Analysis of IV) The Feedlot: Making Meat

This is the chapter where the author opens up the Pandora's box of industrial beef.
This is the chapter he referred to in the introduction, about spoiling appetites.
This chapter is mind blowing for a meat lover.

Following the trail of corn into the industrial feedlot of Kansas, and into the mouth of steer # 534.

What seemed like a simple process of growing cows, waiting for them to get fat, then sending them into the slaughter house, is in fact, a downright violation of evolution and biology.


source: The food futurist

Filling in the blanks: this industry beef producing "machine" (as this entire chapter depicts this) causes pollution, toxic waste, and deadly pathogens in the form of a massive manure lagoon. It’s a simple matter of biology that not only allows cows to live off of grass it makes them uniquely suited to do so.

The presented are that, forcing cows to off of corn is not only unnatural, it’s dangerously unhealthy. The feed are filled with antibiotics, growth hormones, and synthetic protein and fats from other cows; it is implied that super bugs developed from the antibiotics may just end up in someones hamburger.

“Most antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed, a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged (except in agriculture), is leading directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant superbugs.” These antibiotics are only necessary because we insist on forcing cows to live off of corn .

All that cheap corn that fattens up the cow is also fattening us up with excess saturated fat.

This pounding information is all tying into a common theme: that humans tries to create an biological system intended for industry, defying mother nature, and creating new problems that originally took care of itself!

Cow stomach gassed up due to corn? no problem, just add medicine to the feed! Not only that, the cows are NOT naturally designed to live in over crowded pens!

This is certainly parallels the peak of the industrial revolution in London. People moving into cramped and filthy cities from the country side, polluted living quarters of the workers, dangerous working conditions. (Compare this with the life of steer 534)


source: Industrial Revolution


The implication here is strong: the industrial cattle producing "factory" is filling a hole by digging another.

Taking this logic further, not only is this method of making meat damaging to the environment, but also ourselves; the cattle's goes through a life of suffering in the pen, us humans are the linked directly to these animals, we will have to pay the price eventually.

The cows are slowly dying everyday because we insist on growing more of a certain crop then we need and instead of growing less we are force feeding it down their throats so we can save ourselves some money.

This process reminds me of a term "stuffing the duck" in Chinese, it describes force-feeding, jamming food in a duck to fatten it before slaughter.

According to the author, if we assume that "we are what we eat", then we are not far from corn and oil...