The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [36]
This biological absurdity, characteristic of all CAFOs, is compounded in the cattle feedyard by a second absurdity. Here animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass must be adapted by us—at considerable cost to their health, to the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their eaters—to live on corn, for no other reason than it offers the cheapest calories around and because the great pile must be consumed. This is why I decided to follow the trail of industrial corn through a single steer rather than, say, a chicken or a pig, which can get by just fine on a diet of grain: The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
2. PASTORAL: VALE, SOUTH DAKOTA
The Blair Ranch occupies fifty-five hundred acres of rolling short-grass prairie a few miles outside Sturgis, South Dakota, and directly in the shadow of Bear Butte. The Bismarck-Deadwood trail crossed its land just to the north of the butte, which rises dramatically from the plains like a chubby ten-story exclamation mark. You can still make out ruts in the turf dug by stagecoaches and cattle drives the century before last. The turf itself in November, when I visited, 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 in the production of a hamburger and the stage least changed by the modern industrialization of meat. While the pork and chicken industries have consolidated the life cycle of those animals under a single roof, beef cattle still get born on hundreds of thousands of independently owned ranches scattered mainly across the West. Although a mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a funnel that starts out as wide as the Great Plains. These corporations have concluded that it takes so much land (and therefore capital) to produce a calf ready for the feedlot—ten acres per head at a minimum—that they’re better off leaving the ranching (and the risk) to the ranchers.
Steer number 534 spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his mother, 9534. The number signifies she was the thirty-fourth cow born in 1995; since none of her male offspring stick around long enough to meet, they’re all named 534. His father was a registered Angus by the name of Gar Precision 1680, a bull distinguished by the size and marbling of his offsprings’ rib-eye steaks. Gar Precision’s only contact with 9534 came by way of a fifteen-dollar mail-order straw of his semen.
Born on March 13, 2001, in the birthing shed across the road, 534 and his mother were turned out on pasture just as soon as the eighty-pound calf stood up and began nursing. Within 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, buffalo grass, green needlegrass.
Apart from the trauma of the Saturday in April when he was branded and castrated, one could imagine 534 looking back on those six months as the good old days. It might be foolish for us to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can say that a calf grazing on grass is at least doing what he has been supremely well suited by evolution to do. Oddly enough, though, eating grass is something that after October my steer will never have the opportunity to do again.
THE COEVOLUTIONARY RELATIONSHIP between cows and grass is one of nature’s underappreciated wonders; it also happens to be the key to understanding just about everything about modern meat. For the grasses, which have evolved to withstand the grazing of ruminants,