Meat: What's Not for Dinner
Because of some odd synchronicity of picking up used books in stores and yard sales, or borrowing from friends, I found myself reading three books back to back whose subject in some way was meat. The hamburger has come to symbolize contemporary America, more so than apple pie. McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, dozens of upscale burger chains, the backyard barbecue: Americans love meat. These books cast light on the dark side of producing and consuming meat, illuminating the true cost of our national cuisine.
Howard Lyman opens his book by setting the parameters of his experience: “I am a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher. I grew up on a dairy farm in Montana, and I ran a feedlot operation there for twenty years. I know firsthand how cattle are raised and how meat is produced in this country. Today I am president of Earth Save International, [End Page 171] an organization promoting organic farming and the vegetarian diet.” Part memoir, part diatribe, part well-researched treatise, Mad Cowboy is a frightening, sometimes sickening, but convincing clarion call for sweeping change at the very core of our cultural behavior: what we eat. Citing study after study, and imbuing the narrative with his personal experience, Lyman shows how the meat industry is destructive to human health and the ecosystem, contributes to global sociopolitical problems such as hunger, diminishing water resources, and the loss of family farm culture, as well as a host of other evils. “Meat kills,” Lyman writes. “It is far and away the number one cause of death and disease in America.” If you are not sworn off meat by the end of this book, likely you will be deeply troubled by the “factory farm” conditions in which livestock are raised. “In Arkansas,” Lyman reports, “the average farm feeds over fifty tons of chicken litter to cattle every year.” That’s right: cows eat chicken shit. We eat cows. Not a pretty picture.
There is no more zealous proselytizer than a former sinner. The studies cited here are convincing, but Lyman’s testimonies of pumping cattle with hormones and antibiotics, and feeding them offal on his own ranch present a disturbing picture of ranching in America today. While individuals have the right to kill themselves because they “so love their hamburgers,” he asserts, we “do not have the right to kill the planet” with our animal-based diet “proven to be as toxic to the Earth as it is to ourselves.” In spite of the distressing but important information within, this book is highly readable, told in a colloquial style, at times even humorous. Unless you are a cattle rancher, this book will likely provide information you did not know, perhaps do not want to know, but in fact must know to save ourselves and our environment.
This memoir picks up where Lyman’s leaves off, when the cattle leave the farm for the slaughterhouse and packing plant. Cheri Register opens her fine memoir with a childhood memory of a school tour of the Wilson meat processing plant, where her father, and many citizens of Albert Lea, Minnesota, worked for decades until 1994, when the company filed for bankruptcy. “During the industrial boom of the 1950s, Albert Lea’s Wilson plant employed 600 supervisory and office personnel and 1,100 production [End Page 172] workers, who slaughtered and processed an average of 2,700 hogs, 500 cattle, and 500 sheep each day.” The class trip opened the author’s eyes, and serves as an analogy for the reader as we progress through this story: “Gradually I understood that animals were ‘slaughtered’ at the plant, that the cattle and pigs...
