WHY THE HAMBURGER IS NOT REALLY CHEAP?

HOW AMERICANS SHOULD CALCULATE THE COST OF A HAMBURGER

(Excerpts from Interview with Micheal Pollan, a former editor at Harper's Magazine, is the author of The Botany of Desire and several other books that examine the intersections between science and culture.)

41,000,000 cows are slaughtered every year for beef in US alone. The U.S. beef industry is made up of more than 1 million businesses, farms and ranches. Per capita spending for beef in retail and food service was about $249 in 2008 — up about $50 from 2001, almost 5 times growth in 7 years! Ever wondered how this growth came about? Let us understand some background.

Cows have the most highly evolved digestive organ on the planet, called the rumen. And the rumen can digest grass. It takes cellulose in grass, and turns it into protein, very nutritious protein. However, cows for slaughter are not fed grass on grasslands but corn on choked cow-farms or feedlots. Corn is cheap and makes them grow much more quickly and fatter and people like their meat really fat and marbled. In capitalism, time is money. The big problem is that cows are not evolved to digest corn. It creates all sorts of problems for them including their rumen bloating up like a balloon or their liver abscesses. By feeding them what they're not equipped to eat well, we then go down the path of technological fixes – primarily antibiotics.

Why should we have a problem with this system?

1.       Cheap meat is a product of lots of antibiotics given to animals. Over half of the antibiotics in the U.S. go to livestock -- that means these drugs no longer work for human patients. The reason you have trouble finding a good antibiotic when your child has an ear infection is directly related to the cost of that cheap hamburger.

2.      When the animals arrive at the meatpacking plant from cow-farms, they're carrying quite a bit of manure. Microbes like E.Coli O157 is now very common in the manure of feedlot animals. And if we ingest only 10 of those bacteria, they can kill us, because they release this lethal toxin. Food poisoning and costs of death is never calculated in the price you pay for a hamburger.

3.       If you talk to environmentalists, they're very concerned about cow farms because all of the water that comes out of them is also full of pharmaceuticals. There are hormones in the water. They are finding fish with strange sexual characteristics downstream from feedlots. The antibiotics get into the environment also.

4.       The reason we can grow corn so cheaply is because we give the corn, chemical fertilizer that is a fossil fuel product. It's takes about 100 gallons of oil to grow a single animal! So we've taken the rumen, which is this sustainable solar organ, and we've turned it into just another fossil fuel burner. We surely do not want that!

5.       Due to centralized system of meat processing, infection from one animal can spread rapidly country wide. Authorities find it hard to trace the source.

The great lesson of ecology is that everything is connected. And it's true. So next time you're reaching for that cheap food, you might ask, is it really so cheap and above all, worth taking the risk?

Each one of us should try and connect to ourselves deeply, through Yog and Pranayaam. That way, we will think twice before we hurt anyone in the ecology.