Grass Based Health looks to be a very interesting blog, and reminds me of Pollan's description of Polyface Farms
in "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
", which is a magnificent read.
I was struck, reading Pollan's telling of the story of grass, by how significantly different grass fed husbandry is, and how significantly different grassfed animal food quality is compared to the industrially produced food you and I procure at the record low (point of sale) costs we're accustomed to.
The short version as Pollan and folks like Joel Salatin (Salatin calls himself a "grass farmer", but makes his living selling the animals his spectacularly healthy grass feeds) tell it:
-Industrially produced cattle are finished/fattened on industrially produced corn which is so full of oil based fertilizer, that each cow has about a half barrel of oil in it. I don't know if the one half barrel accounts for the oil burned in the planting, weeding, harvesting, milling, and transporting the corn, or in the butchering, packaging and transporting the beef to you and to me. I think the half barrel is just an accounting of the amount of amonium nitrate used to grow the cow to market weight.
-The food quality of a cow fed on oil fed corn is significantly different, most notably, in the content of the omega six fatty acids at the cellular level. In short - we didn't evolve to eat THAT kind of cow.
-The costs of the animal are distributed due to multiple government interventions in the agricultural industry; the price you pay at the counter distracts you from the price you pay in taxes and other market distorting interventions of the USDA. The other prices you pay, but don't see, result from:
1. Over-fertilization of corn with ammonium nitrate, which ends up in creeks, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, which is probably not good (but I don't know how bad it truly is)
2. Rivers of bovine waste created in the feedlots where cattle, which are ruminants made to live on grass (which very few mammals can live on, but fortunately for us apex predators, cattle thrive on), are fed corn. Ruminants fed a corn diet get sick, and fat, and require lots of interested stuff mixed with their feed (antibiotics and surfactants) so they can survive the unnatural diet.
-Interesting chain of events follows. All of the USDA's rules about butchering meat are built around the idea of butchering sick cows en masse. If you feed a cow grass, and kill it in your back yard, there are entire classes of disease it doesn't have a risk of getting - like e coli, which could be eliminated from our food supply by letting all cattle live on grass alone for five days before they are butchered. But don't try and kill a cow in your back yard and sell it, because the USDA doesn't like that; they want you to take it to an industrial processing facility with the sick cows, where the carcass can be gazed at by inspectors. Yes, the USDA - how this happened is sad to consider - can tell you who you can or cannot buy dead cows from, presumably because the passionate, caring and very intelligent, not to mention incredibly well informed, bureaucrats at the USDA have your best interests at heart and unquestionably know better than you do what you should or should not eat and with whom you should conduct business.
-I won't even delve into the bizarre and dark relationships between the USDA, independent farmers, and the agribusiness conglomerates - Lierre Keith
and Pollan paint the picture well, and it may even be true, probably is, and if so, certainly validates the Frankenstein creations that result when business and government start scratching each other's backs.
-For those of you who believe in the anthropogenic global warming myths, grass farmers like to point out that while industrial food production of both plants and animals is a massive contributor to carbon emissions, grass farming and grass farmed animals are a huge carbon sponge, effectively sequestering carbon by creating massive quantities of top soil.
-85% of the caloric quantity of the food our industrial food system produces comes from corn and other grain sources (with soybeans thrown in for good measure). It's better to choke down your grains as beef than as grains, but it still isn't what I would call optimal. That's why I now view the deer I kill as the best food in our house, whereas I used to look at it like second rate meat that was hard to cook and tasted funny.
So I wonder about the massive experiment we are conducting on ourselves - can we be healthy on non-grassfed animals as our food, and at what dosages? Joel Salatin says he grows hundreds of cows, turkeys, rabbits, chickens, pigs, and chicken eggs annually with no irrigation, no fertilizer, and virtually no commercial feed. Would it be possible to transform our food system into grass based production systems which are as self sustaining as Polyface? Salatin says the only reason the grass based production method does not beat the current costs of the industrial food chain is USDA rules, designed to protect us from the many hazards of industrial production of foods, unnecessarily raise the cost of bringing grass fed animals to market. Aside from the quality and cost issues, industrial production methods are arguable unsustainable, especially as regards non-animal products, because they are dependent upon oil fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation (irrigation brings soil salinization and is therefore unsustainable - although there are some efforts to breed new varieties of salt resistant plants, thank goodness).
I'm dreaming of the grass revolution. Providing food via the current industrial food system to 300 million Americans, much less 6+ billion the world over, seems like one huge house of cards, let's hope the breeze through the window doesn't kick up.
(edited 3 March 2011)
in "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals", which is a magnificent read.I was struck, reading Pollan's telling of the story of grass, by how significantly different grass fed husbandry is, and how significantly different grassfed animal food quality is compared to the industrially produced food you and I procure at the record low (point of sale) costs we're accustomed to.
The short version as Pollan and folks like Joel Salatin (Salatin calls himself a "grass farmer", but makes his living selling the animals his spectacularly healthy grass feeds) tell it:
-Industrially produced cattle are finished/fattened on industrially produced corn which is so full of oil based fertilizer, that each cow has about a half barrel of oil in it. I don't know if the one half barrel accounts for the oil burned in the planting, weeding, harvesting, milling, and transporting the corn, or in the butchering, packaging and transporting the beef to you and to me. I think the half barrel is just an accounting of the amount of amonium nitrate used to grow the cow to market weight.
-The food quality of a cow fed on oil fed corn is significantly different, most notably, in the content of the omega six fatty acids at the cellular level. In short - we didn't evolve to eat THAT kind of cow.
-The costs of the animal are distributed due to multiple government interventions in the agricultural industry; the price you pay at the counter distracts you from the price you pay in taxes and other market distorting interventions of the USDA. The other prices you pay, but don't see, result from:
1. Over-fertilization of corn with ammonium nitrate, which ends up in creeks, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, which is probably not good (but I don't know how bad it truly is)
2. Rivers of bovine waste created in the feedlots where cattle, which are ruminants made to live on grass (which very few mammals can live on, but fortunately for us apex predators, cattle thrive on), are fed corn. Ruminants fed a corn diet get sick, and fat, and require lots of interested stuff mixed with their feed (antibiotics and surfactants) so they can survive the unnatural diet.
-Interesting chain of events follows. All of the USDA's rules about butchering meat are built around the idea of butchering sick cows en masse. If you feed a cow grass, and kill it in your back yard, there are entire classes of disease it doesn't have a risk of getting - like e coli, which could be eliminated from our food supply by letting all cattle live on grass alone for five days before they are butchered. But don't try and kill a cow in your back yard and sell it, because the USDA doesn't like that; they want you to take it to an industrial processing facility with the sick cows, where the carcass can be gazed at by inspectors. Yes, the USDA - how this happened is sad to consider - can tell you who you can or cannot buy dead cows from, presumably because the passionate, caring and very intelligent, not to mention incredibly well informed, bureaucrats at the USDA have your best interests at heart and unquestionably know better than you do what you should or should not eat and with whom you should conduct business.
-I won't even delve into the bizarre and dark relationships between the USDA, independent farmers, and the agribusiness conglomerates - Lierre Keith
and Pollan paint the picture well, and it may even be true, probably is, and if so, certainly validates the Frankenstein creations that result when business and government start scratching each other's backs.-For those of you who believe in the anthropogenic global warming myths, grass farmers like to point out that while industrial food production of both plants and animals is a massive contributor to carbon emissions, grass farming and grass farmed animals are a huge carbon sponge, effectively sequestering carbon by creating massive quantities of top soil.
-85% of the caloric quantity of the food our industrial food system produces comes from corn and other grain sources (with soybeans thrown in for good measure). It's better to choke down your grains as beef than as grains, but it still isn't what I would call optimal. That's why I now view the deer I kill as the best food in our house, whereas I used to look at it like second rate meat that was hard to cook and tasted funny.
So I wonder about the massive experiment we are conducting on ourselves - can we be healthy on non-grassfed animals as our food, and at what dosages? Joel Salatin says he grows hundreds of cows, turkeys, rabbits, chickens, pigs, and chicken eggs annually with no irrigation, no fertilizer, and virtually no commercial feed. Would it be possible to transform our food system into grass based production systems which are as self sustaining as Polyface? Salatin says the only reason the grass based production method does not beat the current costs of the industrial food chain is USDA rules, designed to protect us from the many hazards of industrial production of foods, unnecessarily raise the cost of bringing grass fed animals to market. Aside from the quality and cost issues, industrial production methods are arguable unsustainable, especially as regards non-animal products, because they are dependent upon oil fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation (irrigation brings soil salinization and is therefore unsustainable - although there are some efforts to breed new varieties of salt resistant plants, thank goodness).
I'm dreaming of the grass revolution. Providing food via the current industrial food system to 300 million Americans, much less 6+ billion the world over, seems like one huge house of cards, let's hope the breeze through the window doesn't kick up.
(edited 3 March 2011)
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