I thought I'd input some more of Pollan's writing & let others point out any mistakes he makes. I'd be curious to know.
Mind you, these are only excerpts, strung together. Pollan writes:
" . . . the feedlot is a city built upon America's mountain of surplus corn--or rather, corn plus the various pharmaceuticals a ruminant must have if it is to tolerate corn."
"Before being put on this highly concentrated diet [corn, beef tallow, protein supplement made of molasses and urea], new arrivals to the feedyard are treated to a few days of fresh long-stemmed hay. (They don't eat on the long ride and can lose up to one hundred pounds, so their rumens need to be carefully restarted.) Over the next several weeks they'll gradually step up to a ration of thirty-two pounds of feed, three-quarters of which is corn--nearly a half bushel a day."
"We've come to think of 'corn-fed' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you're referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous. Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn, a compact source of caloric energy, get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like. Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed on grass. A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef. (Modern-day hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild meat don't have our rates of heart disease.) In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn, humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.
Yet the USDA's grading system has been designed to reward marbling (a more appealing term than 'intramuscular fat,' which is what it is) and thus the feeding of corn to cattle. Indeed, corn has become so deeply engrained in the whole system of producing beef in America, that whenever I raised any questions about it among ranchers or feed-lot operators or animal scientists, people looked at me as if I'd just arrived from another planet. (Or perhaps from Argentina, where excellent steaks are produced on nothing but grass.)"
"The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories on the market. Of course, it was the same industrial logic--protein is protein--that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this was spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. REndered bovine meat and bonemeal represented the cheapest, most convenient way of satisfying a cow's protein requirement (never mind these animals are herbivores by evolution) and so appeared on the daily menus of Poky and most other feedyards until the FDA banned the practice in 1997."
All quoted material comes from Pollan.
Herring405
