If we are what we eat, then we are in trouble.

Chapter 4 of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivores Dilemma depicts the process of raising meat cattle.  In order to do so, Pollan purchases a steer, 534, and will follow his steer from calf-hood to the dinner plate.  It turns out almost all cattle, unlike the fully industrialized life cycles of chickens or pigs, start on pasture naturally with their mothers, drinking her milk and eating grass.  This is the most natural experience that each of these cows ever has.  After a few months of this seemingly perfect life, it’s weaning time.  This is a tramatic time for the calf and mother as they are forced apart, but the calf doesn’t even know the great trauma ahead of him.  After a short grace period at both the breeding facility, then the feed-lot, this calf enters his miserable life of fattening and sickness.  Corn, protein, fat, and antibiotics are mixed together and fed out three times a day.  Given the excess corn, these are the least expensive calories, and for the food industry this is all that matters.  Cows are not naturally designed to eat corn though, and this causes major issues for their health.  Also, the fat and protein fed to these cows is rarely a natural source for them.  Often, they are fed beef fat sent from the slaughterhouse where they are headed in months to come.  With this extremely unnatural system, the cows are very unhealthy and often contract diseases and bacteria that can even be spread to humans.  And while we all seem to believe that we are running the system best for ourselves, the truth is that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by breeding anti-biotic resistant bacteria, creating toxic wastes, and further draining our diminishing fossil fuels.

            In my opinion, just like the corn industry, this system is seriously harmful.  But this time, instead of just unfair and dreadful for the farmer, this is system can ultimately damage our population as a whole.  We are taking an entirely natural and ideal cycle, using the sun’s energy to grow grass for cows whose manure then fertilizes the grass, and turning it into a viscous cycle of waste and danger.  We use fossil fuels to create fertilizers that pollute our world, to grow corn that damages the cows, which in turn breeds resistant superbugs, and by the end of the process the cow’s manure is so chemically altered that it creates toxic waste lands.  Where does this make sense at all?  Oh yeah, just so we can have our cheaply made steak that is, by the way, questionably causing major health problems not just for the cows, but for us as well.

Do you think this kind of system would still work if we began to use grass or hay in the feed instead of corn?

Shouldn’t the government be more concerned about this breeding of anti-biotic resistant bacteria?

Does this knowledge make you want to change your eating habits or can you accept it as just the way it has to be?

Steve Greenburg (Cartoonist). (2007). Drug-resistant Superbugs [Cartoon], Retrieved Feb 9, 2011, from: http://blogs.venturacountystar.com/greenberg/archives/2007/11/drugresistant_s.html