NYT "Power Steer" article (continued)
''Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving
sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a
pneumatic-powered 'gun' that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the
diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the
forehead. When it's done correctly, it will kill the animal on the first shot.''
For a plant to pass a McDonald's audit, the stunner needs to render animals
''insensible'' on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second shot is allowed,
but should that one fail, the plant flunks. At the line speeds at which meatpacking
plants in the United States operate -- 390 animals are slaughtered every hour at
National, which is not unusual -- mistakes would seem inevitable, but Grandin
insists that only rarely does the process break down.
''After the animal is shot while he's riding along, a worker wraps a chain around
his foot and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg,
he's carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his
throat. Animal rights people say they're cutting live animals, but that's because
there's a lot of reflex kicking.'' This is one of the reasons a job at a slaughter
plant is the most dangerous in America. ''What I look for is, Is the head dead? It
should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He'd better not be
trying to hold it up -- then you've got a live one on the rail.'' Just in case, Grandin
said, ''they have another hand stunner in the bleed area.''
Much of what happens next -- the de-hiding of the animal, the tying off of its
rectum before evisceration -- is designed to keep the animal's feces from coming
into contact with its meat. This is by no means easy to do, not when the animals
enter the kill floor smeared with manure and 390 of them are eviscerated every
hour. (Partly for this reason, European plants operate at much slower line
speeds.) But since that manure is apt to contain lethal pathogens like E. coli 0157,
and since the process of grinding together hamburger from hundreds of different
carcasses can easily spread those pathogens across millions of burgers, packing
plants now spend millions on ''food safety'' -- which is to say, on the problem of
manure in meat.
Most of these efforts are reactive: it's accepted that the animals will enter the kill
floor caked with feedlot manure that has been rendered lethal by the feedlot diet.
Rather than try to alter that diet or keep the animals from living in their waste or
slow the line speed -- all changes regarded as impractical -- the industry focuses
on disinfecting the manure that will inevitably find its way into the meat. This is
the purpose of irradiation (which the industry prefers to call ''cold
pasteurization''). It is also the reason that carcasses pass through a hot steam
cabinet and get sprayed with an antimicrobial solution before being hung in the
cooler at the National Beef plant.
It wasn't until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler, 36 hours later, that I
was allowed to catch up with them, in the grading room. I entered a huge arctic
space resembling a monstrous dry cleaner's, with a seemingly endless overhead
track conveying thousands of red-and-white carcasses. I quickly learned that you
had to move smartly through this room or else be tackled by a 350-pound side of
beef. The carcasses felt cool to the touch, no longer animals but meat.
Two by two, the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the rails, six pairs every
minute, to a station where two workers -- one wielding a small power saw, the
other a long knife -- made a single six-inch cut between the 12th and 13th ribs,
opening a window on the meat inside. The carcasses continued on to another
station, where a U.S.D.A. inspector holding a round blue stamp glanced at the
exposed rib eye and stamped the carcass's creamy white fat once, twice or --
very rarely -- three times: select, choice, prime.
For the Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of truth, for that stamp will
determine exactly how much the packing plant will pay for each animal and
whether the 14 months of effort and expense will yield a profit.
Unless the cattle market collapses between now and June (always a worry these
days), I stand to make a modest profit on No. 534. In February, the feedlot took
a sonogram of his rib eye and ran the data through a computer program. The
projections are encouraging: a live slaughter weight of 1,250, a carcass weight of
787 pounds and a grade at the upper end of choice, making him eligible to be sold
at a premium as Certified Angus Beef. Based on the June futures price, No. 534
should be worth $944. (Should he grade prime, that would add another $75.)
I paid $598 for No. 534 in November; his living expenses since then come to $61
on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the feedlot (including implant), for a total
investment of $917, leaving a profit of $27. It's a razor-thin margin, and it could
easily vanish should the price of corn rise or No. 534 fail to make the predicted
weight or grade -- say, if he gets sick and goes off his feed. Without the corn,
without the antibiotics, without the hormone implant, my brief career as a
cattleman would end in failure.
The Blairs and I are doing better than most. According to Cattle-Fax, a
market-research firm, the return on an animal coming out of a feedlot has
averaged just $3 per head over the last 20 years.
''Some pens you make money, some pens you lose,'' Rich Blair said when I
called to commiserate. ''You try to average it out over time, limit the losses and
hopefully make a little profit.'' He reminded me that a lot of ranchers are in the
business ''for emotional reasons -- you can't be in it just for the money.''
Now you tell me.
The manager of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of steaks from No.
534 before his carcass disappears into the trackless stream of commodity beef
fanning out to America's supermarkets and restaurants this June. From what I
can see, the Blair brothers, with the help of Poky Feeders, are producing meat as
good as any you can find in an American supermarket. And yet there's no reason
to think this steak will taste any different from the other high-end industrial meat
I've ever eaten.
While waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I've explored some
alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays you can find hormone- and
antibiotic-free beef as well as organic beef, fed only grain grown without
chemicals. This meat, which is often quite good, is typically produced using
more grass and less grain (and so makes for healthier animals). Yet it doesn't
fundamentally challenge the corn-feedlot system, and I'm not sure that an
''organic feedlot'' isn't, ecologically speaking, an oxymoron. What I really wanted
to taste is the sort of preindustrial beef my grandparents ate -- from animals that
have lived most of their full-length lives on grass.
Eventually I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me a quarter of a
grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most of my freezer. I also found
ranchers selling grass-fed beef on the Web; Eatwild.com is a clearinghouse of
information on grass-fed livestock, which is emerging as one of the livelier
movements in sustainable agriculture.
I discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than supermarket beef.
Whatever else you can say about industrial beef, it is remarkably cheap, and any
argument for changing the system runs smack into the industry's populist
arguments. Put the animals back on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it takes
too long to raise beef on grass, and there's not enough grass to raise them on,
since the Western range lands aren't big enough to sustain America's 100 million
head of cattle. And besides, Americans have learned to love cornfed beef. Feedlot
meat is also more consistent in both taste and supply and can be harvested 12
months a year. (Grass-fed cattle tend to be harvested in the fall, since they stop
gaining weight over the winter, when the grasses go dormant.)
All of this is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot system is hard to refute.
And yet so is the ecological logic behind a ruminant grazing on grass. Think what
would happen if we restored a portion of the Corn Belt to the tall grass prairie it
once was and grazed cattle on it. No more petrochemical fertilizer, no more
herbicide, no more nitrogen runoff. Yes, beef would probably be more expensive
than it is now, but would that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every day
might not be such a smart idea anyway -- for our health, for the environment.
And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap at all, when you add in
the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart
disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are
costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.
So how does grass-fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of
a nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I
sampled turned out to be the best steak I've ever eaten. But unless the meat is
carefully aged, grass-fed beef can be tougher than feedlot beef -- not
surprisingly, since a grazing animal, which moves around in search of its food,
develops more muscle and less fat. Yet even when the meat was tougher, its
flavor, to my mind, was much more interesting. And specific, for the taste of
every grass-fed animal is inflected by the place where it lived. Maybe it's just my
imagination, but nowadays when I eat a feedlot steak, I can taste the corn and
the fat, and I can see the view from No. 534's pen. I can't taste the oil,
obviously, or the drugs, yet now I know they're there.
A considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing (and, O.K.,
chewing) a grass-fed steak: a picture of a cow outside in a pasture eating the
grass that has eaten the sunlight. Meat-eating may have become an act riddled
with moral and ethical ambiguities, but eating a steak at the end of a short,
primordial food chain comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and
light is something I'm happy to do and defend. We are what we eat, it is often
said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats
too.
Michael Pollan, the author of ''The Botany of Desire,'' is a contributing writer
for the magazine. His last cover article was about organic food.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company |
