Mindful Eating: Cow-Pooling

Jill Davies, director of Sustainable Living Systems, is a pure food activist living in western Montana. She speaks and writes on current trends in the production of foods and medicines with a focus on GMOs, and on organic agriculture and seed saving.

Part 5

It’s time to talk about meat and what’s missing in the factory-farm meat that is found in the chain stores. I want to make it very clear how insane this part of our food systems is. In the 1950s and 1960s our food experts were telling us to cut way down on the consumption of animal fats. Why? We were having too many heart attacks. (In Part 2 we covered the fallacy of that advice.)

At the same time, the USDA was pouring subsidy dollars into the Midwest, turning it into a 125,000-square-mile sea of corn, producing cheap feed for the new CAFOs being built (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). Why? To get fat into our meat. Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” describes the history of this eloquently.

Now we have lovely “marbled” beef that most people can afford to eat in large helpings. But what happens when you take animals marvelously designed to digest grass and make them eat mainly seeds, i.e. corn? Ruminants (cows, sheep, bison) have something called a rumen, which is essentially a big fermentation tank (stomach) in which a resident population of bacteria (which have coevolved with the animals) happily digest the grass for the animal, which then turns it into high quality protein.

The normal acidity (pH) of a rumen is neutral, unlike our own highly acid stomachs. But feed the animal corn and the rumen becomes highly acidic, which actually makes the cow sick, manifesting as diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a weakening of the immune system. Up to 30 percent of feedlot cows (some pens even more) are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers. If kept on the feedlot diet for more than 150 days they will die. Antibiotics and antacids keep the cows standing (and eating). That’s what happens to the cow. What happens to the meat?

There are two fats that are called “essential,” meaning our bodies cannot make them so we must get them in our food. Named Omega 6 and Omega 3, they both have important roles in our bodies, but their functions are often opposites and they compete for space in our cell membranes. Om.3s lower the inflammation response, Om.6s excite it. Om.3s slow the clotting of blood, Om.6s speed it. Om.3s are produced in the leaves of plants, Om.6s in the seeds of plants.

Om.3s facilitate the transformation of light into usable energy in the plant chloroplast and are intimately involved in the growth, health and function of the neurons in our brains and eyes, a fascinating coherence in function between plant and animal. Om.6s serve as a store of energy for the future seedling, and are involved in fat storage in the animal.

Our Western, industrial food system has taken the animals off the family farm and put them in CAFOs and shifted their diet from grass to corn — from leaves to seeds. Consequently the ratio of Om.6 to Om.3 in their meat has shifted from 2:1 to more than 10:1.

This marked shift applies to all factory farm products where the main food is cheap, subsidized corn: beef, chicken, pork, dairy, eggs. Also, since our diets shifted from whole foods and pastured animals to refined corn and soy oils where Om.6s dominate and the process of hydrogenation of vegetable oils destroys Om.3s, the same ratio of Om.6 to Om.3 is found in our bodies as well. But in pre-western-diet populations, the ratio was 1:1 or 2:1.

Since we now are full of Om.6s and deficient in Om.3s, what are the health effects? An excessive inflammation response yields auto-immune diseases like arthritis. Blood clotting equals heart disease. Brain cell deficiency equals learning and behavioral problems in children, to name just a few of the consequences.

In this light, what the animal has eaten becomes more important than choosing what animal to eat. For example, farmed salmon that are being fed grain may be worse for us than grass-fed beef, which have the proper ratio of these fats. And from a “whole systems thinking” perspective, (see Part 3), the corporate agenda has taken the light out of our food.

Sustainable Living Systems in western Montana is working to build (actually rebuild) a local food system. In this valley, we have lots of stock producers, mostly beef, and we have several meat processors as well. Lots of people here are using the processors to cut and wrap either their own wild meat or locally produced beef and lamb. But only a few producers are called on to provide a grass-fed (grass-finished) animal. Apparently, people still think fattening with corn is the way to go.

The cattle producers here who are running fattening operations have to bring in train carloads of corn from the Midwest. We cannot reliably produce feed corn in this climate but we can produce great grass here. Producing corn-fattened cattle in this valley does not make sense and is not sustainable. But if more people started asking for grass-fed beef we could build our local economy around it. §