11 Jan 2004
The Future of Cattle

The New York Times Magazine has a great article today entitled Cattle Futures?.

For tens of thousands of years, we have been eating the flesh of ruminants that live on grass. The rightness of that picture -- a bovine grazing on grassland -- goes way back, maybe all the way to the savanna. And while that picture has recently been eclipsed by nauseating images of modern meat production, the grass-fed ruminant and the vegetarian herbivore are not extinct yet.

For several years now, an alternative, postindustrial food chain has been taking shape, its growth fueled by one ''food scare'' after another: Alar, G.M.O.'s, rBGH, E. coli 0157:H7; now B.S.E. Whatever science told us about the risks of these novel industrial entrees and sides, something else told us we might want to order something more appetizing: organic, hormone-free, grass-finished. It might cost more, but it's possible again to eat meat from a short, legible food chain consisting of little more than sunlight, grass and ruminants. Back to the future: a 21st-century savanna. If, as seems probable, this landscape should now expand at the expense of the feedlot, then something good -- even beautiful -- will have come of this poor mad cow.

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