Corn: If I’m going to talk about beef, I have to talk about corn. Corn is being grown in massive quantities. And not the juicy sweet corn that appears at the farmer’s market begging to be shucked and grilled and slathered with herbed butter. Nope. This corn is industrial grade corn that is inedible for human consumption. Yet, farmers in America are being subsidized by Uncle Sam to plant acres upon acres of the stuff. In fact, to stay afloat financially, farmers have to grow more than is needed. What happens to the excess? The corn is dumped into colossal piles creating gargantuan mountains of inedible food. (A lot of it is destined for highly processed foods but that’s another post!)
Cattle: Let’s take a moment for a short anatomy lesson. Cattle are ruminates. They have 4 stomachs for digesting food. They have a super capacity for taking food that has no nutritional value for humans (like grasses and clover) and extracting nutrients by chewing and swallowing, then regurgitating the mass (cud) to be further digested in each of the four stomachs. Pretty cool.
Unfortunately, someone got the brainy idea that one way of eliminating the vast overproduction of corn would be to feed it to cattle, even though cattle do not have the ability to digest the corn. So what happens when you give an animal food whose body is not designed to digest? Michael Pollan wrote an article in the New York Times about what happens:
“Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates.A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.”
Yea baby! Grill me up a burger from that meat! The remedy for the problem is to give the cattle copious amounts of antibiotics and other pharmaceutics to keep the animal alive until it can be slaughtered. At one time cattle were brought to market when the animals were 4 to 5 years…now its 14 -16 months. Cattle need to be fattened up quickly to make the whole production profitable…enter the factory farm: huge feed lots where animals, standing in their own excrement, are corralled into small areas. There’s a whole bunch of other problems and ramifications from the production of factory farmed beef. Indeed books have been written on the subject. Suffice it to say, I think it’s pretty clear why I just can’t bring myself to ever spend one red cent on factory farmed beef.
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| Lucky me! I get my beef from Tassajara Meats at my local farmer's market. |
Grass fed beef on the other hand, is letting the animal do what it was created to do. Grasses and clover are so conveniently converted into a high quality, healthy protein. Grass fed beef is lower in calories and fat than factory farmed beef. It’s high in omega-3 fatty acids. True, grass fed beef is expensive. So what I do is use smaller quantities and add to the meat beans and grains. Great flavor, awesome nutrition, humane animal husbandry. Hey, that would make a good bumper sticker. You heard it here first!
(PS...if you want to know more about the relationship between corn and factory farmed beef watch Food Inc and King Corn. Both are eye openers!)
