The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [34]
Even so, it is possible to follow a bushel of George Naylor’s corn, provided you are willing to regard it as the commodity it is—that is, treat it not as a specific physical entity you can hold in your hands but as a generic, fungible quantity, no different from any other bushel of number 2 field corn boarding that Cargill train or any other. Since Naylor’s corn is mixed in with all the other corn grown this year, the destinations of the kernels in any one of his bushels will mirror, more or less precisely, the ultimate destinations of the crop as a whole—export, livestock, high-fructose corn syrup, etc.
So where do those ninety thousand generic kernels wind up? After they’ve been milled and fractionated, processed and exported and passed through the guts of cows and chickens and pigs, what sort of meal do they make? And—at the risk of employing a word that might sound extreme attached to something as wholesome and all-American as corn—what sort of havoc can those ninety thousand kernels wreak?
THE PLACE where most of those kernels wind up—about three of every five—is on the American factory farm, a place that could not exist without them. Here, hundreds of millions of food animals that once lived on family farms and ranches are gathered together in great commissaries, where they consume as much of the mounting pile of surplus corn as they can digest, turning it into meat. Enlisting the cow in this undertaking has required particularly heroic efforts, since the cow is by nature not a corn eater. But Nature abhors a surplus, and the corn must be consumed.
Enter the corn-fed American steer.
FOUR
THE FEEDLOT
Making Meat (54,000 KERNELS)
1. CATTLE METROPOLIS
The landscape that corn has made in the American Middle West is unmistakable: It forms a second great American lawn, unfurling through the summer like an absurdly deep-pile carpet of green across the vast lands drained by the Mississippi River. Corn the plant has colonized some 125,000 square miles of the American continent, an area twice the size of New York State; even from outer space you can’t miss it. It takes a bit more looking, however, to see some of the other landscapes that corn-the-commodity has created, in obscure places like Garden City, Kansas. Here in the high plains of western Kansas is where America’s first feedlots were built, beginning in the early fifties.
You’ll be speeding down one of Finney County’s ramrod roads when the empty, dun-colored January 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 the swiftly rising odor—an aroma whose Proustian echoes are decidedly more bus station men’s room than cows in the country—has been heralding the feedlot’s approach for more than a mile. And then it’s upon you: Poky Feeders, population, thirty-seven thousand. A sloping subdivision of cattle pens stretches to the horizon, each one home to a hundred or so 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 feedyard’s thunderously beating heart and dominating landmark: a rhythmically chugging feed mill that rises, soaring and silvery in the early morning light, like an industrial cathedral in the midst of a teeming metropolis of meat. As it does twelve hours a day seven days a week, the mill is noisily converting America’s river