Hi gang,
I came across this article on the web. It is very
interesting, and very long so I am just going to post
the very beginning and the link to the rest. To view
articles on nytimes.com I think you need a user id and
password, but it is free and I have never been espamed
by them.
Larry
Power Steer
By MICHAEL POLLAN
arden City, Kan., missed out on the suburban building
boom of the postwar years. What it got instead were
sprawling subdivisions of cattle. These feedlots --
the nation's first -- began rising on the high plains
of western Kansas in the 50's, and by now developments
catering to cows are far more common here than
developments catering to people.
You'll be speeding down one of Finney County's ramrod
roads when the empty, dun-colored 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 a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma whose
Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men's-room than
cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach of a feedlot
for more than a mile. Then it's upon you: Poky
Feeders, population 37,000. Cattle pens stretch to the
horizon, each one home to 150 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 feedlot's beating heart: a
chugging, silvery feed mill that soars like an
industrial cathedral over this teeming metropolis of
meat.
I traveled to Poky early in January with the slightly
improbable notion of visiting one particular resident:
a young black steer that I'd met in the fall on a
ranch in Vale, S.D. The steer, in fact, belonged to
me. I'd purchased him as an 8-month-old calf from the
Blair brothers, Ed and Rich, for $598. I was paying
Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room, board and meds
and hoped to sell him at a profit after he was
fattened.
My interest in the steer was not strictly financial,
however, or even gustatory, though I plan to retrieve
some steaks from the Kansas packing plant where No.
534, as he is known, has an appointment with the
stunner in June. No, my primary interest in this
animal was educational. I wanted to find out how a
modern, industrial steak is produced in America these
days, from insemination to slaughter.
Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing,
has become problematic in recent years. Though beef
consumption spiked upward during the flush 90's, the
longer-term trend is down, and many people will tell
you they no longer eat the stuff. Inevitably they'll
bring up mad-cow disease (and the accompanying
revelation that industrial agriculture has transformed
these ruminants into carnivores -- indeed, into
cannibals). They might mention their concerns about E.
coli contamination or antibiotics in the feed. Then
there are the many environmental problems, like
groundwater pollution, associated with ''Concentrated
Animal Feeding Operations.'' (The word ''farm'' no
longer applies.) And of course there are questions of
animal welfare. How are we treating the animals we eat
while they're alive, and then how humanely are we
''dispatching'' them, to borrow an industry euphemism?
Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed
by the shame of killing and, since Upton Sinclair's
writing of ''The Jungle,'' by questions about what
we're really eating when we eat meat. Forgetting, or
willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many
beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry. (What
grocery-store item is more silent about its origins
than a shrink-wrapped steak?) Yet I recently began to
feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was
going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to
myself, as well as to the animals, to take more
responsibility for the invisible but crucial
transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat.
I'd try to own it, in other words.
So this is the biography of my cow.
link to the rest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/31BEEF.html
All about beef
