Steak - Mark Schatzker [7]
David Bergin hasn’t raised cattle since he left the ranch, but he is no enemy of corn-feeding. Before the dust, he had his own little feedlot with fifty cattle, and later managed a feedlot for a huge company called Cargill. Today he is president of a bank, and some of his clients run feedlots. He still wears cowboy boots and a Stetson and carries a six-shooter in the cab of his truck to shoot coyotes and skunks. David Bergin is still a cowboy.
After dinner, on the drive south out of Gruver, I crossed back into the zone of reek and passed Palo Duro Feeders again. It was lit up by bright lights and shrouded in a dark fog of dust. The lights stay on late so that the cattle can feed long into the night.
Bill O’Brien is not a cowboy. He drives a sporty Lexus and does not wear a Stetson, and he lacks the heft of a cowboy. He is spry and has a big-toothed grin and the charm and confidence of a senator. But like cowboys, O’Brien does raise a lot of food for the folks back east. He owns Palo Duro Feeders along with another feedlot called Texas Beef, which holds twelve thousand more cattle than the one on Palo Duro Creek. He took me out to Texas Beef to have a look.
O’Brien is soft-spoken and upbeat by nature, but as we drove, he told me about how big-city attitudes toward steak make him angry. The New York Times, he said, kept printing stories claiming that corn isn’t a “natural” feed for cattle. “If that isn’t the biggest bunch of bull,” he said, sounding disbelieving and hurt. To prove those urban journalists wrong, one day O’Brien opened the gate in the back of one of his feeding pens, giving the cows inside the option of leaving their corn-filled feed bunks for open pasture. The cows continued to eat their corn, but then they wandered out and ate grass, and then, later still, they would wander back in and return to their corn. This, O’Brien said, proved that corn was a natural food. O’Brien printed his findings, calling his study group “The International Center for the Study of Bovine Happiness,” and mailed it off to a writer he considered one of the more egregious New York Times offenders, Marian Burros. “She just doesn’t like me,” O’Brien told me. “She’s an urban food writer. She’s never been to the country. I debunked the mythology she’s created, which is that it’s unnatural for cattle to eat grain. She doesn’t like it.” His study received no response. When the experiment was completed, the cattle were sent to the slaughterhouse. No one recorded how they tasted.
Like Palo Duro, Texas Beef stank from at least a mile out. We pulled in and drove down one of the wide alleyways between pens. O’Brien stopped and opened the windows. The cows were frightened by the car and backed away from the feed bunk. They stopped and stared at us, wide-eyed, blinking, ears twitching, then began inching forward. “Do these cattle look unhappy to you?” O’Brien asked.
The truth is, I couldn’t say. They were crowded together, fifty thousand of them, in numbers and concentration you wouldn’t ever find in nature, standing in textbook filth next to an open-air sewage lagoon, eating a yellow powdery substance that was dispensed by a truck. And yet, no cows were moaning. There weren’t any dead ones covered in swarms of flies. No cow was lying on its side, panting and glassy-eyed. One cow, which I could hear but not see, was coughing.
We stepped out of the car for a better look. West Texas is a windy place, and for the second time in twenty-four hours—and also the second time in my life—my face was pelted by fecal dust. I put on my sunglasses, certain of one fact: I would not be happy living in a feedlot. But many of the things that bring me comfort—high-thread-count cotton, watching hockey and baseball in HD, fishing,