The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [42]
The pen 534 lives in is surprisingly spacious, about the size of a hockey rink, with a concrete feed bunk along the road, and a fresh water trough out back. I climbed over the railing and joined the ninety steers, which, en masse, retreated a few lumbering steps, and then stopped to see what I would do.
I had on the same carrot-colored sweater I’d worn to the ranch in South Dakota, hoping to elicit some glint of recognition from my steer. I couldn’t find him at first; all the faces staring at me were either completely black or bore an unfamiliar pattern of white marks. And then I spotted him—the three white blazes—way off in the back. As I gingerly stepped toward him the quietly shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted, and there stood 534 and I, staring dumbly at one another. Glint of recognition? None, none whatsoever. I told myself not to take it personally; 534 and his pen mates have been bred for their marbling, after all, not their ability to form attachments.
I noticed that 534’s eyes looked a little bloodshot. Dr. Metzin had told me that some animals are irritated by feedlot dust. The problem is especially serious in the summer months, when the animals kick up clouds of the stuff and workers have to spray the pens with water to keep it down. I had to remind myself that this is not ordinary dirt dust, inasmuch as the dirt in a feedyard is not ordinary dirt; no, this is fecal dust. But apart from the air quality, how did feedlot life seem to be agreeing with 534? I don’t know enough about the emotional life of a steer to say with confidence that 534 was miserable, bored, or indifferent, but I would not say he looked happy.
He’s clearly eating well, though. My steer had put on a couple hundred pounds since we’d last met, and he looked it: thicker across the shoulder and round as a barrel through the middle. He carried himself more like a steer now than a calf, even though his first birthday was still two months away. Dr. Metzin complimented me on his size and conformation. “That’s a handsome-looking beef you got there.” (Shucks.)
If I stared at my steer hard enough, I could imagine the white lines of the butcher’s chart dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, tenderloin, brisket. One way of looking at 534—the feedlot way, the industrial way—was as a most impressive machine for turning number 2 field corn into cuts of beef. Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 will convert thirty-two pounds of feed into four pounds of gain—new muscle, fat, and bone. This at least is how 534 appears in the computer program I’d seen at the mill: the ratio of feed to gain that determines his efficiency. (Compared to other food animals, cattle are terribly inefficient: The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.) Poky Feeders is indeed a factory, transforming—as fast as bovinely possible—cheap raw materials into a less cheap finished product, through the mechanism of bovine metabolism.
Yet metaphors of the factory and the machine obscure as much as they reveal about the creature standing before me. He has, of course, another, quite different identity—as an animal, I mean, connected as all animals must be to certain other animals and plants and microbes, as well as to the earth and the sun. He’s a link in a food chain, a thread in a far-reaching web of ecological relationships. Looked at from this