It all comes back together. It’s a bit of a read, but Power Steer by Michael Pollan is a good piece of journalism on where beef comes from. He moralizes only a little bit. He purchased a steer in order to follow it through the industrial farming process. Most of the time the facts speak for themselves. Among those facts is a calculation that I found familiar:
It might be possible to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.
Anyway, I dug it. Maybe you will too, though if you’re planning to eat at the Outback, you might put off the article until tomorrow.
”They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, with a note of envy, of grazing cattle, ”fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or bored.” Nietzsche clearly had never seen a feedlot.
Leave a Reply