Far away from home

I saw him only once, as he furtively crossed the traffic circle. We both stopped what we were doing to get a clear look at each other. The neighbor’s son said he thought he saw him too, but didn’t believe his eyes. But last night, we all heard him: three clear, lonely howls, no full moon needed. We figure this natural predator has been forced into this awkward co-existence as his natural habitat falls to Planned Urban Developments. The notion that our incursion into this relatively undisturbed territory will have no effect on the animals that live there doesn’t figure into the balance sheet. The green belt behind our development, where the population of rabbits is running rampant as the bunnies breed like, well, rabbits, is obviously more attractive to him than bulldozers. He is slender and shy, our neighborhood coyote, and I fear for him if anyone in authority hears about him.

Last night, on my way home from supper out with a bunch of friends, Darling Husband towed our two sons into the library, and I ducked into the supermarket next door to pick up an ice cream fix. I settled on the marginally responsible choice of Ben & Jerry’s Dave Matthews Band Magic Brownie. On my way to the checkout, I picked up a small block of Tillamook jack cheese for quesadillas tomorrow evening, and, emboldened by finding something remotely edible in a mainstream market, stopped at the table of baked goods in the bakery department. They had a clamshell of miniature croissants – cocktail croissants, they call them – so I tucked them into the basket slung over my arm. Once home, as I unpacked, I glanced at the label: no real surprises there, other than disappointment that they had used hydrogenated margarine along with butter, but then I saw where they had come from. Arizona. Yup, that’s right, they had traveled more than a thousand miles to get here. My mind races: are they more French than we are here? Is there something about the desert that is more conducive to baking (I would have thought the opposite, handling pastry on a hot day can be miserable)? Do bakers prefer retiring to/living in arid climes? I can’t make sense of it, but I feel a bit like the child watching the naked emperor walk by, shouting, “croissants from Arizona don’t add up!”

And I admit sadness in feeling like the childlike voice in a sea of blind followers. I am profoundly disappointed that the majority of folks seem to think it completely normal when they find baked goods hundreds of miles from home, but who consider it not normal to find a wild animal living in its native habitat. I am thrilled to the core by the normalcy of nature asserting itself in our backyards. But I fear for the emperor’s subjects.

How many cows?

Seems it was only last spring there was a huge recall of ground beef. First it was 75,000 pounds; then 445,000. Then it hit 5.7 million pounds. I started wondering how many cows to took to produce (for it is production, not raising on this scale) this amount of shrink-wrapped meat. And then a much quieter headline this week: Topps meats has recalled 21.7 million pounds of ground beef.

The details are similar to all recalls: sold under different brands, packages up to one year old, save wrapper for a refund. But the scale is mind-boggling. It’s not the largest recall ever: that dubious honor goes to Pilgrim's Pride, who recalled more than 27 million pounds of poultry in 2002, and Hudson Foods, who recalled 25 million pounds of ground beef in 1997.

As a child of depression babies, I was taught that thrift was a virtue, that waste was a sin. So, it saddens me doubly to see not only the frozen patties being disposed of (where? will the toxin leach into our groundwater and wells along with the antibiotics and hormones?), as well as all the energy and effort that went into making them being wasted.

How many cows did it take? Well, the friendly folks at the Cattlemen's Beef Board and National Cattlemen's Beef Association tell me that a cow will yield 180-225 pounds of ground beef. Simple arithmetic tells me that it took between 96,444 and 120,555 head of cattle to produce the meat affected by the recall. That seems a drop in the bucket of the 100 million or so beef cattle in this country, but it’s still a small town’s population.

According to the USDA, a cow eats between 80-90 pounds of food each day. The cattlemen tell me that it’ll take me 18-22 months to reach maturity for slaughter. That means somewhere between 5,208,000,000 and 5,728,800,000 pounds of feed had to be produced and transported to feed those cattle. They also needed water, though there is a discrepancy of information out there. Predictably, information is politically colored: the cattlemen tell me that cow needs a mere 435 gallons per cow, for a total of only 9,439,500,000 gallons. Vegesource tells me that it’s more like 2,500 gallons a head, or 54,250,000,000 gallons. I imagine the truth lies somewhere in between, but neither number is terribly encouraging.

I have honestly no idea how much of the other “input” went into these factory animals: roughage to replace grass (oyster shells, sand, poultry feathers, and rough plastic pellets); vitamins to replace greens (vitamin A); growth hormones to reduce the time to market (Because estradiol, a form of human estrogen is a natural hormone, it can be fed to the cows and they can still be considered natural); estrus suppressants (Heifers grow faster if they don’t menstruate); antibiotics (for common feedlot conditions: peneumonia, pinkeye or shipping fever syndrome, bovine respiratory disease complex); and vaccines (7-way blackleg (including overeating) plus tetanus).

If you can shake that off, let’s move on to output. Jubilee Farm’s Farmer Erick tells me in one of his epistles that fifty pounds is the accepted figure for the amount of manure a cow produces in a day. Our fictional herd will produce between 6,249,600,000 and 9,548,000,000 pounds of manure over their life cycle. In addition to the sheer massive disposal problem that billions of pounds of manure creates, it also contains the excess hormones and anitbiotics shed by the animals. They will leech into the groundwater supply and recycle back to all of us, whether or not we need or want of hormone replacement therapy or antibiotic treatment.

There’s also the matter of greenhouse gases: using EPA numbers, I estimate that our herd will flatulate to the tune of 20,387,393 to 31,147,407 pounds of methane over their lifespan.

This really stinks, in more ways than one. After investing all this time, energy and water, this meat will need to be destroyed. I’ve been considering the cows that made up this recall as an immense single herd, but they only came together at processing, where one source of bacterial contamination was spread to all of them. This kind of waste makes it amply clear that large scale meat production is not as efficient—or safe—as we’re led to believe. I guess size really does matter.