Just today James McWilliams published an interesting article in the New York Times that illuminates some of the problems with sustainable meat products. I've always been wary of the assumption grass fed beef is the answer to our problems so I was excited to read this article. This might upset some purist but I've put in bold what I believe to be the most important parts:
"Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable."
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"All this said, committed advocates of alternative systems make one undeniably important point about the practice called “rotational grazing” or “holistic farming”: the soil absorbs the nutrients from the animals’ manure, allowing grass and other crops to grow without the addition of synthetic fertilizer. As Michael Pollan writes, “It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients.” In other words, raising animals is not only sustainable, but required."
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"But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin*, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling."
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| *YerbaMateLover's note: this is that eccentric guy from Food Inc. |
Ok I hope you enjoyed that, and possibly learned something. Some of his points on small farms the FJH has come to realize first hand. For example, we learned Mr. Sprinkles imports his soy fertilizer from the Midwest. So if the fertilizer isn't local, is the food local? I'm a big proponent of living your life by achievable standards, so I'm not a nut job about being strictly local. However, it is something to think about.
Another point I found compelling were chicken breeds that had been selected for quick growth. As with anything in the world of FOOD JUSTICE I'm sure there are clean hands and dirty hands on both ends of the spectrum. For me however, it brings up some of the thoughts I've been having with GMOs lately (blog post to come!). But essentially, why do we care so much that we have altered our foods with GMOs? None of the food we eat on a regular basis ever existed in that form in nature. The idea that something we grow is natural completely ignores mankind's history. Human's ability to form sedentary populations is rooted in our ability to modify plants to suit our agriculture needs. Is it that much worse that we do it in vitro vs in vivo?
^I acknowledge that was a massive tangent.
Overall, I come away from this article where I started. There is not one solution, we just need to find a happy medium between all of these options. Corporations are not something to villainize, and local business realistically can't solve all our problems. Most importantly, its about reflecting on our own consumption and remaining informed about the unintended consequences of our purchases.
A young scholar! Who is this Dan, master of quill and parchment? Liberally educated in the arts I assume!
ReplyDeleteI think this article is wrong in a lot of ways, most of them illuminated in Stephanie Ogburn's response (http://grist.org/food/2009-09-08-mcwilliams-locavore-polemic/) to McWilliams's book, Just Food. Mostly, McWilliam's makes the assumption that proponents of grass-fed beef support meat consumption at its current levels, at its current price. This is wrong: most locovores are willing to pay a lot more for the meat, and eat a lot less of it as a result. McWilliams misrepresents the pro-grass-fed argument, and makes his case seem much stronger than it actually is as a result. That's nasty, lazy, and boring. Don't even start with his argument for GMOs.
ReplyDeleteI, too, find this article very difficult to settle with. Being someone who is highly interested in agriculture and has spent many hours fretting over what the food system should be like, I see this article falling short in the thought process to purely make a point. As Ben mentioned, no one who supports grass fed and humanely raised meat supports the number of animals in the food industry at the moment nor do they agree with the low prices in which animals can be consumed at.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it's also important to not just view animals on a farm as a poop-making, eatable thing. Chickens, for instance, peck at bugs, keeping down the population of harmful pests like slugs, termites, earwigs, etc, they consume food scraps, and, yes, their poop is quite fertile. They are multitasks and incredibly entertaining to have around. No organic fertilizer can do what chickens do, even if they must eat food from a different, distant location. Yet, if you choose to raise your own chickens, you'll undoubtedly, at some point, come across a problem with chicken populations. If your hens are laying fertile eggs and hatching chicks, what must one do with roosters? Sure, they produce manure, peck at bugs, and consume food scraps, but they're also loud, aggressive, and can not lay eggs. Having more than one rooster isn't smart, I imagine (but I know nothing about that because I'm not aloud to own one, let alone two or three). So, do you just let them out in to the wild, saying 'good luck, dude, perhaps you can make it a day or two in freedom before your poor, mutated chicken body and bad instincts get you killed' or, at an appropriate age, do you kill and consume said rooster along with a handful of other chickens to keep the population at a manageable level? Yeah, to me, I feel as though this is the most logical answer. This, however, also means that it's really not reasonable to eat meat once day, or maybe even once a week, because a small farm could never produce that many chickens in a safe and smart way.
I could go on about this. Maybe I'll make a blog post on my views of agriculture, my defense of meat consumption, and how to food industry should be viewed, but for now, I think two things are important to keep in mind when reading about what the 'right' way to eat is. 1: SUSTAINABILITY IS IMPOSSIBLE. At least when you think of sustainability as keeping things in a closed cycle, like being concerned about the nutrients of the land not being returned to that land. Never, should an article addressing agriculture, criticize small farms for being 'unsustainable'. 2: YOU CAN CONVINCE YOURSELF OF ANYTHING WHEN IT COMES TO FOOD. You can tell yourself that eating meat every day and modified strawberries that can grow below freezing is what's best, or that any sort of animal product is terrible for you. I'm sure, somewhere, there is science to support it as well as arguments that you can easily buy into or ignore, all for the purpose of you convincing yourself 'yes, this is how it should be. i am right, i am righteous', when really, I don't think anyone can ever find a true answer. Nature doesn't like to be understood simply, nor does it care to become exactly what we want, even if we splice its genes and spray it with pesticides.