Everything is corn (Pollan)
September 8th, 2007 | Published in Health, Agriculture, Animals, Food, Quotes | 1 Comment
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.
–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 18
September 8th, 2007 at 8:56 pm (#)
Writing in the New York Times last year, Michael Pollan noted:
Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot.
I can’t find the original source in Berry’s writings.