Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf: The Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation - Hardcover

Lovenheim, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609605917 ISBN 13: 9780609605912

Publisher: Crown, 2002

Synopsis

Four years ago, journalist Peter Lovenheim was standing in a long line at McDonald’s to buy a Happy Meal for his little daughter, which would come with a much-desired Teenie Beanie Baby—either a black-and-white cow named “Daisy” or an adorable red bull named “Snort.” Finding it rather strange that young children were being offered cuddly toy cows one minute and eating the grilled remains of real ones the next, Lovenheim suddenly saw clearly the great disconnect between what we eat and our knowledge of where it comes from. Determined to understand the process by which living animals become food, Lovenheim did the only thing he could think of: He bought a calf—make that twin calves, number 7 and number 8—from the dairy farm where they were born and asked for permission to spend as much time as necessary hanging around and observing everything that happened in the lives of these farm animals.

Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf is the provocative true story of Peter Lovenheim’s hands-on journey into the dairy and beef industries as he follows his calves from conception to possible consumption. In the process, he gets to know the good, hard-working people who raise our cattle and make milk products, beef, and veal available to consumers like you and me. He supplies us with a “fly on the wall” view of how these animals are used to put food on America’s very abundant tables.

Constantly vigilant about wanting to be an observer who never interferes, Lovenheim allows the reader to see every aspect of a cow’s life, without passing judgment. Reading this book will forever change the way you think about food and the people and animals who provide it for us.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Lovenheim’s articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, and other publications. A graduate of Boston University School of Journalism and Cornell Law School, he is the author of four previous books, including Becoming a Mediator: An Insider’s Guide to Exploring Careers in Mediation. He lives in Rochester, New York.

From the Back Cover

“Lovenheim’s book is masterful. Never has a book so big, so poignant, so important been written about the people who produce our milk and meat for us and the 110 million cattle from which they earn their livelihoods . . . . Peter Lovenheim confronts us with some unintended consequences of our eating habits.” —Franklin M. Loew, D.V.M., Ph.D.; member, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences; and former dean of the cornell and the tufts university schools of Veterinary medicine

“Recalling Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, written in 1906, this book, too, carefully examines the deep disconnect between what we eat and where it comes from. Lovenheim is a meticulous observer with a deep feeling for the people who open their worlds to him . . . . The book’s freshness, originality, and humanity make it a rare journey of exploration.”—Scott McVay, President, the Chautauqua Institution

“This is wonderful writing about the process of farming and the people who farm. It’s a serious book, lucid and endearing. Lovenheim is good company as he follows two calves from birth to griddle, but raises the hard questions we try not to think about—the same questions raised by E. B. White in Charlotte’s Web.” —Mark Kramer, director of the Narrative Journalism Program, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University

“[Lovenheim] writes respectfully of farmers and expresses many of the same feelings I’ve had during a twenty-five-year career of handling farm animals. . . . Lots of people—including those who actually work with farm animals—are going to like this book." —Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures, and nationally recognized expert in farm animal handling and behavior

“This is an important book. It reminds us that farmers labor within a system they cannot easily change, and that the animals from which our food comes are living beings. I hope this book will inspire more dialogue between consumers and farmers about the way we produce our food.” —José Bové, chairman, Confédération Paysanne, France, and author of The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers Against Junk Food

Reviews

A more generous view of the beef industry than Eric Schlosser's recent Fast Food Nation, this anecdotal account follows a cow's life from conception to consumption. Lovenheim (Mediate, Don't Litigate), a professional mediator, was buying his daughter a McDonald's Happy Meal with a coveted Beanie Baby cow when he was struck by how little most beef-eaters know about the process that turns cute calves into juicy burgers. He found an operating dairy farm near his upstate New York home that agreed to sell him two calves, and to allow him 24-hour access to all aspects of the farm's operation. Tracing the progress of his holstein calves as they are raised for "dairy meat" (middling quality beef that ends up at mid-priced restaurants), Lovenheim offers an absorbing firsthand look at cattle-raising. How bull semen is collected, why cows are made to ingest magnets, how bulls are de-horned and castrated, how dairy cows are chosen for slaughter, why antibiotics and additives are used, how a cattle auction is conducted these are just some of the daily operations that Lovenheim illuminates while introducing readers to the men and women who work these farms. He ultimately never sets foot in a slaughterhouse, and the book is more a neutral, matter-of-fact exploration than a muckraking expos‚, as much about Lovenheim's own education as it is about the beef that ends up on our tables.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Journalist Lovenheim wants contemporary Americans to understand where the milk and hamburgers they take for granted come from. Purchasing several calves from a herd of cattle on an upstate New York dairy farm, Lovenheim follows their progress from birth to death. Along the way, he shares his newfound knowledge of the mechanics of artificial insemination, the rites of calving, the economics of cattle husbandry, the operation of the dairy products industry, and the functioning of the meat-processing industry. By focusing on the people involved at each step of this process, and by neither sentimentalizing nor anthropomorphizing the cattle, Lovenheim offers a graphic portrait of those whose labor and lives feed a nation and a world. Life favors neither man nor bovine, but how the humans in Lovenheim's tale conduct themselves ennobles them and gives honor to the brief lives of farm animals who are as vulnerable to nature's everyday vicissitudes as they are to the appetites of their human masters. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Journalist Lovenheim's curiosity over how living things are turned into food inspired him to buy two calves and follow them from infancy to the slaughterhouse. His account of this process is a mix of agricultural science, insights into the meat business, and human-interest journalism. At its core are the personal stories of some of the people who raise beef and dairy cattle and those who slaughter them for human consumption. Along with the author, the reader discovers that much of the meat for fast-food hamburgers comes from dairy animals, either from cows whose production has slowed or from bull calves. The facts and story of beef production are presented well (and described in vivid detail with no apologies or call for reform), but the mix of science, farming, and irrelevant personal details is at times disconcerting. Recommended for public libraries. Tim McKimmie, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In 1960, for summer vacation, my family drove from our suburban home in Rochester, New York, to California and back. I was seven years old. On the fourth day of our trip, somewhere in Iowa, I noticed from the back seat of my father’s blue Buick Roadmaster a large herd of grazing cattle. I asked my older sister Jane, who sat next to me, why there were so many “cows,” as I called them.

“That’s where our hamburgers come from,” she said.

My mother twisted around from the front seat. “Jane, shush!”

I asked my sister how cows become hamburgers.

“Oh, the farmers feed them,” she said, vaguely.

“Then what do they do to them?”

“They take them for a train ride.”

“Then what do they do?”

“Peter,” said my mother, “let’s play license-plate bingo.”

In the forty years since that trip, I have eaten my share of steaks, roast beef, and hamburgers, but I have never quite gotten over either my curiosity about how we turn living things into food or my wonder and uneasiness at so many animals taking so many “train rides” to satisfy our appetites. At times, over the years, I ate less meat, taking what seemed the moral high ground. At other times I simply pushed the matter from my thoughts. Today my two older children’s eating habits reflect my own ambivalence: one eats meat, the other doesn’t.

In the spring of 1997, while standing in line at McDonald’s with the daughter who eats meat, I was reminded of that long-ago road trip. McDonald’s was giving away Teenie Beanie Babies with every purchase of a Happy Meal, and my daughter was hoping to get one. Despite having ordered 100 million of the stuffed toy animals, McDonald’s couldn’t keep up with the demand. The line in which we stood extended out the front door; at the drive-through, cars were backed up to the street.

As we waited, I glanced at a countertop display of Beanie Babies. Among them I was surprised to see a bright red bull named “Snort” and a black-and-white cow named “Daisy.” It struck me as odd that a company selling ground beef would offer toys in the shape of cattle. Were children really expected to hug and play with a toy cow while eating the grilled remains of a real one? It seemed to me the McDonald’s–Beanie Baby promotion revealed a deep disconnect between what we eat and where it comes from.

This was not always the case. Until recent generations, every human culture knew intimately the source of its food. Today, however, fewer than 2 percent of Americans are engaged in farming. As a result, most of us know little about where our food comes from, and we are invested in keeping it that way because some aspects of animal agriculture make us uncomfortable. Collectively, we follow my Mom’s advice: while the cattle graze around us, we play license-plate bingo.

But I began to wonder: What might happen if I could connect the dots and actually observe up close the process by which living animals become food? Could I meet the people who raise and care for these animals, watch them as they work, learn their thoughts as they labor to feed the rest of us? How would it affect me to understand deeply a process that has both fascinated and, frankly, scared me since childhood?

But how to begin? The numbers overwhelm: we eat more than 5 billion hamburgers annually, and to produce them we slaughter nearly 45 million cattle, almost 125,000 a day, 5,000 an hour, more than one each second.

I decided to simplify the task: to see if it was possible to move backward from “billions and billions served” to just one—one live animal, and to follow that one animal all the way from birth to burger, or—as an agriculture professor I later spoke with put it—“from conception to consumption.”

My first thought was to catch a plane and head for Iowa, Kansas, or Texas to observe the vast cattle herds of the Midwest. This turned out to be unnecessary. As I soon learned, fast-food hamburger is a blend of fatty meat from cattle raised on pasture and feedlot in the South and Midwest, and lean meat from “cull” dairy cows—cows sent to slaughter when their milk production declines. Most fast-food hamburgers are at least one-half dairy cow, sometimes as much as 70 percent.

And then I learned something else I hadn’t known: not only is the state I live in, New York, the third-largest dairy state in the nation (after Wisconsin and California), but the westernmost counties that border my home in Rochester are the heart of the state’s dairy industry. In other words, within a fifty-mile radius of my suburban home, I could observe firsthand the births, lives, and deaths of the cows whose meat comprises half or more of fast-food hamburgers. I could do all my research without taking another road trip through Iowa.

Who knows why particular images from childhood have the power to shape our lives? Or why, at midlife, we may feel compelled—if we are to remain vital—to confront those images and understand their power? For some, the confrontation may require a physical challenge, like climbing a mountain, hiking the desert, or sailing the ocean. For me, it required pulling on a pair of black rubber boots, climbing into a cow barn, and coming face to face with the reality of life and death.

To begin my journey, I bought a calf.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0609605917
• ISBN 13: 9780609605912
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288