A couple of weeks ago I picked up a book called "Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. I have a personal goal of broadening my knowledge through reading, and I heard that this book was highly recommended. I"m about a quarter of the way through the book, and the author has shed light on the cattle and corn industry and how they are infinitely intertwined. (hint: most cows are NOT as happy as the cow in the picture below *sad face*)
Here’s a nice little summary of what I’ve read so far:
Prior to world war 2, corn was a rotation crop on farmlands. Farmers would rotate corn, which takes nitrogen from the soil, with soy, which would return nitrogen to the soil. Eating habits across America were more vegetable heavy, and meat was a meal that people had once in a while, but not every day. The manure from cows and other farm animals was used as fertilizer and there was a closed loop of ecology in the farm.
After world war 2, there was an abundance of ammonium nitrate, which was used to make artillery for the war. When the war ended the secretary of state at the time came across a novel idea – use the ammonium nitrate to repopulate the soil with nitrogen. Farmers were subsidized for using this commercial fertilizer in place of rotating in soy or using manure. IN case there was an over harvest one year of corn, the secretary of state established a program to loan farmers money for their extra corn crop, so farmers would always have income, and the department of agriculture could sell the corn on the market when the supply became lower, in subsequent years.
However, because of the superbly effective commercial fertilizer, corn became produced at massive amounts, too great for people to consume at a normal rate (people don’t consume more because there is more available, we can only eat so much). Now the government became burdened with all this corn on their hands that the farmers were offloading to them, and they concocted another scheme – change farm animal’s diets to eat corn instead of grass. They incentivized farmers to breed cows that had higher corn-tolerance. But cows’ stomachs are not evolved for starch heavy diets and become highly acidic (normally their stomachs are pH neutral), so the government subsidized research to find antibiotics and diet supplements that lowered the acidity. Other things they found through research was that feeding a cow its own fat culled from boiling non-edible cow parts further hastened the fattening process.
The high fat, sugar and starch diet made cows grow faster than their natural rate, where farmers back before corn would slaughter a cow 4-5 years old, now these corn-fed cows are ready for slaughter at 14 months old. Slaughterhouses kill cows at a rate of 400 to 500 an hour, which if you imagine how big a cow is, is immensely fast. This process inevitably allows some non-edible material (poo, eyeballs, gut) to enter the edible material stream, and that is how diseases such as the mad cow disease and acid-resistant strains of e.coli have entered our human bodies as well.
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Having read up until this point, last night I still managed to forget my troubles and down a burger at a bar while hanging out with a good friend of mine (who was an omnivore as well). On the train ride home, I took out the book and began reading the next chapter on the actual slaughterhouse practices. I must have read about 5 pages before I began feeling a bit queasy. By the time I got home this queasiness had turned into a full blown nausea, leading me straight to the bathroom where I proceeded to (TMI ALERT!) vomit my dinner.
I slept soundly last night, and I think I heard mooing in my sleep. I'm seriously contemplating switching to eating veggies. Can this make me a happier person? As I begin to observe my body slowly rejecting meat, I wonder, can I consciously make the jump? What kind of difference can I, one person on this earth, make for those poor cows living in the feedlots eating corn flakes?
