I am endlessly fascinated and outraged by American beef production and consumption. Consumers demand it cheap and high in saturated fat, and meatpacking companies supply it as fast as they can. A recent New York Times article was chock full o' disturbing info, fodder for future soapbox speeches.

Writer Michael Pollan purchased #534 as a calf "to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat."

Things he learned, and you ought to know, about the beef you eat:

With the industrial feedlot system, we've all but ended the symbiosis between grazing cattle and grasses, "a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food on land too arid or hilly to grow anything else."

In exchange, we've introduced bad, bad things to cattle:
- Massive digestive distress: A grain diet, i.e., cheap calories, actually "can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics." E.g., massive daily doses of Rumensin and tylosin.
- An unnatural food chain that breeds disease: Cattle eat bovine blood products, bovine fat, pigs, fish, and chicken manure, among other things. Factory-raised chickens, pigs, and fish, in turn, eat cows.

We've brought bad things unto ourselves:
- Heart disease: "A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef." The USDA grading system rewards marbled beef from cornfed cattle, which is higher in saturated fat. By the way, healthier fats like Omega-3 fatty acids are found in grass-fed cattle.
- Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria: See Rumensin and tylosin, above.
- Acid-resistant strains of bacteria: Grass-fed cattle grow bacteria in the neutral-Ph environment of their stomachs, which die in the normal acids of a human stomach. But "the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids -- and go on to kill us." Deadly bacteria are also found in feedlot cattle manure, which is difficult to keep separate from the meat harvested, especially at the slaughtering pace of U.S. meatpacking plants.
- Hormone buildup in our food and environment: It "may explain falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls" as well as mutations in fish found in runoff areas.
- Increased consumption of fossil fuels: The author's calf consumed in his lifetime massive amounts of corn, which in turn took about 284 gallons of oil to produce, mostly in the form of petroleum-based fertilizers. "We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine."
- Monoculture: Surpluses of heavily-subsidized, factory-farmed corn are fed to cows at the encouragement of the USDA.

And still we resist "impractical" solutions, such as switching to a hay diet before slaughter to reverse the breeding of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which might in turn reduce the need to irradiate our beef. Europe has banned synthetic hormones from its beef; American feedlots say they would stop if the market demanded it. But the market loves eating cheap beef every day.

When will Americans accept that it's in their own best interest to eat less beef, and pay more for it? I know: The day they accept that they should use less fossil fuel, and pay more for it . . .