Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [46]
Figure 1. A Protein Factory in Reverse
Source: USDA, Economic Research Service, Beltsville, Maryland.
*Soy constitutes only 12% of steer feed and 20 − 25% of poultry.
Not surprisingly, Diet for a Small Planet’s description of the systemic waste in our nation’s meat production put the livestock industry on the defensive. They even set a team of cooks to work to prove the recipes unpalatable! (Actually, they had to admit that they tasted pretty good.)
Some countered by arguing that you get more protein out of cattle than the humanly edible protein you put in! Most of these calculations use one simple technique to make cattle appear incredibly efficient: on the “in” side of the equation they included only the grain and soy fed, but on the “out” side they include the meat put on by the grain feeding plus all the meat the animal put on during the grazing period. Giving grain feeding credit for all of the meat in the animal is misleading, to say the least, since it accounts for only about 40 percent. In my equation I have included only the meat put on the animal as a result of the grain and soy feeding. Obviously all the other meat, put on by forage, would have been there for us anyway—just as it was before the feedlot system was developed. (My calculations are in note 13 for this chapter, so you can see exactly how I arrived at my estimate.)
The Feedlot Logic: More Grain, Lower Cost
On the surface it would seem that beef produced by feeding grain to livestock would be more expensive than beef produced solely on the range. For, after all, isn’t grain more expensive than grass? To us it might be, but not to the cattle producer. As long as the cost of grain is cheap in relation to the price of meat, the lowest production costs per pound are achieved by putting the animal in the feedlot as soon as possible after weaning and feeding it as long as it continues to gain significant weight.17 This is true in large part because an animal gains weight three times faster in the feedlot on a grain and high-protein feed diet than on the range.
As a byproduct, our beef has gotten fattier, since the more grain fed, the more fat on the animal. American consumers have been told that our beef became fattier because we demanded it. Says the U.S. Department of Agriculture: “most cattle are fed today because U.S. feed consumers have a preference for [grain] fed beef.”18 But the evidence is that our beef became fattier in spite of consumer prefence, not because of it. A 1957 report in the Journal of Animal Science noted that the public prefers “good” grade (less fatty) beef and would buy more of it if it were available.19 And studies at Iowa State University indicate that the fat content of meat is not the key element in its taste anyway.20 Nevertheless, more and more marbled “choice” meat was produced, and “good” lean meat became increasingly scarce as cattle were fed more grain. In 1957 less than half of marketed beef was graded “choice;” ten years later “choice” accounted for two-thirds of it.21
Many have misunderstood the economic logic of cattle feeding. Knowing that grain puts on fat and that our grading system rewards fatty meat with tantalizing names like “choice” and “prime,” people target the grading system as the reason so much grain goes to livestock. They assume that if we could just overhaul the grading system, grain going to livestock would drop significantly and our beef would be less fatty. (The grading system was altered in 1976, but it still rewards fattier meat with higher prices and