I have a beef

Jan 11, 2004

Some good reading about the insanity of agribusiness. Verlyn Klinkenborg offers this from Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient Efficiencies of Modern Farming:

As always, the goals of industrial agriculture create a perverse logic. Instead of adapting the agricultural system to suit the animal, we try to adapt the animal to suit the system in order to eke out every last efficiency.

And from Michael Pollan in Cattle Futures comes this:

Whatever else it is—nutritious, economical, the polar opposite of wasteful—you can’t help feeling that the convoluted new food chain that industrial agriculture has devised for the animals we eat (and thus for us) is, to be unscientific for a moment, disgusting.

Anton Zuiker ☄