In defense of chewers of cud
Make mine medium-rare
BY BLAKE HURST
The car in front of us at the coffee shop drive-through window had a bumper sticker that said “Meat is not green.” Well, thank goodness. I’m no cook, but I’m sure the main cook at our house balks at serving green meat. Now, I’m not totally blind to the metaphorical play of the bumper sticker set: From worries about cholesterol to energy use to global warming, the cow is on the front lines in the battle about what we should eat. Yet, beef is a main ingredient to my definition of the good life, and it’s time to speak up for cud-chewers.
A 2006 Food and Agriculture Organization report said that cows cause more greenhouse warming than cars. Methane, when it comes to global warming, is 23 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. Cows emit methane when they ruminate. Which means almost all my textbooks in high school history were wrong. They seemed to think that it was generally a bad thing that Buffalo Bill Cody and his buddies shot millions of buffaloes for the hides, wasting the meat and driving buffalo close to extinction. Come to find out, Buffalo Bill was last century’s Al Gore, and probably the only reason the climate has lasted as long as it has.
Who knew that brown cow was such an environmental villain? We once had a steer bloat in our feedlot. The vet stuck a scalpel in the calf’s side causing an odoriferous eruption of what I now know were dangerous greenhouse gases. And, somewhere on a low-lying Polynesian island, a French tourist was swept away by the sudden sea rise caused by our veterinarian’s scalpel. Not to worry, I’ve got a solution. Like essayist Matt Labash, I eat as much beef as I can, thereby stemming global warming at the source.
There is an environmental solution. Just feed cows nothing but grass, and the problem goes away. At least that’s what dozens of “foodie” Web sites say. According to a study done by Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, and work done by Nathan Pelletier of Dallhousie University in Canada, cows fattened on corn actually emit less methane than do their more environmentally correct bovine brethren. Feedlot-finished cattle are easier on the climate because they reach slaughter weight more quickly, the higher feed value of corn decreases the emission of methane, and less land is used in the production of each pound of beef.
Replacing the meat in my diet with the next best source of protein, beans, doesn’t solve the problem. I mean, methane is methane is methane. I will then be causing more environmental damage than a Hummer. Not to mention the marital problems sure to follow. We are doomed, simply doomed.
How exactly do we know how much methane a cow produces? A quick Internet search answered that question. There it was, a picture of a confused looking Holstein with about a hundred-pound L.P. bottle on her back and an apparatus to capture afflatus installed—the answer to my marital problems and heating bill. Just recapture the methane, and recycle it in my furnace.
The recent release of the Climate Research Unit’s emails has added a certain spice to this whole debate about our addiction to SUVs and sirloins. It seems that science is not always a non-political search for truth and some of our leading experts on this most important subject are humorless twits. Separate stories revealed that much of the basis for historical reconstruction of temperatures depends on tree rings from only 12 trees in Siberia. The authors of the emails claim they are mistreated, misunderstood, plagued by the misinformed, and taken out of context. “Hide the decline” hardly seems to need much context, however.
If you are 30, there has been no global warming in your adult life. More importantly, at least in the short term, even the most alarmist global warming models show little benefit from the Cap and Trade Bill in front of Congress, or by extension, the rules that the EPA is ready to write limiting our use of carbon. We’re going to raise the price of almost everything for no benefit that those God-like computer models can find.
The goal of the kind of people recently partying down in Copenhagen is to reduce the emission of carbon by 80 percent by the year 2050. That would demand a carbon use roughly the same as our grandparents used in 1910. One thing is certain: people in China, India, and Westboro, Mo., are not going to accept a future that cold and that dark. Not to mention a future without prime rib.
Much of the world is unsuitable for the raising of grains, vegetables or arugula. Without the cow, we wouldn’t have T-bone steaks, John Wayne or rodeos. She placidly uses what we cannot, turning vast stretches of the world into valuable protein and energy. From the savannas of Africa to the plains of Australia to the American West, from the hills of Virginia to the hollows of Southern Missouri, the cow takes indigestible cellulose and turns it into what’s for dinner. The cow is the perfect example of sustainability, providing nutrition and enjoyment from those most renewable of resources, grass and corn. Not only that, but beef is a necessity, not unlike medical care or clothing. You can celebrate your anniversary with a nice pasta, your birthday with vegetarian lasagna, your graduation with tofu on a stick, but for me special occasions have always demanded a steak, and always will.
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