Kellogg's, but with a cornier flavor. I
passed, however, on the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop
consisting of molasses and urea.
Corn is a
mainstay of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite as
cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing
surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50 cents less than
the cost of growing it. The rise of the modern factory farm is a
direct result of these surpluses, which soared in the years
following World War II, when petrochemical fertilizers came into
widespread use. Ever since, the U.S.D.A.'s policy has been to help
farmers dispose of surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible
through the digestive tracts of food animals, converting it into
protein. Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable
foodstuff, making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals
on small plots of land. Without cheap corn, the modern urbanization
of livestock would probably never have occurred.
We have
come to think of ''cornfed'' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue;
we shouldn't. Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh,
giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to
like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it
contains more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal
of Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not
only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the
type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier. (Grass-fed
meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6, which is
believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine and
CLA, another ''good'' fat.) A growing body of research suggests that
many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really
problems with cornfed beef. In the same way ruminants have not
evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating
grain-fed animals. Yet the U.S.D.A.'s grading system continues to
reward marbling -- that is, intermuscular fat -- and thus the
feeding of corn to cows.
The
economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm,
there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the
cheapest, most convenient source of calories. Of course the
identical industrial logic -- protein is protein -- led to the
feeding of rendered cow parts back to cows, a practice the F.D.A.
banned in 1997 after scientists realized it was spreading mad-cow
disease.
Make that
mostly banned. The F.D.A.'s rules against feeding ruminant protein
to ruminants make exceptions for ''blood products'' (even though
they contain protein) and fat. Indeed, my steer has probably dined
on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to
in June. ''Fat is fat,'' the feedlot manager shrugged when I raised
an eyebrow.
F.D.A.
rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to
cows. (Feather meal is an accepted cattle feed, as are pig and fish
protein and chicken manure.) Some public-health advocates worry that
since the bovine meat and bone meal that cows used to eat is now
being fed to chickens, pigs and fish, infectious prions could find
their way back into cattle when they eat the protein of the animals
that have been eating them. To close this biological loophole, the
F.D.A. is now considering tightening its feed rules.
Until
mad-cow disease, remarkably few people in the cattle business, let
alone the general public, comprehended the strange semicircular food
chain that industrial agriculture had devised for cattle (and, in
turn, for us). When I mentioned to Rich Blair that I'd been
surprised to learn that cows were eating cows, he said, ''To tell
the truth, it was kind of a shock to me too.'' Yet even today,
ranchers don't ask many questions about feedlot menus. Not that the
answers are so easy to come by. When I asked Poky's feedlot manager
what exactly was in the protein supplement, he couldn't say. ''When
we buy supplement, the supplier says it's 40 percent protein, but
they don't specify beyond that.'' When I called the supplier, it
wouldn't divulge all its ''proprietary ingredients'' but promised
that animal parts weren't among them. Protein is pretty much still
protein.
Compared
with ground-up cow bones, corn seems positively wholesome. Yet it
wreaks considerable havoc on bovine digestion. During my day at
Poky, I spent an hour or two driving around the yard with Dr. Mel
Metzen, the staff veterinarian. Metzen, a 1997 graduate of Kansas
State's vet school, oversees a team of eight cowboys who spend their
days riding the yard, spotting sick cows and bringing them in for
treatment. A great many of their health problems can be traced to
their diet. ''They're made to eat forage,'' Metzen said, ''and we're
making them eat grain.''
Perhaps the
most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is
feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas,
which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when
the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage,
rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap
gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing
against the animal's lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to
relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal's
esophagus), the cow suffocates.
A corn diet
can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic
stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it
unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn,
which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it
sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate
excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can
lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general
weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to
everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.
Cows rarely
live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about
as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. ''I don't know how
long you could feed this ration before you'd see problems,'' Metzen
said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would
eventually ''blow out their livers'' and kill them. As the acids eat
away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect
in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at
slaughter to have abscessed livers.
What keeps
a feedlot animal healthy -- or healthy enough -- are antibiotics.
Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent
bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the
antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed -- a practice
that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the
evolution of new antibiotic-resistant ''superbugs.'' In the debate
over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually
made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates
don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just
don't want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory
farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the
use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction.
Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the
animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for what we feed them.
I asked
Metzen what would happen if antibiotics were banned from cattle
feed. ''We just couldn't feed them as hard,'' he said. ''Or we'd
have a higher death loss.'' (Less than 3 percent of cattle die on
the feedlot.) The price of beef would rise, he said, since the whole
system would have to slow down.
''Hell, if
you gave them lots of grass and space,'' he concluded dryly, ''I
wouldn't have a job.''
Before
heading over to Pen 43 for my reunion with No. 534, I stopped by the
shed where recent arrivals receive their hormone implants. The
calves are funneled into a chute, herded along by a ranch hand
wielding an electric prod, then clutched in a restrainer just long
enough for another hand to inject a slow-release pellet of Revlar, a
synthetic estrogen, in the back of the ear. The Blairs' pen had not
yet been implanted, and I was still struggling with the decision of
whether to forgo what is virtually a universal practice in the
cattle industry in the United States. (It has been banned in the
European Union.)
American
regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to
human health has been proved, even though measurable hormone
residues do turn up in the meat we eat. These contribute to the
buildup of estrogenic compounds in the environment, which some
scientists believe may explain falling sperm counts and premature
maturation in girls. Recent studies have also found elevated levels
of synthetic growth hormones in feedlot wastes; these persistent
chemicals eventually wind up in the waterways downstream of
feedlots, where scientists have found fish exhibiting abnormal sex
characteristics.
The F.D.A.
is opening an inquiry into the problem, but for now, implanting
hormones in beef cattle is legal and financially irresistible: an
implant costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight
of a steer at slaughter, for a return of at least $25. That could
easily make the difference between profit and loss on my investment
in No. 534. Thinking like a parent, I like the idea of feeding my
son hamburgers free of synthetic hormones. But thinking like a
cattleman, there was really no decision to make.
I asked
Rich Blair what he thought. ''I'd love to give up hormones,'' he
said. ''If the consumer said, We don't want hormones, we'd stop in a
second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the
market signal's not there, and as long as my competitor's doing it,
I've got to do it, too.''
Around
lunch time, Metzen and I finally arrived at No. 534's pen. My first
impression was that my steer had landed himself a decent piece of
real estate. The pen is far enough from the feed mill to be fairly
quiet, and it has a water view -- of what I initially thought was a
reservoir, until I noticed the brown scum. The pen itself is
surprisingly spacious, slightly bigger than a basketball court, with
a concrete feed bunk out front and a freshwater trough in the back.
I climbed over the railing and joined the 90 steers, which, en
masse, retreated a few steps, then paused.
I had on
the same carrot-colored sweater I'd worn to the ranch in South
Dakota, hoping to jog my steer's memory. Way off in the back, I
spotted him -- those three white blazes. As I gingerly stepped
toward him, the quietly shuffling mass of black cowhide between us
parted, and there No. 534 and I stood, staring dumbly at each other.
Glint of recognition? None whatsoever. I told myself not to take it
personally. No. 534 had been bred for his marbling, after all, not
his intellect.
I don't
know enough about the emotional life of cows to say with any
confidence if No. 534 was miserable, bored or melancholy, but I
would not say he looked happy. I noticed that his eyes looked a
little bloodshot. Some animals are irritated by the fecal dust that
floats in the feedlot air; maybe that explained the sullen gaze with
which he fixed me. Unhappy or not, though, No. 534 had clearly been
eating well. My animal had put on a couple hundred pounds since we'd
last met, and he looked it: thicker across the shoulders and round
as a barrel through the middle. He carried himself more like a steer
now than a calf, even though he was still less than a year old.
Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation. ''That's a
handsome looking beef you've got there.'' (Aw, shucks.)
Staring at
No. 534, I could picture the white lines of the butcher's chart
dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib,
brisket. One way of looking at No. 534 -- the industrial way -- was
as an efficient machine for turning feed corn into beef. Every day
between now and his slaughter date in June, No. 534 will convert 32
pounds of feed (25 of them corn) into another three and a half
pounds of flesh. Poky is indeed a factory, transforming cheap raw
materials into a less-cheap finished product, as fast as bovinely
possible.
Yet the
factory metaphor obscures as much as it reveals about the creature
that stood before me. For this steer was not a machine in a factory
but an animal in a web of relationships that link him to certain
other animals, plants and microbes, as well as to the earth. And one
of those other animals is us. The unnaturally rich diet of corn that
has compromised No. 534's health is fattening his flesh in a way
that in turn may compromise the health of the humans who will eat
him. The antibiotics he's consuming with his corn were at that very
moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the environment
they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect us and resist
the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as
the animals we eat, and whatever happens to it also happens to us.
I thought
about the deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I were standing in.
We don't know much about the hormones in it -- where they will end
up or what they might do once they get there -- but we do know
something about the bacteria. One particularly lethal bug most
probably resided in the manure beneath my feet. Escherichia coli
0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it
was first isolated in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot cattle,
more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as
10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.
Most of the
microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our
food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they
originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the
digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to
our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains
of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids -- and
go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have
broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection. Yet this
process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist,
has discovered that switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in the
final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157
in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however, is
considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.
So much
comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways
to be not cheap at all. While I stood in No. 534's pen, a dump truck
pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of
feed. The animals stepped up to the bunk for their lunch. The $1.60
a day I'm paying for three giant meals is a bargain only by the
narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take into account, for
example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance or
food poisoning by E. coli or all the environmental costs associated
with industrial corn.
For if you
follow the corn from this bunk back to the fields where it grows,
you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more
chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop. Keep going
and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way
down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created
(if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''
But you can
go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn
all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started
life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from the
sun; now that corn constitutes such an important link in his food
chain, he is the product of an industrial system powered by fossil
fuel. (And in turn, defended by the military -- another uncounted
cost of ''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist
who specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible
to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to
slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of
corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have
consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have
succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was
once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need:
another fossil-fuel machine.
Sometime in
June, No. 534 will be ready for slaughter. Though only 14 months
old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds and will move with
the lumbering deliberateness of the obese. One morning, a cattle
trailer from the National Beef plant in Liberal, Kan., will pull in
to Poky Feeders, drop a ramp and load No. 534 along with 35 of his
pen mates.
The
100-mile trip south to Liberal is a straight shot on Route 83, a
two-lane highway on which most of the traffic consists of speeding
tractor-trailers carrying either cattle or corn. The National Beef
plant is a sprawling gray-and-white complex in a neighborhood of
trailer homes and tiny houses a notch up from shanty. These are,
presumably, the homes of the Mexican and Asian immigrants who make
up a large portion of the plant's work force. The meat business has
made southwestern Kansas an unexpectedly diverse corner of the
country.
A few hours
after their arrival in the holding pens outside the factory, a plant
worker will open a gate and herd No. 534 and his pen mates into an
alley that makes a couple of turns before narrowing down to a
single-file chute. The chute becomes a ramp that leads the animals
up to a second-story platform and then disappears through a blue
door.
That door
is as close to the kill floor as the plant managers were prepared to
let me go. I could see whatever I wanted to farther on -- the cold
room where carcasses are graded, the food-safety lab, the
fabrication room where the carcasses are broken down into cuts -- on
the condition that I didn't take pictures or talk to employees. But
the stunning, bleeding and evisceration process was off limits to a
journalist, even a cattleman-journalist like myself.
What I know
about what happens on the far side of the blue door comes mostly
from Temple Grandin, who has been on the other side and, in fact,
helped to design it. Grandin, an assistant professor of animal
science at Colorado State, is one of the most influential people in
the United States cattle industry. She has devoted herself to making
cattle slaughter less stressful and therefore more humane by
designing an ingenious series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps
and stunning systems. Grandin is autistic, a condition she says has
allowed her to see the world from the cow's point of view. The
industry has embraced Grandin's work because animals under stress
are not only more difficult to handle but also less valuable:
panicked cows produce a surge of adrenaline that turns their meat
dark and unappetizing. ''Dark cutters,'' as they're called, sell at
a deep discount.
Grandin
designed the double-rail conveyor system in use at the National Beef
plant; she has also audited the plant's killing process for
McDonald's. Stories about cattle ''waking up'' after stunning only
to be skinned alive prompted McDonald's to audit its suppliers in a
program that is credited with substantial improvements since its
inception in 1999. Grandin says that in cattle slaughter ''there is
the pre-McDonald's era and the post-McDonald's era -- it's night and
day.''
Grandin
recently described to me what will happen to No. 534 after he passes
through the blue door. ''The animal goes into the chute single
file,'' she began. ''The sides are high enough so all he sees is the
butt of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute,
he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he's
straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a 25-degree angle,
and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground and he's being
carried along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he
can't look down and see he's off the ground. That would panic him.''
Listening
to Grandin's rather clinical account, I couldn't help wondering what
No. 534 would be feeling as he approached his end. Would he have any
inkling -- a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line --
that this was no ordinary day?
Grandin
anticipated my question: ''Does the animal know it's going to get
slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them, going into
the squeeze chute on the feedlot, getting their shots and going up
the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were
going to die, you'd see much more agitated behavior.
''Anyway,
the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving
sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a
pneumatic-powered 'gun' that fires a steel bolt about seven inches
long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it
smack in the middle of the forehead. When it's done correctly, it
will kill the animal on the first shot.''
For a plant
to pass a McDonald's audit, the stunner needs to render animals
''insensible'' on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second
shot is allowed, but should that one fail, the plant flunks. At the
line speeds at which meatpacking plants in the United States operate
-- 390 animals are slaughtered every hour at National, which is not
unusual -- mistakes would seem inevitable, but Grandin insists that
only rarely does the process break down.
''After the
animal is shot while he's riding along, a worker wraps a chain
around his foot and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside
down by one leg, he's carried by the trolley into the bleeding area,
where the bleeder cuts his throat. Animal rights people say they're
cutting live animals, but that's because there's a lot of reflex
kicking.'' This is one of the reasons a job at a slaughter plant is
the most dangerous in America. ''What I look for is, Is the head
dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out.
He'd better not be trying to hold it up -- then you've got a live
one on the rail.'' Just in case, Grandin said, ''they have another
hand stunner in the bleed area.''
Much of
what happens next -- the de-hiding of the animal, the tying off of
its rectum before evisceration -- is designed to keep the animal's
feces from coming into contact with its meat. This is by no means
easy to do, not when the animals enter the kill floor smeared with
manure and 390 of them are eviscerated every hour. (Partly for this
reason, European plants operate at much slower line speeds.) But
since that manure is apt to contain lethal pathogens like E. coli
0157, and since the process of grinding together hamburger from
hundreds of different carcasses can easily spread those pathogens
across millions of burgers, packing plants now spend millions on
''food safety'' -- which is to say, on the problem of manure in
meat.
Most of
these efforts are reactive: it's accepted that the animals will
enter the kill floor caked with feedlot manure that has been
rendered lethal by the feedlot diet. Rather than try to alter that
diet or keep the animals from living in their waste or slow the line
speed -- all changes regarded as impractical -- the industry focuses
on disinfecting the manure that will inevitably find its way into
the meat. This is the purpose of irradiation (which the industry
prefers to call ''cold pasteurization''). It is also the reason that
carcasses pass through a hot steam cabinet and get sprayed with an
antimicrobial solution before being hung in the cooler at the
National Beef plant.
It wasn't
until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler, 36 hours later,
that I was allowed to catch up with them, in the grading room. I
entered a huge arctic space resembling a monstrous dry cleaner's,
with a seemingly endless overhead track conveying thousands of
red-and-white carcasses. I quickly learned that you had to move
smartly through this room or else be tackled by a 350-pound side of
beef. The carcasses felt cool to the touch, no longer animals but
meat.
Two by two,
the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the rails, six pairs every
minute, to a station where two workers -- one wielding a small power
saw, the other a long knife -- made a single six-inch cut between
the 12th and 13th ribs, opening a window on the meat inside. The
carcasses continued on to another station, where a U.S.D.A.
inspector holding a round blue stamp glanced at the exposed rib eye
and stamped the carcass's creamy white fat once, twice or -- very
rarely -- three times: select, choice, prime.
For the
Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of truth, for that
stamp will determine exactly how much the packing plant will pay for
each animal and whether the 14 months of effort and expense will
yield a profit.
Unless the
cattle market collapses between now and June (always a worry these
days), I stand to make a modest profit on No. 534. In February, the
feedlot took a sonogram of his rib eye and ran the data through a
computer program. The projections are encouraging: a live slaughter
weight of 1,250, a carcass weight of 787 pounds and a grade at the
upper end of choice, making him eligible to be sold at a premium as
Certified Angus Beef. Based on the June futures price, No. 534
should be worth $944. (Should he grade prime, that would add another
$75.)
I paid $598
for No. 534 in November; his living expenses since then come to $61
on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the feedlot (including
implant), for a total investment of $917, leaving a profit of $27.
It's a razor-thin margin, and it could easily vanish should the
price of corn rise or No. 534 fail to make the predicted weight or
grade -- say, if he gets sick and goes off his feed. Without the
corn, without the antibiotics, without the hormone implant, my brief
career as a cattleman would end in failure.
The Blairs
and I are doing better than most. According to Cattle-Fax, a
market-research firm, the return on an animal coming out of a
feedlot has averaged just $3 per head over the last 20 years.
''Some pens
you make money, some pens you lose,'' Rich Blair said when I called
to commiserate. ''You try to average it out over time, limit the
losses and hopefully make a little profit.'' He reminded me that a
lot of ranchers are in the business ''for emotional reasons -- you
can't be in it just for the money.''
Now you
tell me.
The manager
of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of steaks from No.
534 before his carcass disappears into the trackless stream of
commodity beef fanning out to America's supermarkets and restaurants
this June. From what I can see, the Blair brothers, with the help of
Poky Feeders, are producing meat as good as any you can find in an
American supermarket. And yet there's no reason to think this steak
will taste any different from the other high-end industrial meat
I've ever eaten.
While
waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I've explored some
alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays you can find
hormone- and antibiotic-free beef as well as organic beef, fed only
grain grown without chemicals. This meat, which is often quite good,
is typically produced using more grass and less grain (and so makes
for healthier animals). Yet it doesn't fundamentally challenge the
corn-feedlot system, and I'm not sure that an ''organic feedlot''
isn't, ecologically speaking, an oxymoron. What I really wanted to
taste is the sort of preindustrial beef my grandparents ate -- from
animals that have lived most of their full-length lives on grass.
Eventually
I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me a quarter of a
grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most of my freezer. I
also found ranchers selling grass-fed beef on the Web; Eatwild.com
is a clearinghouse of information on grass-fed livestock, which is
emerging as one of the livelier movements in sustainable
agriculture.
I
discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than supermarket
beef. Whatever else you can say about industrial beef, it is
remarkably cheap, and any argument for changing the system runs
smack into the industry's populist arguments. Put the animals back
on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it takes too long to
raise beef on grass, and there's not enough grass to raise them on,
since the Western range lands aren't big enough to sustain America's
100 million head of cattle. And besides, Americans have learned to
love cornfed beef. Feedlot meat is also more consistent in both
taste and supply and can be harvested 12 months a year. (Grass-fed
cattle tend to be harvested in the fall, since they stop gaining
weight over the winter, when the grasses go dormant.)
All of this
is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot system is hard to
refute. And yet so is the ecological logic behind a ruminant grazing
on grass. Think what would happen if we restored a portion of the
Corn Belt to the tall grass prairie it once was and grazed cattle on
it. No more petrochemical fertilizer, no more herbicide, no more
nitrogen runoff. Yes, beef would probably be more expensive than it
is now, but would that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every
day might not be such a smart idea anyway -- for our health, for the
environment. And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap
at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic
resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli
poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are
costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.
So how does
grass-fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a
nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from
Argentina that I sampled turned out to be the best steak I've ever
eaten. But unless the meat is carefully aged, grass-fed beef can be
tougher than feedlot beef -- not surprisingly, since a grazing
animal, which moves around in search of its food, develops more
muscle and less fat. Yet even when the meat was tougher, its flavor,
to my mind, was much more interesting. And specific, for the taste
of every grass-fed animal is inflected by the place where it lived.
Maybe it's just my imagination, but nowadays when I eat a feedlot
steak, I can taste the corn and the fat, and I can see the view from
No. 534's pen. I can't taste the oil, obviously, or the drugs, yet
now I know they're there.
A
considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing (and,
O.K., chewing) a grass-fed steak: a picture of a cow outside in a
pasture eating the grass that has eaten the sunlight. Meat-eating
may have become an act riddled with moral and ethical ambiguities,
but eating a steak at the end of a short, primordial food chain
comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and light is
something I'm happy to do and defend. We are what we eat, it is
often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what
what we eat eats too.
Michael Pollan, the author of ''The Botany of Desire,'' is a
contributing writer for the magazine. His last cover article was
about organic food.
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