Part 3
of 4 [ Part 1 | Part
2 | Part 4 ]
By Michael
Pollan
What keeps a feedlot animal
healthy -- or healthy enough -- are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas
production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the
incidence of liver infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America
end up in animal feed -- a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged,
leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant ''superbugs.''
In the debate over the use
of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between clinical
and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates don't object to treating
sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want to see the drugs lose
their efficacy because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals
to promote growth.
But the use of antibiotics
in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly
being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be
sick if not for what we feed them.
I asked Metzen what would happen
if antibiotics were banned from cattle feed. ''We just couldn't feed them
as hard,'' he said. ''Or we'd have a higher death loss.'' (Less than 3
percent of cattle die on the feedlot.) The price of beef would rise, he
said, since the whole system would have to slow down.
''Hell, if you gave them lots
of grass and space,'' he concluded dryly, ''I wouldn't have a job.''
Before heading over to Pen
43 for my reunion with No. 534, I stopped by the shed where recent arrivals
receive their hormone implants. The calves are funneled into a chute,
herded along by a ranch hand wielding an electric prod, then clutched
in a restrainer just long enough for another hand to inject a slow-release
pellet of Revlar, a synthetic estrogen, in the back of the ear.
The Blairs' pen had not yet
been implanted, and I was still struggling with the decision of whether
to forgo what is virtually a universal practice in the cattle industry
in the United States. (It has been banned in the European Union.)
American regulators permit
hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to human health has been
proved, even though measurable hormone residues do turn up in the meat
we eat. These contribute to the buildup of estrogenic compounds in the
environment, which some scientists believe may explain falling sperm counts
and premature maturation in girls.
Recent studies have also found
elevated levels of synthetic growth hormones in feedlot wastes; these
persistent chemicals eventually wind up in the waterways downstream of
feedlots, where scientists have found fish exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
The F.D.A. is opening an inquiry
into the problem, but for now, implanting hormones in beef cattle is legal
and financially irresistible: an implant
costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight of a steer
at slaughter, for a return of at least $25.
That could easily make the
difference between profit and loss on my investment in No. 534. Thinking
like a parent, I like the idea of feeding my son hamburgers free of synthetic
hormones. But thinking like a cattleman, there was really no decision
to make.
I asked Rich Blair what he
thought. ''I'd love to give up hormones,'' he said. ''If the consumer
said, We don't want hormones, we'd stop in a second. The cattle could
get along better without them. But the market signal's not there, and
as long as my competitor's doing it, I've got to do it, too.''
Around lunch time, Metzen and
I finally arrived at No. 534's pen. My first impression was that my steer
had landed himself a decent piece of real estate. The pen is far enough
from the feed mill to be fairly quiet, and it has a water view -- of what
I initially thought was a reservoir, until I noticed the brown scum.
The pen itself is surprisingly
spacious, slightly bigger than a basketball court, with a concrete feed
bunk out front and a freshwater trough in the back. I climbed over the
railing and joined the 90 steers, which, en masse, retreated a few steps,
then paused.
I had on the same carrot-colored
sweater I'd worn to the ranch in South Dakota, hoping to jog my steer's
memory. Way off in the back, I spotted him -- those three white blazes.
As I gingerly stepped toward him, the quietly shuffling mass of black
cowhide between us parted, and there No. 534 and I stood, staring dumbly
at each other.
Glint of recognition? None
whatsoever. I told myself not to take it personally. No. 534 had been
bred for his marbling, after all, not his intellect.
I don't know enough about the
emotional life of cows to say with any confidence if No. 534 was miserable,
bored or melancholy, but I would not say he looked happy. I noticed that
his eyes looked a little bloodshot. Some animals are irritated by the
fecal dust that floats in the feedlot air; maybe that explained the sullen
gaze with which he fixed me.
Unhappy or not, though, No.
534 had clearly been eating well. My animal had put on a couple hundred
pounds since we'd last met, and he looked it: thicker across the shoulders
and round as a barrel through the middle. He carried himself more like
a steer now than a calf, even though he was still less than a year old.
Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation. ''That's a handsome
looking beef you've got there.''
Staring at No. 534, I could
picture the white lines of the butcher's chart dissecting his black hide:
rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket. One way of looking at
No. 534 -- the industrial way -- was as an efficient machine for turning
feed corn into beef.
Every day between now and his
slaughter date in June, No. 534 will convert 32 pounds of feed (25 of
them corn) into another three and a half pounds of flesh. Poky is indeed
a factory, transforming cheap raw materials into a less-cheap finished
product, as fast as bovinely possible.
Yet the factory metaphor obscures
as much as it reveals about the creature that stood before me. For
this steer was not a machine in a factory but an animal in a web of relationships
that link him to certain other animals, plants and microbes, as well as
to the earth.
And
one of those other animals is us.
The unnaturally rich diet of
corn that has compromised No. 534's health is fattening his flesh in a
way that in turn may compromise the health of the humans who will eat
him. The antibiotics he's consuming with his corn were at that very moment
selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the environment they wind up,
for bacteria that could someday infect us and resist the drugs we depend
on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and
whatever happens to it also happens to us.
I thought about the deep pile
of manure that No. 534 and I were standing in. We don't know much about
the hormones in it -- where they will end up or what they might do once
they get there -- but we do know something about the bacteria. One particularly
lethal bug most probably resided in the manure beneath my feet.
Escherichia coli 0157 is a
relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated
in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom
carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause
a fatal infection.
Most of the microbes that reside
in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by
the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a
neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot
cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment
acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our
stomach acids -- and go on to kill us.
By acidifying a cow's gut with
corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection.
Yet this process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist,
has discovered that switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in the final
days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157 in its manure
by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however, is considered wildly
impractical by the cattle industry.
So much comes back to corn,
this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways to be not cheap at all.
While I stood in No. 534's pen, a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed
bunk and released a golden stream of feed.
The animals stepped up to the
bunk for their lunch. The $1.60 a day I'm paying for three giant meals
is a bargain only by the narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take into
account, for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance
or food poisoning by E. coli or all the environmental costs associated
with industrial corn.
For if you follow the corn
from this bunk back to the fields where it grows, you will find an
80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical herbicide and
fertilizer than any other crop.
Keep going and you can trace
the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into
the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is the right word) a
12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''
But you can go farther still,
and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to the
oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started life as part of a food
chain that derived all its energy from the sun; now that corn constitutes
such an important link in his food chain, he is the product of an industrial
system powered by fossil fuel.
(And in turn, defended by the
military -- another uncounted cost of ''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel,
a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, if 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.
Sometime in June, No. 534 will
be ready for slaughter. Though only
14 months old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds and
will move with the lumbering deliberateness of the obese. One morning,
a cattle trailer from the National Beef plant in Liberal, Kan., will pull
in to Poky Feeders, drop a ramp and load No. 534 along with 35 of his
pen mates.
The 100-mile trip south to
Liberal is a straight shot on Route 83, a two-lane highway on which most
of the traffic consists of speeding tractor-trailers carrying either cattle
or corn. The National Beef plant is a sprawling gray-and-white complex
in a neighborhood of trailer homes and tiny houses a notch up from shanty.
These are, presumably, the
homes of the Mexican and Asian immigrants who make up a large portion
of the plant's work force. The meat business has made southwestern Kansas
an unexpectedly diverse corner of the country.
A few hours after their arrival
in the holding pens outside the factory, a plant worker will open a gate
and herd No. 534 and his pen mates into an alley that makes a couple of
turns before narrowing down to a single-file chute. The chute becomes
a ramp that leads the animals up to a second-story platform and then disappears
through a blue door.
That door is as close to the
kill floor as the plant managers were prepared to let me go.
I could see whatever I wanted
to farther on -- the cold room where carcasses are graded, the food-safety
lab, the fabrication room where the carcasses are broken down into cuts
-- on the condition that I didn't take pictures or talk to employees.
But the stunning, bleeding and evisceration process was off limits to
a journalist, even a cattleman-journalist like myself.
Click
here to read the continuation of this story
New
York Times March 31, 2002
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