“Power Steer” by Michael
Pollan
in the New York Times,
March 31, 2002
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.'' [T] o 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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