Michael Pollan Hails Grass-Fed Cattle

Arcata –A strategic shift to grass-fed cattle is the key to healing America’s “national eating disorder,” Michael Pollan, the popular agri-business journalist, told a packed house at Humboldt State University Sept. 29.

Humboldt County farmers and ranchers are leading the way in the conversion to grass-nourished animals, he noted. Eventually the change could result in the transformation of America’s corn-fed livestock economy and food chain, entrenched for decades by national agriculture policy.

Pollan said the stakes are enormous: a radical redesign of the food system, based on a full-scale departure from industrial—corn-based—food and animal feed. Their near-universal use has created a “fast-food nation” beset with grave health risks, he charged.

“We need to take the animals out of the feedlot and fatten them on grasses, which is what they were evolved to do,” he told the HSU throng, estimated at 600. That would lead to much healthier animals and much healthier meat. Farmers’ embrace of a “poly-culture of grasses” would stem both the national epidemic of obesity and the international ravages of hunger.

"The more I look at it,” Pollan said, “grass-fed meat is the closest thing to a free-lunch in nature. If the pasture is managed really well—intensively grazed, moving the animals very often—you are actually building soil. Basically you are taking food off the land at no cost to the land, if you do it right. In fact, you’re improving the land.”

His postulate:  “If we get it right on the farm, we’re going to get it right in our bodies, too.”

Pollan, a best-selling author who presented Humboldt State’s Hadley Distinguished Lecture in Journalism, drew a stark picture of what he claims is the monoculture of corn’s powerfully destructive  impact on the environment and public health.

• Commodity corn (number two yellow corn grown all over the Midwest) is the chief culprit, “the keystone species of our industrial food system.”
• Corn is the nation’s biggest crop, in acres (80 million, twice the size of New York State) and dollar value, “with the possible exception of your own local cash crop (laughter).”
• Corn is a “fat packet of calories” that dominates cropland, crowds out other plant species and crushes biodiversity in the corn-belt.
• Corn is “pampered.” Agri-business “overfeeds it with fertilizer, nukes its enemies with pesticides—and we stuff ourselves with it.”
• Corn readily lends itself to high yields—20 bushels per acre in 1920, 200 per acre in Iowa today. No other species, except the Holstein cow, has raised its productivity so dramatically in that time. The result: enormous overproduction that stimulates consumers to overeat.  
• Commodity corn prices have dropped 50% in Mexico, but tortilla prices have doubled, since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the Clinton Administration. Yet the floodtide of cheap corn to overseas markets does not necessarily feed the world. The poorest can no longer feed themselves because they cannot grow corn and trade it with the prodigious economies of scale achieved by the United States. More and more foreign farmers cannot afford corn, are driven off their land and are forced into vastly overcrowded cities.
• Three-fifths of Americans are overweight, one-fifth are obese. The generation being born today, demographers believe, “will have a shorter lifespan than their parents if nothing is done about diabetes in particular. We’re reducing the lifespan for the first time.”         
• The obesity crisis began in the late 1970s and corn is largely responsible, in Pollan’s judgment. Since then, “each of us [is] consuming 200 more calories per day. American farmers are producing 500 more calories per day. So we’re eating 40% of the extra production.”
  

Pollan said there is a precedent in the nation’s history, with the same dire consequences for public health. Farmers produced too much and people consumed too much in the 1810s and 1820s, in the form of corn whiskey. The resulting crisis, an epidemic of drinking, sowed the seeds of the temperance movement and prefigured today’s obesity epidemic.

Regarding reform of national agricultural policy, Pollen urged producers to measure their income by the acre instead of the bushel. He appealed to Uncle Sam to give precedence to quality over yield.

A well-informed public is equally crucial to reforming the food system, Pollan emphasized. It is a national problem in which the consumer can lead the way if the “wall of ignorance” can be broken down between consumers and producers. “The only information traveling in most of our food system is price,” he admonished. “We have been brainwashed to believe in the 99-cent hamburger—that spending as little as possible for food is the smartest thing to do. I think that’s wrong.”

The wall is incredibly destructive because it is “such a short walk from not knowing how your food is produced to not caring,” he said. “The consumer does not care whether the farmer can make a living or not, as long as he gets a bargain. The producer doesn’t care enough about his animals’ well-being or whether he’s putting hormones in his cows. Yield is all that matters on the producer’s end because price is all that matters on our end.”   

Pollan’s solution: people should eat with the same sense of civic responsibility they bring to community service or volunteer work. A citizen consumer recognizes that “in our eating, we remake the earth.” He or she is a food detective who knows that each food dollar represents a vitally important vote for the well-being of the producer, the welfare of animals and the biodiversity of species.

It is time to merge the roles of citizen and consumer, Pollan said. They have been divorced for many decades. If they are merged, “we have the power to redefine what we mean by a good value—a ‘real-value’ meal. What we eat attaches our bodies and our minds to the earth. In our being we remake the earth, either for the better or the worst. In our eating decisions we can help create the kind of world we want to live in. We have to get back to grasses, the poly-culture of grasses, that makes up the cow pasture. We must bring an ecologist’s lens to this.”

The Hadley Distinguished Lecture in Journalism was inaugurated in the 1980s to honor the late Humboldt County newspaper publishers Gordon, Monica and Craig Hadley, who produced The Union newspaper in Arcata for nearly half a century.

Previous lecturers have included columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, NBC sportscaster Dick Enberg and veteran White House correspondent and columnist Helen Thomas.

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