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.
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