Category Archives: food

Will Field Corn Kill Us? No but it’s killing the cows..

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Many people were horrified by the scandal surrounding cattle that were so weak that they were either being prodded with a forklift or actually carried to the kill room with the fork lift. Most people, not being involved in agriculture, wondered how anyone could be so callous. BUT the most disgusting thing you run into when you look into the issue of Factory Farming Cattle (and there are a lot of nasty things here) is that the corn that is feed to the cattle after they are weaned is killing them. So to slaughterhouse staff and meat packers its a matter timing whether they get them in the kill room before they die.

http://richard-goodman.blogspot.com/2008/02/meatpacker-in-cow-abuse-scandal-may.html

 Meatpacker in Cow-Abuse Scandal May Shut as Congress Turns Up Heat

By DAVID KESMODEL and JANE ZHANG
Write to David Kesmodel at david.kesmodel @ wsj.com
and Jane Zhang at Jane.Zhang @ wsj.com
February 25, 2008; 
CHINO, Calif. — Last year, a man carrying a hidden video camera took a $12-an-hour job at a little-known beef slaughterhouse here. Now the meatpacker is about to collapse, and has become a flashpoint in a national debate over meat safety and the quality of food Americans serve their schoolchildren.

Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co., one of the biggest suppliers of beef to the national school-lunch program before videos showing animal cruelty at the plant helped trigger the biggest meat recall in U.S. history, probably will shut down permanently, according to the company’s general manager, Anthony Magidow.

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As John Robbins points out modern cattle raising is all about carving up cattle quick:

What About Grass-fed Beef?

 Feeding grain to cattle has got to be one of the dumbest ideas in the history of western civilization.

Cows, sheep, and other grazing animals are endowed with the ability to convert grasses, which those of us who possess only one stomach cannot digest, into food that we can digest. They can do this because they are ruminants, which is to say that they possess a rumen, a 45 or so gallon (in the case of cows) fermentation tank in which resident bacteria convert cellulose into protein and fats.

Traditionally, all beef was grass-fed beef, but in the United States today what is commercially available is almost all feedlot beef. The reason? It’s faster, and so more profitable. Seventy-five years ago, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter. Today, they are 14 or 16 months. You can’t take a beef calf from a birth weight of 80 pounds to 1,200 pounds in a little more than a year on grass. It takes enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements, antibiotics and other drugs, including growth hormones.

Switching a cow from grass to grain is so disturbing to the animal’s digestive system that it can kill the animal if not done gradually and if the animal is not continually fed antibiotics. These animals are designed to forage, but we make them eat grain, primarily corn, in order to make them as fat as possible as fast as possible.
 All this is not only unnatural and dangerous for the cows. It also has profound consequences for us. Feedlot beef as we know it today would be impossible if it weren’t for the routine and continual feeding of antibiotics to these animals. This leads directly and inexorably to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These are the new “superbugs” that are increasingly rendering our “miracle drugs” ineffective.

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Letting Corporations into anything in agriculture besides processing is turning out to be a disaster in many respects from beginning to end. To this end we could talk about any plant or animal that we eat, but if we keep our focus on corn it becomes clear that all the corporate ag production affairs require one thing energy and lots of it.

While the movie, King Corn, has a lot going for it, like cute college kids out for a lark and the absurdity of growing an acre of anything in the current farm system, it is actually a pretty good look at why growing as much corn as we do is stupid and corporate farming only compounds that.

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http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn/

While the planting, growing and harvesting of field corn takes an incredible amount of energy, the real energy comes after it has been harvested. You can’t eat the stuff so it all has to be PROCESSED to be used or eaten by animals most of which don’t like the stuff but eat it if they are forced to. As the film makers themselves say:

 http://kingcorn.net/

Almost everything Americans eat contains corn: high fructose corn syrup, corn-fed meat, and corn-based processed foods are the staples of the modern diet.  Ready for an adventure and alarmed by signs of their generation’s bulging waistlines, college friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis know where to go to investigate.  Eighty years ago, Ian and Curt’s great-grandfathers lived just a few miles apart, in the same rural county in northern Iowa.  Now their great-grandsons are returning with a mission:  they will plant an acre of corn, follow their harvest into the world, and attempt to understand what they—and all of us—are really made of.

 

But where will all that corn go? Ian and Curt leave Iowa to find out, first considering their crop’s future as feed.  In Colorado, rancher Sue Jarrett says her cattle should be eating grass.  But with a surplus of corn, it costs less to raise cattle in confinement than to let them roam free: “The mass production of corn drives the mass production of protein in confinement.”  Animal nutritionists confirm that corn makes cows sick and beef fatty, but it also lets consumers eat a $1 hamburger.  Feedlot owner Bob Bledsoe defends America’s cheap food, but as Ian and Curt see in Colorado, the world behind it can be stomach turning.  At one feedlot, 100,000 cows stand shoulder-to-shoulder, doing their part to transform Iowa corn into millions of pounds of fat-streaked beef.

 

Following the trail of high fructose corn syrup, Ian and Curt hop attempt to make a home-cooked batch of the sweetener in their kitchen.  But their investigation of America’s most ubiquitous ingredient turns serious when they follow soda to its consumption in Brooklyn.  Here, Type II diabetes is ravaging the community, and America’s addiction to corny sweets is to blame.

 

The breadth of the problem is now clear: the American food system is built on the abundance of corn, an abundance perpetuated by a subsidy system that pays farmers to maximize production.  In a nursing home in the Indiana suburbs, Ian and Curt come face-to-face with Earl Butz, the Nixon-era Agriculture Secretary who invented subsidies.  The elderly Butz champions the modern food system as an “Age of plenty” Ian and Curt’s great-grandfathers only dreamed of.

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 November pulls Ian and Curt back to Iowa.  Their 10,000-pound harvest seems as grotesque as it is abundant.  They haul their corn to the elevator and look on as it makes its way into a food system they have grown disgusted by.  At a somber farm auction, Ian and Curt decide to tell their landlord they want to buy the acre.  The next spring their cornfield has been pulled from production and planted in a prairie, a wild square surrounded by a sea of head-high corn.

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OKOKOKOKOK So maybe corn IS killing us but will we miss it when its gone because of energy prices. Probably not one bit though the first winter maybe tough if gasoline goes to $100 a gallon. The first to go though will be the exporting of grain. Do you believe we actually pile billions of tons of corn on diesal power ships so that other people can refine (errr spend their energy on) it? They can’t eat it either.

For more:

Iowa Corn
Get info on biotechnology, corn products and Iowa corn growers.

Corn Palace Convention and Visitors Bureau
As seen in KING CORN, Mitchell, South Dakota’s Corn Palace is a monument to the country’s leading crop.

American Corn Growers Association
“America’s leading progressive commodity association, representing the interests of corn producers in 35 states.”

A Zillion Uses for Corn!
An extensive list of products that contain corn.

Putting DNA to Work: Improving Crops: From Teosinte to Corn
See photos of corn’s ancestor and read about how its genetic makeup has evolved.

EWG: Farm Subsidy Database
View graphs and databases on corn subsidies in the United States.

Mountains of Corn and a Sea of Farm Subsidies
Reprinted from a 2005 New York Times article, this piece examines how the country’s corn overproduction is affecting its farmers.

No-Till Farmer
Top tips on growing monoculture corn.

Corn Refiners Association
Learn about corn refining and resulting products.

High Fructose Corn Syrup
HFCS, how it’s made and how it affects your health, plus other links.

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Gasoline Hits $100 A Gallon – The world ends

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Well actually it doesn’t. But it will definitely change our lifestyles and our foodchain. But not really the way either the right or the left think or at least want you to believe. Believe me I am not being callous when I simply say that lots of people will die. There is no denying that and if we let it CHAOS could insue. But I don’t it will happen that way. One way or another we will either very quickly get a lot more renewable energy sources in place or we as a nation will be forced to return to a small farm society. The Saudi’s know for sure what is coming because they just anounced another huge solar project. Something like this:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D07E1D71639F932A35752C1A965948260

TWO years ago, this village of 3,000 people, only 20 miles from Riyadh, the capital of this kingdom, had no electricity. Today, villagers proudly display their televisions, toasters and other accouterments of an electrified society.

But when Saudis here turn their lights on at night, they are using energy generated not by their country’s vast oil reserves, but by the sun.

This village and two others nearby are the first in the kingdom, or anywhere, to be powered continuously and primarily by solar power.

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I realize that yesterday I gave sort of a short shift to the Peak Oil people. I kinda acted like everyone in the audience would know what that is. So here are some of their more promenant sites:

http://www.theoildrum.com/

http://www.peakoil.com/

Energy Sites
 wakeuptosolars.gif

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Please note the bell shaped curve above. That is their arguement in a nutshell. In other words demand has exceeded the ability of the oil producers to provide oil. That ability to produce will eventually “fall off” as the supply ends and prices will go through the roof (read: become prohibitive). So what does that mean for the now Industrialized Foodchain?

In Michael Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he lays out huge problems with our corporate food chain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omnivore’s_Dilemma

 Industrial

Pollan begins with an exploration of the food-production system from which the vast majority of American meals are derived. This industrial food chain is largely based on corn, whether it is eaten directly, fed to livestock, or processed into chemicals such as glucose and ethanol. Pollan discusses how the humble corn plant came to dominate the American diet through a combination of biological, cultural, and political factors. The role of petroleum in the cultivation and transportation of the American food supply is also discussed.

A fast food meal is used to illustrate the end result of the industrial food chain.

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In fact a scientist said that if humanity quit using nitrogen fertilizer it would be like taking EVERY automobile in the WORLD off the road.

However its interesting that he actually fails in what he sets out to do. His goal was actually to grow throught the progression of Industrial—> Small Farm—> Vegan—>Make my own meal. He wanted to make the point that Vegatarion was the way to go to save the planet from us humans. His thought being that he would make up a giant tofu salad at the end of the book. It did not go that way, because he quickly discovered that going meatless is tougher than he thought AND that it would take MORE energy inputs than we currently use to take the whole USA vegatarian. In other words we omnivores by DESIGN (duh) and we can’t change that by wishing it to be so. In the end he makes his meal and includes fish in it to show that heh you can “eat locally”.  Hunting animals is a lot tougher  than fishing. But heh he does not say how long it took to catch the one he shared.

Next – On to King Corn.
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Food And Oil – We are all gona die

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Since the Peak Oil people have managed to scare the begeezus out of the whole world. I though that it was time to engage in a meditation on the Relationship between Food and Energy. Having sat through similar meditations on Religion and Energy Conservation (18 posts) and Energy Policy and the Presidential Candidates (17 posts) I can assure you this will not take more than 3 or 4 posts and will probably include Weird Bird Friday.

But let’s start with  Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Delimma and a film, King Corn, by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, to take an initial pass at the problem.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn/

http://www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore.php

But before we do let’s do a little thought experiment because King Corn and the Omnivore’s Dilemma both ultimately fail in what they hope to accomplish.  In fact, I think that the high price of oil right now is being manipulated by the producers, the futures market and the refiners and it will come down. But as I have said to the Peak Oil people all along, we are maybe at the “oil Plateau”, but we are not at the “decline” part of the curve. It WILL COME. Thus, it is good to think about the situation to see what may happen.

As an aside here for another second. I have actually thought about farming for alot of my life because I believe that the world is warming because of our release of greenhouse gases, and that warming will destabalize our weather. That in effect would disrupt the farmers and thus the food supply. Under the “Peak Oil” senario what would happen is that all of the energy inputs into our industrial linear monocultural food chain would be withdrawn. This means no fertilizers, and no transportation for the food grown. Or maybe foods that can travel less distances. But eventually this would leaves us with no fuel to drive the tractors to plant the seeds and a loss of refrigeration. Or at least the type of refrigeration we are used to. If you believe their worst case senarios this could happen rather quickly. Think, as one of their leading bloggers recently said, about the impact of gasoline that costs 100$$ a gallon. I live about 6 or 7 miles from Springfield and I can tell you I would be walking to town at that point.

Still would we all die? If you mean ALL as Humanity, yes many of us would die if the worldwide food chain were disrupted. But think about it in another way, food would become trapped in the producing and exporting nations. So those countries would be awash in the foods that they produce. As we have seen in this last round of oil price increases the poorer countries of the world would face food riots, mass starvation, disease and death. In a moral cataclysm, the question for the 3rd world would be what to do with the bodies. Burying them would be dumb, burning them even worse…but should we recycle dead humans? Maybe we need to think about that.

In much of the world and even in parts of the third world what would happen is that we all would have to become hunters and gathers again. I am not saying that lives would not be lost, and that tremendous tumult would not result but at least initially we all would have to become small plot croppers like we did during WWII. When I mention Victory Gardens to the PO (peak oil) folks they go ballistic. They jump up and down and shout, “It’s the population stupid.”

 

So if the ALL in We Are All Going To Die is we folks in the US of A then let’s look at it. In 1940 there were 133 million people in the US, now there are roughly 280 million people. So a simple analysis could say that 150 million people here would die. That is to die back to the point where Victory Gardens were effective. But I have my doubts about that. Looking at the worst disaster to hit this country, the Flu Pandemic of 1918 the US suffered a net loss of population of 60 thousand people. That was .06% of the population.

 

I also am intellectually opposed to “science fiction” posturings where the rich rule the world and the poor eat Solent Green. Nonetheless I am not naïve enough to assume that millions won’t die here. The Pandemic actually wiped out a birth rate producing 1.5 million people a year before it “went negative”. Would we survive as a capitalist democracy? That is a much bigger question. It would be imperative in that first farming year that fuel prices spiked that every scrap of food grown is preserved. Capitalists might not be willing to pay the cost of that. Would many of us end up eating field corn or something made out of it. Heck yes. Would our livestock have to get by on grass? Oh yah. Would the megacities empty. I don’t know, but again the problem is corporate land ownership. That land would have to be expropriated to put small producers on it. Is democracy up for the test? It may have no choice.

 

Would I survive as a country boy living in the middle of Illinois? Yes, I believe I would. Country Boys Will Survive. God, I have always wanted to say that.