Viewpoint: Lily’s Chickens

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No, it’s the other savings that compel me most toward a vegetable-based diet — the ones revealed by simple math. A pound of cow or hog flesh costs about 10 pounds of plant matter to produce. So a field of grain that would feed 100 people, when fed instead to cows or pigs that are then fed to people, fills the bellies of only 10 of them; the other 90, I guess, will just have to go hungry. That, in a nutshell, is how it’s presently shaking down with the world, the world’s arable land, and the world’s hamburger eaters.

Some years ago our family took a trip across the Midwest to visit relatives in Iowa, and for thousands of miles along the way we saw virtually no animal life except feedlots full of cattle — surely the most unappetizing sight and smell I’ve encountered in my life (and my life includes some years of intimacy with diaper pails). And we saw almost no plant life but the endless fields of corn and soybeans required to feed those pathetic penned beasts. Our kids kept asking mile after mile, “What used to be here?” It led to long discussions of America’s vanished prairie, Mexico’s vanished forests and the diversity of species in the South American rain forests that are now being extinguished to make way for more cattle graze. We also talked about a vanishing American culture: During the last half century or so, each passing year has seen about half a million more people move away from farms (including all of my children’s grandparents or great-grandparents). The lively web of farmhouses, schoolhouses, pasture lands, woodlots, livestock barns, poultry coops and tilled fields that once constituted America’s breadbasket has been replaced with a meat-fattening monoculture. When we got home our daughter announced firmly, “I’m never going to eat a cow again.”

When your 10-year-old calls your conscience to order, you show up: She hasn’t eaten a cow since, and neither have we. It’s an industry I no longer want to get tangled up in, even at the level of the 99-cent exchange. Each and every quarter pound of hamburger is handed across the counter after the following productions costs, which I’ve searched out precisely: 100 gallons of water, 1.2 pounds of grain, a cup of gasoline, greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to those produced by a six-mile drive in your average car, and the loss of 1.25 pounds of topsoil, every inch of which took 500 years for the microbes and earthworms to build. How can all this cost less than a dollar, and who is supposed to pay for the rest of it? If I were a cow, right here is where I’d go mad.

Thus our family parted ways with all animal flesh wrought from feedlots. But for some farmers on certain land, assuming that they don’t have the option of turning their acreage into a national park (and that people will keep wanting to eat), the most ecologically sound use of it is to let free-range animals turn its grass and weeds into edible flesh, rather than turning it every year under the plow. We also have neighbors who raise organic beef for their family on hardly more than the byproducts of other things they grow. It’s quite possible to raise animals sustainably, and we support the grass-based farmers around us by purchasing their chickens and eggs.

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