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: