Do Not Read This Blog Post: Part 2

I know that I promised you the answer to "why corn?", but here's the thing. On Saturday, my 8 month old developed a fever of 103. She continued to have a fever until Wednesday morning. On Sunday, my 4YO started the fever, and it's still going strong. On Wednesday, my 2YO developed the fever. Now, I probably could have managed to post a blog entry before now, except that my husband has a "man cold". In fact, he had a man cold three weeks ago, and this past week decided his man cold wasn't enough and he needed to get really sick and be completely out of commission and bed-ridden for 5 days solid. "Wah, I feel woozy. Wah, I'm disoriented. Wah, my head is pounding. Wah, I have no peripheral vision. Wah, I can't stay upright." Wuss. Sorry, I mean, poor little bunny. Needless to say my ability to blog, as well as my ability to go foraging for local dinner meat, has gone right out the window.

However, I did read one quick little tidbit from Omnivore's Dilemma while rocking my daughter to sleep at 2 in the morning after she had vomited on me for the 4th time that day.

Are you ready? You can still turn back.

Trust me, you don't want to think about this. Stay ignorant!

Pigs raised in a CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) are weaned just a few days after they're born, instead of the few weeks they would wean in nature. This causes them to have a life-long need to suckle. Unable to resist this temptation, they bite the tails of the other pigs. Now, usually if a pig's tail is bitten it will get aggressive and confront the offender, but CAFO pigs are so demoralized by their living situation that they just ignore the biting. This leads to infection. So, to stop this from happening, pigs raised in CAFOs have their tails clipped at a young age. Oh, and they don't cut the tails off so the other pigs won't bite them, they cut the tails off to make them more sensitive so that when the other pigs bite them even the demoralized CAFO pigs will turn around and get aggressive.

Do Not Read This Blog Post: Part 1

Seriously, I'm not kidding.

This is your last chance. Take the blue pill.

All right, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Several friends, on reading my blog, suggested I read a book called The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. (By the way, I'm never speaking to either of you again.) I've just finished the 1st of three parts to this book and I'm going to sum up what I've learned. After all, why should I suffer alone?

I swear I'm going to do it. I am not messing around here people.

Fine, whatever.

When cows eat grass:

1. Sunlight and rain make the grass grow.
2. The cow eats the grass.
3. The cow spreads the grass seed, planting it with his hooves.
4. The cow fertilizes the grass seed with manure.
5. In the cow's rumen (one of its many stomach units) the grass ferments, is broken down by bacteria, and is digested and turned into high quality protein.

So basically, a useless plant to humans, grass is grown and sustained by the cow, and turned into protein, using a sustainable, solar-powered food chain that produces food by transforming sunlight into protein. How cool is that?

When cows eat corn:



Corn fed cows nurse for the first few months of their life and graze on grass until around 8 months of age.

1. The cow is transported from the grass lands to the feedlot.
2. At the feedlot they are given a mixture of corn, alfalfa hay, silage, liquefied fat (beef tallow...yup, we're forcing this herbivore into cannibalism), protein supplements (molasses and urea, a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas), liquid vitamins, synthetic estrogen and antibiotics.
3. The cow's rumen isn't meant to break down corn the way it does grass so... The fermentation of corn in the cows rumen causes tons of extra gas as well as a layer of foamy slime that traps the gas, causing it to inflate like a balloon until the rumen presses against the animal's lungs.
4. When this happens they force a hose down the animal's esophagus to keep it from suffocating.
   
5. The cow develops acidosis. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, and a general weakening of the immune system leaving the animal vulnerable to pneumonia, as well as a whole host of other nasty feedlot illnesses. They're given tons of antibiotics to deal with these conditions. However...
6. Over time the acids from digesting the corn eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the cow's bloodstream. The microbes end up in the liver where they form abscesses and impair liver function. In some pens up to 70 percent of cows are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.
   
7. The good news is, the cows are fattened up in 14 months with corn instead of the 4 years it takes with grass. And the meat they produce are filled with lots more yummy saturated fats and lots less of those troublesomely healthy omega 3 fatty acids, as compared to their grass grown brethren.
   

Oh, and while at the feedlot the animals create a lagoon of manure with nitrogen and phosphorus levels so high that the manure can't be used on crops for fertilizer because they would kill them. It also contains heavy metals and hormone residues, all which end up in waterways downstream from the feedlots. They sleep on large piles of manure which end up on their hides and thus in our hamburgers requiring us to cook them longer so we don't die from the e coli that breeds in said cow shit that, I repeat, ends up in our food.

So, instead of a nice closed loop system of sunlight energy turning into healthy animal protein, at 25 pounds of corn a day a steer will have consumed in his lifetime the equivalent of thirty-five gallons of oil, or nearly a barrel. That's just one. Some plants slaughter 400 animals an hour. Plus there's the antibiotics that have to be produced, the protein supplements, the vitamins, the synthetic estrogen, the maintaining of the feedlots, the shipping of the corn, etc., etc. All these things to make up for feeding them something they are not biologically designed to eat!

So, with all the trouble and oil it requires to feed cows corn instead of grass, why are we doing it? Well, let's talk about that. Next time. In part two. You don't want to read that one either. Trust me. It gets worse then cow poop in your hamburger.

Oh, And About That Ham

If you're reading my posts in order you may or may not have noticed that I picked up a "fresh ham shank" from Balance Rock the other day. Well, tonight I cooked it.

When I was a little girl I remember how much I absolutely loved Thanksgiving dinner. It was probably my most favorite holiday. I loved a whole mouthful of turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, and gravy all at once. It was like heaven. I also remembered my mother making some silly comment about how some day she'd come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner. I distinctly remember my precocious response, "You can come but you're cooking it. There's no way I'm ever sticking my hand up a turkey's butt."

Yup, that's me, the happily unaware meat eater. My meat does not come with a head attached, nor feathers, nor anything else to remind me that it was once a living breathing thing. And in my mind I can easily disassociate my meat products from the animals they used to be. I need to be able to disassociate because as you all now know my becoming a vegetarian would most definitely lead to starvation.

So, I love bacon. It does not look like Wilbur. I love pork chops. Also, no resemblance to Wilbur. And who doesn't love a freshly warmed honey baked ham? No Wilbur! So, when I saw a "fresh ham shank" sitting in the freezer of my ecologically responsible local farm store, I decided I would go for it even though I knew it would not be conveniently spiral sliced for me.

Yeah, want to know what a "fresh ham shank" looks like?

This is my idea of a yummy ham:




See how little this looks like the animal it came from?











This, on the other hand, is a ham shank.




I can picture where it's little leg used to be!




Imagine my surprise when I removed the shank from the opaque butcher paper, which I know they used to hide the contents from unsuspecting souls like myself, only to find an actual honest to goodness pig hind-quarter...blood and all! Eeewww! It still had the skin on it! Why didn't anyone warn me? Yeah, yeah, I've seen chicken skin and turkey skin, but I didn't grow up on a farm so I've never seen pig skin. It still had a few stray hairs! Ach!

Okay, okay, so I guess I'm growing up a little here. I still use a long spoon to get the giblets out of my turkey butt and push the onion and carrots inside. But today I actually did score an honest to goodness ham shank per the instructions in my Joy Of Cooking cookbook and I have to say that for the next 3 hours the house smelled tremendous.

I will admit to feeling a little bit guilty about being a meat eater, though. I mean, I just can't help feeling sad knowing that, because of me, somewhere out there is a very gimpy three-legged pig.

Back to Balance

So I finally made a return to Balance Rock Farm. It was a beautiful Thursday morning. I love Thursdays. It's the one day a week when my in-laws pick up my two wonderful boys around 8:30 in the morning and it's just me and the baby until around 4:00 at night. It's my errand day. One time it was my sit around and do nothing day, but then I really hated the ensuing Friday because of all the pile up my laziness created.

So, with just one child in tow I made my way back to the farm. We went in and actually took some time perusing the small shelves and refrigerators for the various local products available. They had a nice selection of locally made cheeses this time and the freezers were full of a variety of meats. I picked up some more pork chops, a whole chicken, and a fresh ham shank, as well as some cheddar cheese. It was a very relaxing trip. I only had to explain to Allison once that no she could not have any of the various varieties of candy because, thankfully, she has yet to grow any teeth (we're still nursing). It was great.

We proceeded benignly to the register to pay for our goods and I plotted my future Thursdays and my local eating plans around a weekly trip out here. We had a nice long chat with the man who owns the farm (really long, I wasn't sure we were getting out of there). Then, as we made our way to the door he added, "Oh, by the way, I came over here to the shop because I saw you pulling in, but I just wanted to let you know we decided to start closing on Thursdays from now on. Have a nice day!"