Cattle Futures
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Life as a human omnivore is more complicated and risky. When you can eat almost anything, how do you avoid the dangers nature presents, the plant toxins and parasites and lethal microbes? We have culture to guide us (traditions, science, Jane Brody), but surely even we can still hear older voices, aversions (to rot) and attractions (to sweetness) that still speak when we encounter a plate of food. In matters as fundamental to our animal lives as choosing what to eat, perhaps our aesthetic sense of things is not just aesthetic but is informed by something deeper, something we would do well to heed.
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For tens of thousands of years, we have been eating the flesh of ruminants that live on grass. The rightness of that picture—a bovine grazing on grassland—goes way back, maybe all the way to the savanna. And while that picture has recently been eclipsed by nauseating images of modern meat production, the grass-fed ruminant and the vegetarian herbivore are not extinct yet.
For several years now, an alternative, postindustrial food chain has been taking shape, its growth fueled by one "food scare" after another: Alar, GMOs, rBGH, E. coli 0157:H7; now BSE. Whatever science told us about the risks of these novel industrial entrees and sides, something else told us we might want to order something more appetizing: organic, hormone-free, grass-finished. It might cost more, but it's possible again to eat meat from a short, legible food chain consisting of little more than sunlight, grass and ruminants. Back to the future: a 21st-century savanna. If, as seems probable, this landscape should now expand at the expense of the feedlot, then something good—even beautiful—will have come of this poor mad cow.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer for The NewYork Times Magazine. This piece originally was published in The NewYork Times Magazine in the United States. Copyright 2004 Michael Pollan.
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