In the last section I included a critique of the dairy industry and their add campaign of "Got Milk?". I want to be clear that I am not against dairy farmers, cattle ranchers or any farmers, for that matter. I am, however very critical of their "industries". A small dairy farmer is not the dairy industry. The dairy industry is factory farms, international food corporations, marketing departments and multi million dollar add campaigns. The small dairy farmer is held captive by the prices set by the dairy industry's control of the market. In my memory I have many instances where small dairy farmers dumped their milk in protest of low prices. If small family farms were the dairy industry would they not be sharing in the profits of that industry?
Currently the dairy industry imports dairy products from countries as far away as China so as to have a less expensive base of dairy ingredients for processed foods like flavored chips and cheese poofs. This increases the dairy industry's profits. This, even though there is a surplus of milk produced domestically. This process further undercuts the small dairy farmer. Do we have milk yet?
In this next section I critique the meat producing industry, not the farmers involved. An industry that has, like the dairy industry, successfully convinced us that we have to eat more of their products than necessary. This is how all food industries operate. This is how business operates. They must get the population to eat or buy as much of their product as possible. This makes them money. This makes the investors profit.
To stay healthy, do we really have to eat meat with every meal? Do we have to have a meat ingredient in every dish we cook? Where does that shrink-wrapped-on-styrofoam steak come from? It's now just another product to buy. Where does that dollar burger come from? It's a convenient meal on the go. What about those eggs? Do all eggs have paper thin shells? That crispy bacon, is it always so uniform in its fat content? How do they get it to be low fat?
The First People ate meat. They had what we now call a traditional diet. The difference is they hunted their meat. The animals lived a life that was their own. The animals were free to roam and live in the world. There was a balance of hunter and prey. The hunters revered their quarry and viewed the animals as sacred because they were a life giving food source, as well as a source for tools, clothing and shelter. The animals were integral to The People. Through its factory farms our society breeds, confines, abuses and slaughters the animals it eats. Our process completely devalues the relationship between people and animals. Our process creates disconnection from the Earth and all that lives on it, even ourselves.
We can domesticate animals and still have a connection to them. We can raise animals for our food without devaluing the fact they are alive. We do not eat products. We eat living things as all else in nature does. But we insist on separating ourselves from nature, from the Earth, from our food as much as possible. We create a barrier from the visceral act of killing our food. The majority of us do not kill to eat. We pay someone to do it for us.
Here is the next chapter.
Feeding Cattle Grain
To make a more sustainable food production future for ourselves as a population, we need to change our habits and assumptions about food. We need to eat less animal products. We need to eat less milk, eggs, cheese and especially less meat.
To raise animals for slaughter in a modern, mechanized way to feed as many people as currently consume meat is a very resource intensive and wasteful method of producing food. Grain must first be grown. The ground turned and plowed. The seeds planted. The fertilizers made. In the case of conventional agriculture, fertilizers are made out of extremely toxic petrochemicals using energy intensive processes within factories. The fertilizers are then applied. The plants harvested. The grain separated then processed into feed. Trucked to a warehouse. Trucked to a feed store. Bought by the farmer and finally fed to their cattle. Just so someone can eat the meat of a cow. Only ten percent of the grain fed to a cow becomes edible body mass. It is more beneficial and more efficient to feed people the grain directly rather than to feed grain to animals who are then slaughtered and fed to people.
Pasturing cattle is more efficient than grain feeding the cattle for slaughter. It would be better and simpler to eat the grain directly and eat less of pasture raised meat, or none at all. Changing our habits could have a direct impact on how food is produced and allocated.
If cheap, easily accessed energy is not available to the agricultural industry, grain feeding of cattle will become cost prohibitive. Rather than eating more meat because there is more of it available due to grain feeding, we would then be eating less because there is less produced, or it would become too expensive to afford as a staple food. Or, our meat production industry would pasture feed their cattle and produce less beef for consumption, driving demand down. Or, we could just eat less beef demanding it be pasture raised because it’s one way to help the planet survive, sustain ourselves as a population and feed more people.
We have a choice.
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