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.