Meat and post-classic America

If we all became vegans, there would be an agricultural crash; it would last just long enough for all the meat interests, corporate and family, to get more subsidies from the government. Farm lobbyist are more influential than anybody save the NRA.

Most of the howling about factory farms is about meat. Long experience growing meat animals has led to the livestock, including poultry, being penned; production is much higher if animals are closed in. Cattle grazing on the plains, the round-up, cattle drives, all the staples of Westerns? Gone, just gone.

Contemporary family farms do have huge barns, filled with agricultural machines; grain is the big product on family farms and most grain is produced on family farms. Family farms aren't the quaint 160 acres of yesteryear, though. A combination of leasing, futures contracts, and subsidized bank loans has led to family farms becoming huge. The owners may be related, but most of the work is done by managers and employees; the family lives in Miami, maybe. Or Paris. Use your imagination.

Who cares? What about those factory farms, that we all should hate? Factory farms produce four fifths of the meat in the US. Factory farms are sheds full of penned cattle or huge buildings full of caged chickens. They are notorious for disease, waste problems, animal cruelty. Dealing with waste is a sensational problem. Each cow, or pig, is a living poop machine. A 4.5 pound hen produces 2 pounds a week of chicken poop, a 1400 pound cow, 350 pounds, a 180 pound pig 90 pounds. Those pigs eat like.....

An example: In 2000, a feedlot in Nebraska had 85,000 cattle on 600 acres. That's about 142 cows per acre. Not exactly 2 acre zoning. If you figure that a third of the 600 acres is devoted to transport, processing, storage, and so on, you get about 212 per acre. They would need to be put in rows, side by side, nose to butt. Surprise: they are. One of the first cruel oddities is that the tails of the cows are amputated lest they bother the cows in back of them.

How do they spend their day on the feedlot? Bo-ring. Eat, then sleep, then eat. Eat really a lot. No exercise; exercise makes the meat tough. Oh, I forgot: Eat, then poop, then sleep, then eat, then poop, then sleep. That's 29,750,000 pounds of cow poop on our Nebraska feedlot -- every week. Every week. Cow poop stops for no man. Yipes. That's a lot of cow poop. And that's just one feedlot.

So what? Well, a couple of things. The poop has to go somewhere. Where? How does it get removed from the sheds? Turns out there are many competing belt systems to haul the poop out of the sheds. By the time it reaches the outside world, half the weight is evaporated as moisture. Down to about 15,000,000 pounds for this feedlot. Then it is dried further, processed, and ultimately becomes a solid ten percent of what was originally pooped. Fine. We are down to 3,000,000 pounds. The manure is then put on trains or trucks, and taken to grain farms, where it is used for fertilizer. Turns out the cow pee is a much more difficult problem, and requires several more steps to make relatively safe.

Ah, the cycle is complete. Zen stuff. Simple ideas, complex systems. Santa Fe Institute ideas. But this poop thing is just an interesting diversion from whatever the point of the essay is.

Each step in the cycle consumes stunning amounts of energy, in a lot of forms. Who knows how many gallons of gas or diesel we are throwing at each pound of meat? The systems have grown up without any real planning, and are not very efficient. Surprise. American energy costs have been so subsidized, and farming so subsidized, that both grain farms and feedlot operations are largely government-sponsored operations. Strange. "Keep your gummint hands off my Medicare" writ large. Like the defense industry. Strange.

Pretend that we all became vegans. Hell, pretend that half of us become vegans. I can certainly imagine a holiday dinner with no meat, and no fake meat. And less expensive than the whole turkey thing. TG dinner is mostly vegan anyway. Take away the turkey ("Oh, and it's not dry at all"), and we're in vegan territory. I actually think most folks wouldn't care much; I wouldn't. Despite the table talk, turkey is always dry. Stuffing, the dreaded lima beans, turnip, squash, mashed, sweets, yams. Even cranberries, which I loathe. More than enough different eats. Get that dry old animal away from me. Maybe I'm not the one who should be talking about dry old animals.

I would have guessed that meat consumption in the US crashed in the late 20th century. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In 1950, we each ate 144 pounds of meat; in 2005, 221 pounds. Everybody I know, though, is eating less meat. Is this a class issue? A race issue? What's going on?

Take pork; both race and class matter. In 2000, eating pork varied inversely with income. Race? Non-hispanic black folks are easily the highest consumers of pork. Hmm. If you put those together, you get the picture of poor black folks being the heaviest consumers of pork. Middle age men eat the most pork of all age-gender groups. Go figure.

Eating beef also varies inversely with income. The ethnicity numbers are about the same as pork. Strangely, though, Hispanic folks beat everyone else, easily, in the amount of beef eaten at home. Who knew?

Rural folks eat more beef and pork than their city cousins. But in age and gender, the big consumers of beef are young men. McDonald's?

Chicken? Consumption varies directly with income; the more money you make, the more chicken you eat. People living alone eat the most chicken. Odd. Families of more than eight eat the least chicken. I couldn't find more numbers for chicken. I did find numbers on exports; chicken exports have gone up a gazillion percent, to both asian and arab countries. Hmmm. What countries lend us most money?

The outcome of it all: in america, race and class strike again, this time in an unexpected arena.

By now, I have bored myself silly, and lost whatever point there was. It's always fun to look up numbers, and numbers about animal poop are the best. I'm comfortable with the numbers.

Hidden in the numbers, and in the USDA reports about consumption of all this stuff, is a nervous tone. China, India and Brazil are all chowing down on increasing amounts of meat, and on increasing amounts of energy. The train has left the station, and is coming down the track on diet and energy both. The post-classic american decline will change our diets, as well as our addiction to killing millions of brown people. We will have competition in both.

Energy will very soon cost a bunch more; we can kill all the darker-shaded folks we want. Doesn't matter. Oil is going through the roof. Food is going through the roof, because so much of what we grow is heavily subsidized by low oil prices. Obvious stuff, well known, well publicized.

So, our sins are coming home to haunt us. All the money we have borrowed from China, in particular, but also India and some of the Arab countries, will be used to buy our own cows and chickens. Meat producers will rejoice. The rest of us will sink into the dietary penury we deserve, for having worshipped at the altar of supply/demand. No turkey for you, even if you want it.

Ah, starving by our own greed. Not just sitting in the dark in the cold; now there's no food, either. Nice metaphor for pretty much everything in the new century. Well, enjoy, I guess. It just sounds pitiful. Again, the picture of having so much, and just throwing it all away. What for? What did we get in return? Everything we touch turns to animal poop.


And the promised cartoon, in the best size I could make it without blurring.
Click on it for the full size:

Health Care

Imagine that the health care reform (reform? We don't have it to reform!) was for white people only.

Well, aside from the gasp that would have gone up, I think cradle to grave would have been passed in about fifteen minutes. Everyone forgets that all politics in this country begins with race. Why call it "Obamacare" so frequently and with such a delighted sneer? Maybe to connect it to a black president?

What if the Tea Baggers were folks of color? The National Guard would have been recalled from killing people in the Middle East, and pointed toward our own people.

I sent an email to the National Rifle Association suggesting that I would be glad to fund a program to train young black and Hispanic men in gun safety, and buy them their first gun. I waited a long time, then they apparently recovered from their laughing fits and told me they weren't interested now, but, by golly, if they became interested, they would get in touch. I'm guessing that my time in the nursing home will have passed before that will happen. And my great-grandchildren's time.

Why is that a funny story? Why is it so easy for us to accept that the country's largest and most effective lobbying group, by a big margin, has been in at least the last 50 years so clearly a bunch of virulent race-baiters?

I'm not advancing the fund of human knowledge to make this guess: A majority of white folks would be just as happy if slavery had continued. Maybe a close minority. Way fewer than half of whites voted for Obama running against an incompetent bozo and a smiling baboon. If it were just white folks, the bozo and baboon would have won handily.

What are we to do, then? Social Security was started because Roosevelt was worried about the Commies taking over if the white working classes weren't thrown a bone. Medicare was started because white people got sick of paying granny's hospital bills. And so on. But both to buy off the white folks.

The real progressive of my time was, unexpectedly, Lyndon Johnson. A Texan, born of nativist stock, he breathlessly gambled all his political capital, all his arm bending skills, and just plain bribery to get the Civil Rights Bill passed in the mid-sixties.

The Civil Rights Bill would not pass today -- it wouldn't even reach a vote. Johnson was aware of what he was doing. He knew that he had lost the South to the mouth-foaming, howling right for at least a generation. Turns out to be at least two generations, and probably three.

I don't think, though, that he gave weight to two things: one, that the Vietnam war would lose him the support of all those who didn't hate him already, the other that the progressives were a smaller bunch in the rest of the nation than he originally thought.

Toward his death he did realized some of what he had turned loose. Bush the Younger was the best and brightest (heh!) of the products of the Johnson era, at least until 2012, when the Baggers and their bagmen will come to power. Reagan was the most subtle, using his smiling senility to disguise mass murder in numbers that hadn't been reached in, well, a decade. After Vietnam (casualties: 5 million, at least), Guatemala, El Salvador, and all the rest of the benign 80s were a drop in the bucket. A big drop, maybe half cup. Surely not more than, say, two million. Staggering.

I will say, in Johnson's defense, and I don't much like defending him, that the number killed in Vietnam only picked up speed after Nixon slithered into command. The republicans -- Nixon, Reagan, Bush, have, by the nature of their virulent racial antagonisms, been just slightly more willing to murder the non-white. Just slightly.

In Massachusetts, remember that Baker is of this tribe, the know-nothings, the Baggers, the mouth-foaming racists, the folks who would have seniors begging on the street for food money. Impeccable swine, with innocent faces. Damn, how I loathe those people, the "we have too much debt" to pay for health care, but not the trillion-and-a-half bill for murdering Iraqis. As I said before, though, only slightly worse than the others.

It gets personal when I'm the one who could be eating the cat food, and crawling over the bodies of dead elders to get to the clinic. Miles the Cat better get used to being on short rations, just like the rest of us.

And that's where I started. Now that I think it through, since I'm white, the let-them-eat-cat-food advocates will always find a way to get me human food and get to the doc. If I weren't white, I'd be packing my bags and heading to Costa Rica, Canada, New Zealand, some places in Africa, some places in Europe. Keep those passports handy, folks. But, I am white.

I'll eat, I'm just not so sure about you about my darker-skinned fellow citizens

How humiliating for me to say that, in my country, in my lifetime.

Religious War 4

A friend suggested that I look on the sunny side. Here goes:

If it walks like a duck, and so on. If we are constantly in the business of accumulating the corpses of dark people, decade after decade, we are ducks.

Well, then, if not ducks, what are we? How about mass murderers? I can't think of another post-WW11 country -- I don't know enough about all the previous ones -- with our mass killing credentials.

Mao and the Cultural Revolution? Nope; close, but not enough bodies and, really, too short a time to really count. Cambodia? A trifling 3 million total. Don't forget; we've gotten up to a million in just the last decade, easily. Vietnam? Well, 5.4 million total; I'll give us credit for maybe 4 million. We had all the things that made the big bangs, and used them joyfully. We really did love dropping stuff on those little brown folks.

I listed a bunch more over the last blogs. Maybe I've missed one or two; Alert Readers should remind me. Low-balling the numbers is very easy. Seeing your own country as the most murderous entity in the world is very difficult. Nonetheless. No one else is near the top -- hell, no one else made the playoffs. The numbers are the numbers. That duck thing. You are what your record says you are. Oh, nooooo! No more sports metaphors. Please.

I find myself just letting the numbers slip from my mind most times. Onward to the less awful.

We are only #24 in the world murder rate; not much to say there. Of the first world countries, we are edged out by Russia, and, surprise, Poland. Who knew the Poles were so bloodthirsty? Perhaps the alcohol use in both of those countries has something to do with the murder rates. Perhaps our own use of alcohol has something to do with our murder rate. Naw. Lots of other countries drink just as much.

On to jail rates. In 2008, the US imprisoned about 1500 of every 100,000 men, with a trivial rate of 62 per 100,000 women. Better numbers. A little more than one out of every hundred men lives in jail. By race: one in twenty African American men sits in jail right now, today. Overall, we have, far and away, the top imprisonment rate in the world. We are followed (about 20% fewer) by Russia, using numbers for both genders. No other country is on the map, as it were. Heh. A remnant of the cold war, maybe?

If I were going to look at this sensibly, I would say that we are now the world's greatest mass murderers and that we are now the world's greatest self-imprisoners. Well, of course. How else could we be? American exceptionalism.

A few years ago, at the height of the Iraq thing, a couple of connections forced themselves into my usually unreflective mind. Take the first Earth Day in 1974. I remember thinking at the time, and saying to others, that I thought trying to clean up the Earth was a response to the collective guilt over Vietnam. I was laughed out of the room.

Now, though, not so funny. The environmental movement has picked up steam at roughly the same pace as our mass killings -- and mass imprisonments. We are counting on all the Greenies to wash the blood off our hands, and, when they fail, we put a lot of folks, notably folks of color, in jail. Then we know for sure who the bad people are, and we smother them in our guilt.

When I started graduate school in psychology, there were two jokes: one was that when we read about some pathology, we would instantly see it in ourselves. The second, though, was less amusing: we were in psychology to continually reassure ourselves which side of the line we were on; after all, we knew who the patients were. Ugly, and more true than we would admit. Didn't take me long to see the pathology in my colleagues.

Now, I can look at piles of dead, dark people, and I know two things for sure. One is that I didn't pull any triggers or drop any bombs; the other, that all the bad folks are in jail. I am doubly reassured. Triply reassured, really: the bad folks aren't even the same color I am. Guess I need a lot of reassurance. Strangely enough, this kind of talk doesn't startle African Americans. Perhaps their perception is that jail is better than being murdered.

I will stick to my previous blogs. We do the killing thing to insure our social stability. We don't even bother to pretend that our victims are a threat; we aren't afraid of them at all. Nope. Hey, there is just no other way to look at the data; the only other theory is that we suddenly started these massive killings on a whim. My perception works better.

Now, though, we're also talking about what happens after the killings. The locker room showers and self-congratulations include putting huge numbers of people in prison. Slippery ideas, hard to hold on to.

I am not a Marxist. We certainly make a good buck by all the killing/cleaning cycle. I've nothing against a good buck; fortunes are made. But I don't think we get into the killing for the bucks. Nope, I'll stick to my guns: We kill because of our terror of instability. A felicitous metaphor.

Terror over instability is no small thing. My TLE has left me with a sweet sense of how easily I can be brought low by a very small blip in brain functioning. I am tricked by my struggles for normalcy, and by my own hiding of the humiliations that TLE episodes bring. I know the terror that I might shatter. Nothing unique; a lot of people know that terror. Usually it comes to them when they are children; mine came at 65. I think they have it worse; I have a strong internal life, and strong family and friends. They don't have any of that.

I don't think much about the shattering times; I just suddenly begin acting or talking in ways strange to me, which at once exhibit and hide my terror. Nothing so extreme as mass murder and mass imprisonment, but I do know the path to those places. When we are terrified, most times we don't act terrified or even feel terrified; what we do is desperately find ways to not be terrified. We mass murder, and mass imprison, without the least hint of our fear of social shattering.

Surprise! I have made it all come together. Nice job, blogger guy. Fear and killing and humiliation and terror, all in one festering ball. When our descendants look back, a thousand years from now, they will be stunned. These people, with so much.....and they did THAT?

And, still, I can't look, and I can't look away.