This YouTube video of martial artists strutting their stuff just gets funnier and funnier. I'm glad there are no incriminating videos of my martial arts skills.
--Phillip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4Vo1jsD9mg
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
TANDOOR OVEN - The traditional way to smoky meats, pillowy breads
HOW DO THEY DO THAT? | TANDOOR OVEN
The traditional way to smoky meats, pillowy breads
By Jonathan Levitt, Globe Correspondent | May 9, 2007
http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/2007/05/09/the_traditional_way_to_smoky_meats_pillowy_breads/
In the lull between lunch and dinner, Grain and Salt is quiet. Owner Syed Shabbir, 40, sits on a chair, legs crossed and hands folded. After managing The Bombay Club in Harvard Square for seven years, he's glad to have his own place. Shabbir is Muslim and so his new spot is certified halal. A steady trickle of his fellow Muslims pick up orders of pizza topped with tandoori chicken tikka and steak boti kebab sandwiches. There are also college students from the subcontinent looking for a taste of home and desperate Chowhounds who have heard about Shabbir's food.
The menu comes from all over India, popular dishes from Goa to the Himalayas, including smoky meats and pillowy breads from the tandoor oven.
The tandoor is a barrel - shaped clay oven heated on the bottom with gas. It gets blazing hot, about 500 to 800 degrees, so when skewered meat is lowered into the hottest part, it emerges smoky and fragrant, crisp on the outside and juicy inside. Flatbreads like naan, a simple round, and lacha paratha, a twisted whole - wheat round, are slapped against the hot walls of the tandoor, where the dough sticks, bubbles, and bakes quickly.
Traditionally, tandoor ovens in India were shaped with pieces of mud built up in layers, smoothed by hand, and left in the sun to harden. In Bombay, where Shabbir grew up with five brothers and sisters, his family had an outdoor kitchen overlooking the rose gardens, with a tandoor oven bur ied in the ground. The family's cooks heated it with chunks of hardwood.
In this country, some ovens are fired with charcoal but most are fueled with gas. Shabbir thinks that live fire is overrated; it's also against fire codes. "It is the clay and the drippings that create the aroma," he says. "Actually, this is the first time I've had a gas oven. The new code forbids the use of charcoal. But I don't notice much of a difference at all. Plus, the gas is easier to use. It is easy to turn up and down and easy to maintain temperature."
Almost everyone who eats at Grain and Salt orders naan, which comes plain, brushed with garlic butter, or stuffed with ground lamb. Bishal Thapa, 31, the chef in charge of the tandoor, is the master of the naan. He's Nepalese, but grew up in Hong Kong and learned to cook in England, where Indian food and its many regional differences is prized.
It takes an hour for the tandoor to get hot enough to cook naan. If the walls are too cool the bread won't stick. When it reaches temperature, Thapa takes a ball of dough, shapes it over a "pillow" (something he made from a sponge wrapped in a dishtowel), then slaps it on an inside wall. "Naan is supposed to be soft," says Thapa. "If it cooks too slow it will get hard. If it cooks too fast it will burn." He uses two iron skewers to handle the sticky dough. One has a hook at its tip, the other a shallow spoon. When the bread is ready, he holds the naan with the hook and scrapes it off the sides with the spoon. It comes out puffy, beautiful with blisters. He brushes it with butter and tears off a piece to try it.
Shabbir thinks that kebabs and tandoori chicken, which have no sauces, don't go as well with naan as they do with chewy parathas. Where naan is a simple yeast-leavened flatbread, lacha paratha is whole-wheat flour, water, and butter coiled and rolled out.
Thapa makes murgh malai kebab, a ground chicken kebab, to go with lacha paratha to demonstrate the theory. He flattens the shaped dough, presses it onto the pillow and tosses it on the side of the oven just like the naan. It emerges layered and crisp, open like a flower. He brushes it with butter.
He slides the chicken onto a skewer and drizzles it with oil, then lowers the skewer into the oven. "As the oil drips it will make smoke," he says.
Adds Shabbir: "That's what gives the wonderful taste to it." When it's cooked, Thapa tosses the smoky chicken with fresh mint and cilantro leaves, spices like dried mango and cinnamon, lime juice, and thinly sliced red onion.
We stand around the kitchen wrapping the chicken and onions in warm paratha. Shabbir waited a long time to own his own place and he's confident about what he wants.
"I will not compromise anything," he says. "And I know that it shows in the food. People like it here. They say that the food tastes like back home. That makes me feel good."
Grain and Salt, 431 Cambridge St., 617-254-3373. 
tangines
from http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/2007/05/09/everywhere_in_morocco_tagines_are_family_fare/
This tagine was made with turmeric, ground ginger, the chopped flesh of preserved lemon, tomatoes, ghee, and saffron. One interesting thing that Lgrizmi did is crush the saffron threads in a warm bowl with salt to get maximum aroma from this costly spice. La Maison does not use cumin, which is commonly called "lazy wife's spice" or "single man's spice," Nahir informed us, because it's often used instead of a mixture of more complex seasonings.
This tagine was made with turmeric, ground ginger, the chopped flesh of preserved lemon, tomatoes, ghee, and saffron. One interesting thing that Lgrizmi did is crush the saffron threads in a warm bowl with salt to get maximum aroma from this costly spice. La Maison does not use cumin, which is commonly called "lazy wife's spice" or "single man's spice," Nahir informed us, because it's often used instead of a mixture of more complex seasonings.
At local roti shops, key ingredients are flatbreads, curries, and authenticity
From India, by way of Trinidad
At local roti shops, key ingredients are flatbreads, curries, and authenticity
By Jonathan Levitt, Globe Correspondent | May 9, 2007
http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/2007/05/09/from_india_by_way_of_trinidad/
Scents of toasted cinnamon and clove are in the air, and Hindi lyrics and Bollywood beats warble from giant DJ speakers. Walk into Nikisha's Roti Shop and you might mistake it for an Indian restaurant. And while the cooks may have Indian roots, the curries simmering here got sidetracked on their way from Madras to the New World.
Roti has several variations, all made with flaky flatbread (the word roti means bread), curried meat and vegetables, and pickles, all rolled together. The dish comes from India by way of Trinidad and dates back 150 years. In Boston, West Indians are making authentic rotis at a handful of spots. Trinidadians know which shops they like, depending on how close the dish is to the one they know from home.
The food came with workers from the subcontinent who went to the West Indies in the mid-1800s to Caribbean sugar cane plantations, where they became indentured servants. The migrations ended in 1917 but the workers stayed, along with their curries and culture. Indian spices like cumin and turmeric were in cupboards all around the islands. For the East Indians who settled in Trinadad, roti and curry became daily home cooking.
At Nikisha's in Dorchester's Codman Square, and at a handful of other Trini-style shops, homesick West Indians can hunker down with the rich curries they know well, wrapped in roti. Customers sip pineapple soda, peanut punch, or Irish moss with their meals and most don't leave without plastic bags of tamarind balls or coconut rolls for dessert.
With theatrical eye makeup and long black hair, owner Nikisha Bisnath runs Nikisha's with her mother, Gaida Singh. "Rotis is coming along pretty well," says Bisnath, a native of Trinidad, in her sing songy lilt. "All the people around here are into it by now."
Roti refers both to the bread and to the wrap itself. When you order a plain roti, also called dal-puri, you get a large tortilla-like skin piled high with savory curried chicken, beef, goat, shrimp, or duck. You can eat it like a burrito (careful of the bones) or break off pieces and dip them in the curry. Another specialty is the buss-up-shut, served with the same stew, in a flaky, butter-enriched skin. A third, more of a snack, is a double, which takes its name from the two deep-fried skins filled with stewed chickpeas, tamarind, chutney, and hot sauce.
Most Indo-Trinidadians are very particular about their curry mixtures and cooks are precise about preparing the meat. First, they sprinkle it with lime juice and dust it with flour, then rinse it with water. The meat marinates overnight with cilantro, thyme, onion, garlic, and pepper.
Just down the street from Nikisha's is Singh's Roti Shop. Behind the counter, the steam table is stacked with a feast for weekend diners: Jamaican peas and rice; fried chicken with cucumbers; Jamaican beef patties; curries of potato, chicken, goat, duck, shrimp, and fish with green mango; and sweet stewed chicken.
Kay and Ricky Singh run Singh's; he is Nikisha's brother, but the businesses are unrelated. (Ricky and Nikisha learned rotis from their parents in Trinidad. ) Chutney music plays on the boombox and Dillian, the Singhs's pig tailed 10-month-old , is in his playpen in the dining room.
A dal-puri roti here is topped with rich, bone-in chicken curry, curried potatoes, and plenty of hot sauce. To make each one, the Singhs roll out balls of a simple baking powder dough and fill it with ground yellow split peas scented with cumin and garlic. When the orders come in, the dough is cooked on a griddle until puffed and golden. Kay Singh offers me a small bowl of souse, which consists of cold, pickled pigs' feet and cucumbers. "You do eat pigs' feet don't you? " she asks.
In the kitchen at Nikisha's, Gainda Singh is puttering around. Until 1995 she had her own roti shop in Trinidad, but since seven children and 12 grandchildren live in New England, she spends the mild months here. "I never stop missing home," she says. "There is so much to miss -- the weather, the beach, the music, Carnival, the friendly people, my garden, the mangoes, coconuts, bananas ; you name it, I grow it. I only come here to look at my children and grandchildren. And to cook."
On this warm Saturday, most people are ordering buss-up-shut rotis. The dough is made from flour and butter rolled thinly and stretched like a pizza. Singh lays it on the hot griddle, drizzles it with oil and fries it until it's crisp. Then, while it's still on the heat, she uses two wooden paddles called dablas to break up (buss -up ) the dough, hitting it until it looks like crumpled wrapping paper, or an old shirt (shut). "A spatula don't do the job," she says. She transfers the broken pieces to a plate and spoons hot stew, curried potatoes, and cabbage on top. "Someone gonna be happy with this," she says.
Ali's Roti Restaurant has two branches, one on Tremont Street in Roxbury and the other on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. The Mattapan shop on a recent weekend is very busy, with a long winding line, frazzled cooks, and blaring music to entertain everyone.
The owners are Muslim and the food is certified halal, so you won't find pigs' feet here. The menu lists the spices and their health benefits. Cumin aids digestion, turmeric tones the spleen, Congo peppers offer Vitamin C, and more. On weekends, Ali's makes doubles because that's what customers want. "This is what the Trini people come in and get," says Hanif Abrahim, the manager and head cook. The thin wrappers are deep-fried, then filled with curried chickpeas and topped with tamarind chutney and green mango pickles. "People can put away a lot of these at once," he says.
When the West Indian community began moving to the southeastern towns, roti shops opened there, too. "The West Indian population is still growing around here," says Sharon Ram of Ram's Roti Restaurant, which is near the Westgate Mall in Brockton. "People are moving out of Dorchester, out to where it's quieter."
Ram came from Trinidad in 1985 to study computer science at Quincy Junior College (now Quincy College). She thought she would get an education, work a while, and then move back home. "I'm way off computers now though," she says.
Four years ago, Ram opened her shop, which feels more like a home kitchen than its lively neighbors to the north. The same music plays, but at an inside volume, and Ram goes about her work mindfully. She learned how to cook from her grandmother, and mother, Cynthia, 77, who makes the rotis. "If you come from Indian heritage you make rotis every day. It's your bread," says Sharon. To keep things simple at Ram's, the two offer dal puri daily and doubles on weekends.
"Making rotis is nothing for us," she says. "This is home cooking. It's what we ate growing up. This is our food."
Ali's Roti Restaurant, 1188 Blue Hill Ave., Mattapan, 617-298-9850 and 1035 Tremont St., Roxbury Crossing, 617-427-1079
Nikisha's Roti Shop, 532 Washington St., Codman Square, 617-265-0076
Ram's Roti Restaurant, 27 Pleasant St., Brockton, 508-587-5535
Singh's Roti Shop, 692 Columbia Road, 617-282-7977, Dorchester
Chicken from China? - Questionable farming practices fuel skepticism of US plan to import poultry
Chicken from China?
Questionable farming practices fuel skepticism of US plan to import poultry
WASHINGTON -- In China, some farmers try to maximize the output from their small plots by flooding produce with unapproved pesticides, pumping livestock with antibiotics banned in the United States, and using human feces as fertilizer to boost soil productivity. But the questionable practices don't end there: Chicken pens are frequently suspended over ponds where seafood is raised, recycling chicken waste as a food source for seafood, according to a leading food safety expert who served as a federal adviser to the Food and Drug Administration.
China's suspect agricultural practices could soon affect American consumers. Federal authorities are working on a proposal to allow chickens raised, slaughtered, and cooked in China to be sold here, and under current regulations, store labels do not have to indicate the meat's origin.
According to the US Department of Agriculture , China's top agricultural export goal is opening the US market to its cooked chickens. Representative Rosa DeLauro , who is fighting the change, says China does not deserve entry to the coveted, closed poultry market.
Agricultural exports from China to the United States ballooned from $1 billion in 2002 to nearly $2.3 billion in 2006 , according to the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service . DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and chairwoman of a US House agricultural subcommittee , said Congress should signal its willingness to restrict imports from China until it improves food safety oversight.
"There is deception. There is lax regulation, and they've got unsanitary conditions," DeLauro said. "They need to hear from us they're at risk. Congress has to look at limiting some of their agricultural imports."
The USDA, which shares food safety oversight with the FDA, says its proposal to allow the sale of Chinese chicken is in the early stages and that there will be many opportunities for the public to be heard on the matter. Under the plan, any country seeking to export meat , poultry, or egg products to the United States must earn "equivalency," with documentation that its product is as safe and wholesome as the domestic competition. USDA officials would review records, conduct on-site audits, and confirm that foreign laboratories could ensure the food's safety, said Steven Cohen , a spokesman for the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service . The agency would also inspect imported products as they enter the nation, he said.
"This is a process that has barely begun, and there is a very lengthy review," Cohen said.
According to Lucius Adkins , president of United Poultry Growers Association , the idea "should be strangled in infancy." The group represents more than 700 producers in Georgia , one of the nation's leading poultry producing states.
"You don't know what conditions existed in that plant [in China]. You didn't have a government representative there watching [poultry] being slaughtered and processed. It's going to come here packaged," Adkins said. "They're already killing our pets. Do we want to eat their food?"
The National Chicken Council , which represents companies that produce 95 percent of US-grown poultry, has not taken a position on the USDA's proposal.
Each American will eat an estimated 85 pounds of broiler chickens this year, down from 88 pounds last year -- the first per-capita decrease since 1973 . Currently, the US imports almost no poultry, except for a small amount of chicken exported by Canadian producers, said Richard Lobb, a spokesman for the trade association.
But Americans do eat food from around the world, Lobb said. "People don't have any problem with potpie from Canada. How they would feel about frozen chicken from China or specialty Chinese products that are canned or dried or something, I don't know."
In China's agricultural system, many farmers toil on 1-acre plots, while US farmers often work thousands of acres, said Michael Doyle , director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia and former chairman of the FDA's science advisory board.
In China, "there are hundreds of thousands of these little farms," Doyle said. "They have small ponds. And over the ponds -- in not all cases, but in many cases -- they'll have chicken cages. It might be like 20,000 chickens in cages. The chicken feces is what feeds the shrimp."
The USDA has found that up to 10 percent of shrimp imported from China contains salmonella, he said. Even more worrisome are shrimp imported from China that contain antibiotics that no amount of cooking can neutralize. Last month alone, the FDA rejected 51 shipments of catfish , eel , shrimp, and tilapia imported from China because of such contaminants as salmonella , veterinary drugs, and nitrofuran , a cancer-causing chemical. A long history of such test results spurred the FDA to begin working proactively with Chinese farmers on safer seafood production methods, Doyle said.
"In terms of harmful bacteria, consumers have control over that. Even in [poultry] we produce in the US, there is contamination with salmonella," Doyle said. "In terms of veterinary drugs and pesticides, well, good food handling practices won't fix that. That has to be addressed in the country of origin."
Joan Zahka , a Lexington woman, said she wouldn't buy Chinese poultry, based on what she has seen firsthand. Zahka grows her own greens and herbs, and when her children were young she ground organic baby food before it was sold in stores. She shops at Whole Foods for fresh produce and scrutinizes country of origin labels the grocery store chain voluntarily posts.
"There is no way I'm going to knowingly buy chicken from China," Zahka said. "There are all kinds of red flags for me. I've traveled through China. I know we have a much greater value on life here."
Diedtra Henderson can be reached at dhenderson@globe.com.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Rocket debut wasn't pretty, but endearing
Beloved at first sight
Rocket debut wasn't pretty, but endearing
The big sports story that day was actually on Page 1:
REAGAN SAYS HE CAN'T ENTICE SOVIETS TO ATTEND OLYMPICS
That was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, of course. Since then, the Summer Olympics also have been held at Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, and Athens. A lot of things have happened. No more Berlin Wall. Something called the Internet. The rise and fall of Michael Jackson. Oprah. "American Idol."
And, of course, Roger Clemens taking the mound. And taking the mound. And taking the mound.
The date was May 15, 1984. That's when Roger Clemens made his major league debut in Cleveland's mammoth and decrepit Municipal Stadium.
He pitched well enough to win and he pitched poor enough to lose. He slogged through a bizarre 5 2/3 innings, allowing 11 hits and five runs (four earned) and he wound up with a no-decision in a 7-5 Red Sox loss.
On that same evening, Jay Leno was making an appearance at Nick's Comedy Stop and Jerry Vale was pitching vocal woo at Framingham's Chateau de Ville. Local cinema enthusiasts had their pick of such flicks as "The Natural," "Breakin'," "The Bounty," and "Sugar Cane Alley."
The comparable options for the good people of Cleveland apparently had far more appeal than this matchup between the perennially abysmal Indians and the -- are you ready? -- last-place Red Sox.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud and pleased to bring, for your reading pleasure, the words of the one and only Peter Gammons, who was on site to mark this slice of Red Sox history:
"The setting for the Roger Clemens Debut was like taking a play to Dixville Notch before New Haven. On a night when the windchill factor went below freezing in a ballpark where you take your kid if he wants to understand the Depression (the announced crowd of 4,004 counted cobwebs), against a team that hasn't contended since three years before Clemens was born, Ralph Houk introduced the most ballyhooed Red Sox pitcher since Ken Brett, or maybe even Frank Baumann."
(Aside to whomever: Peter Gammons is now rich and famous because he appears regularly on TV, but I know, and he knows, that his real service to mankind was leaving behind prose like this for us all to rediscover 23 years after the fact.)
The team Roger joined was a mess. Mr. Gammons had described the situation in a dispatch printed the morning of Clemens's debut. The team, he reported, has "been playing with the animation of a forest of redwoods." He also told us, "The clubhouse is filled with the quibbling, back-biting and second-guessing diseases that plague second-division teams."
So, welcome to the big leagues, kid.
The Kid was, as Gammons had alluded, the gem of the organization, a 1983 first-round pick out of the University of Texas who had pitched the Longhorns to the College World Series championship in June of '83 and then pitched New Britain to the Eastern League crown three months later, capping his first professional summer with a three-hit shutout of Lynn in the deciding game. There were some arm issues, but now, six weeks into the season, he was ready to go.
"If he pitches his game," said Sox pitching coach Lee Stange, "and doesn't overthrow the way he did in spring training, he'll wind up here."
The first start was enough to make someone of a lesser resolve consider becoming a meter maid. He gave up 11 hits, yes, but six, according to Gammons, were "bathed in blood." Dwight Evans "took the Akron turnoff" on a first-inning Pat Tabler fly ball that dropped for a single. Roger was hit on the heel by a liner. First base umpire Rich Garcia missed a call on a 3-1 play that would have had him out of an inning, claiming Roger had missed the base. (Why, however, was the batter credited with a hit?) First baseman Mike Easler was called for interference as Brett Butler attempted to steal second.
And speaking of steals . . . the Indians stole seven bases, four off Clemens, about whom a Cleveland scouting report had said, "Quick feet to first, but slow to the plate -- try to run on him." That's still sound advice, by the way.
It was truly a mondo bizarro night, and when it was over, Houk had this assessment: "I couldn't believe some of the things that were happening around him . . . guys running, plays not being made, and all he did was keep bearing down. I know he's got the great arm, I know he'll settle down with the great breaking ball. What he showed me were guts and poise, especially considering what happened after Garcia ruled he missed the tag at first."
"What a way to break into the big leagues," agreed Cleveland skipper Pat Corrales.
You've already taken note that Butler, one of the great leadoff men ever, was atop the Cleveland order. Andre Thornton, who once hit for the cycle at Fenway Park off four different pitchers, was batting cleanup. On this strange evening, the lumbering slugger had the first multi-stolen-base game of his career. None other than Dudley Michael Hargrove, a.k.a. the Human Rain Delay, was playing first base and batting fifth. You young-uns might recognize him as Mike Hargrove, longtime skipper of the Indians, Orioles, and Mariners.
But get a load of who was batting sixth and playing short, and had a sacrifice fly in Clemens's major league debut: 25-year-old shortstop Julio Franco.
In the aftermath of all this chaos, the 21-year-old Roger Clemens even spoke the magic words. "I never expected to go to the Hall of Fame in one night," he said. "I kind of expected something crazy would happen my first time out there, and it did."
Five days later, Clemens recorded the first of his 348 victories, going seven innings (7 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 7 K, 1 BB) in a 5-4 decision over the Twins in the Metrodome. "I'm just thrilled that I've got that first win," he said. "I've got some things to do, but it's a start."
He still has some "things to do" nearly 23 years later. And the 44-year-old mortal-lock Hall of Fame New York Yankee righthander soon will have an opportunity to renew acquaintances with the 48-year-old Julio Franco, who is on the first year of a two-year New York Mets contract.
There will be somewhat more than 4,004 in attendance. Too bad Peter Gammons won't be writing about it.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.
Chinese shadows
This editorial berates China for supporting evil regimes because China needs their oil. Doesn't sound that different from what the US does, but the editorial doesn't even mention that comparison.
--Phillip
GLOBE EDITORIAL
--Phillip
GLOBE EDITORIAL
Chinese shadows
ALTHOUTH THERE never was an axis of evil, there are murderous dictatorships in the world today that have one thing in common: support from the People's Republic of China. In Sudan, Burma, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe, China has become an enabler of evil.
Although Beijing's bosses rule in the name of communism, their motives for backing tyrants have nothing to do with the doctrines of Mao Zedong. Their reasons for helping the genocidal regime in Sudan avoid meaningful United Nations Security Council sanctions, or for voting against a Council resolution to censure the military junta in Burma, are more capitalist than communist. China's foreign policy is not driven by any quaint notions of solidarity with the wretched of the earth.
Being the world's fastest-growing consumer of energy and having almost no oil of its own, China wants to ensure its access to oil and protect its large investments in foreign oil fields and oil-producing consortiums. So China has partnered with governments that kill their own people, using its state-owned companies to acquire interests in oil or natural gas reserves around the world.
It is known that the China National Petroleum Company owns the largest slice of Sudan's two major oil consortiums and buys more than half of Sudan's oil exports. It is less well known that after Uzbekistan's despot Islam Karimov massacred protesters in the town of Andijan in 2005, China's foreign ministry said it staunchly supports Uzbekistan's "striking at the three forces, which are terrorism, splittism, and extremism."
This was China's way of equating Karimov's repression with Beijing's campaigns against autonomy for Tibet, independence for Taiwan, and political activism by Muslim Uighurs in western China. Shortly afterward, Karimov was received for a state visit in Beijing, where he signed a $600 million joint venture to develop oil fields in Uzbekistan.
Because China fears any outside interference, particularly on the issues of Tibet, Taiwan, and the Muslims of Xinjiang province, the government has elevated noninterference into a sacrosanct principle justifying its commercial and diplomatic partnerships with dictators such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
Thus far, China seems unpersuaded by the economic argument that it is a waste of money to pursue energy security by buying stakes in oil reserves in Sudan or natural gas pipelines in Burma. So the best way to deter China's rulers from being the principal enablers of genocide in Darfur or forced labor and ethnic cleansing in Burma is to name them and shame them as often as possible. The last thing China's rulers want is to have the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing branded with the name that many are trying to apply: the Genocide Olympics.
Biotech: Not just for the rich (Jim Kim from Mountains Beyond Mountains)
I'm sending this article because it mentions Jim Kim, Paul Farmer's friend from Mountains Beyond Mountains.
Biotech: Not just for the rich
BEHIND THE vibrancy of the life sciences industry so visible at the 2007 BIO convention this week in Boston is a sobering statistic from the World Health Organization: Each year, 10 million people in poor nations die because they lack access to existing medicines or vaccines. In his keynote address yesterday, Michael J. Fox, the actor and founder of a Parkinson's disease research foundation, said that of the 30,000 known human diseases, there are treatments for just 10,000. Many of the diseases without treatments afflict residents of resource-poor countries, which draw little interest from drug makers.
This is a challenge for biotech that goes beyond finding life-extending medications for cancer victims or a drug to encourage the good cholesterol, as important as such advances would be. In much of the world, preventable or treatable illnesses like tuberculosis and cervical cancer are still major killers. In his videotaped remarks to BIO yesterday, Senator Edward Kennedy called for one approach to this imbalance in the world's access to the fruits of biotechnology. His reform legislation for the Food and Drug Administration includes a plan for accelerated FDA review of drug candidates for tropical diseases.
Last year, Senator Patrick Leahy sponsored a bill to ensure that medical technologies developed at federally funded labs would be available not just to branded drug makers but also to low-cost generic drug makers serving developing countries. This is also the goal of a student group called Universities Allied For Essential Medicines. It wants research universities that hold rights to new medical discoveries to license them to branded drug makers with the condition that they be usable by generic makers in developing countries.
When generic makers are granted these rights, neither the universities nor the pharmaceutical companies lose substantial revenues, since the patented, branded versions of the drugs are usually unaffordable in low-income countries. At a UAEM meeting at Harvard last month, Dr. Jim Kim, the former AIDS director for WHO and now chairman of the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, urged students to pressure universities to insist on making their technology accessible to the poor.
The benefits of medical advances from earlier generations could also save lives with more support from the West and from the developing countries themselves. In a report released this week, Save the Children says that 400,000 children die each year of measles, which can be prevented by a 15-cent vaccine. "We must lead in compassion as we have led in innovation," Kennedy told the BIO audience. Researchers, drug company executives, and elected officials should seek all possible ways to make the miracles of medicine the birthright of all, not just the rich.
Prom is a wrap for pair garbed in duct tape
Prom is a wrap for pair garbed in duct tape
MILBRIDGE, Maine -- Cassandra Openshaw and Nick Martin spent nearly a month putting together the colorful gown and tuxedo they wore to the Narraguagus High School senior prom, but they could hardly wait to change their outfits once they arrived there.
After all, it would have been tricky to spend the entire night wrapped in duct tape.
"I want to be able to do things like dance and sit down," said Openshaw, 17, of Milbridge.
The couple used 45 rolls of the sticky, cloth-reinforced tape to make their outfits and accessories.
Absent from the mix was silver-gray, the color most often associated with the tape used for plumbing and heating repairs.
Openshaw and Martin decided to compete in a nationwide contest sponsored by Henkel Consumer Adhesives Inc., marketer of the Duck Tape brand of duct tape.
The couple with the winning outfit receives $6,000 in scholarships, or $3,000 each. Their school also receives $3,000. The contest runs through June 8, with winners chosen on the basis of online voting at the company's website, stuckatprom.com, where entrants' prom photos are posted.
See last year's contestants at http://stuckatprom.com/contests/prom/news.asp
Shift Happens -- Some of the Most Amazing Statistics You Never Knew
The United States may be the world's leading power in terms of economic, social, political and technological impact, but you might think twice about how long that'll continue.
Watching this short and very interesting video from glumbert.com, which compares America to other countries by the numbers, along with huge shifts in technology may change your mind.
What follows are just a few of the many amazing statistics that will shock and concern you, especially if you're an American. Then, click the video below to watch the entire list.
- An American student will have as many as 14 jobs by the time he or she turns age 38.
- More than 3,000 new books are published in the United States every DAY.
- The amount of new technical information doubles every two years, which means students attending a technical school will learn information that will be outdated by their third year.
- The number of words in the English language is 540,000 -- that is FIVE times the number of words present during Shakespeare's time.
Bottled Water Not Cool Anymore
Bottled water is pricey, contributes to global warming, litter, and solid waste, and is usually no safer or healthier than tap water. Increasing numbers of environmentalists, shareholder activists and church groups are targeting the leading sellers of bottled water.
(also see http://v.mercola.com/blogs/public_blog/Bottled-Water-Not-Cool-Anymore-12481.aspx)
For example, shareholders working with an activist group called Corporate Accountability International have asked Coca-Cola to report on the sources and safety of its bottled water, and environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club have urged their supporters to consume less bottled water.
Salt Lake City's outspoken mayor, Rocky Anderson, asked city officials to stop handing out bottled water at meetings, and a handful of high-end restaurants have stopped serving it.
However, U.S. sales of bottled water rose by nearly 10 percent in 2006. Americans consumed about 8.3 billion gallons of bottled water that year, or about 26 gallons per person
CNNMoney.com April 25, 2007(also see http://v.mercola.com/blogs/public_blog/Bottled-Water-Not-Cool-Anymore-12481.aspx)
Monday, May 07, 2007
headphones limit the decibels
Innovative last week
N.H. mom's headphones limit the decibels
from http://www.boston.com/business/personaltech/articles/2007/05/07/chewbacca_as_a_usb_drive/
If your high school graduate is bucking for an iPod, but you want to preserve his hearing through the summer, try swapping in a pair of iHearSafe Earbuds (about $25 at ingemicorp.com) for those that come standard with the music player. Developed by Christine Ingemi, a mother of four iPod listeners in Amherst, N.H., the iHearSafe Earbuds automatically limit the sound from media player devices such as the iPod to 80 decibels. Ingemi said she is working on "sport style" headphones, and earbuds with ear clips, which will be available this summer. And she hopes to have wireless iHearSafe headphones available in time for Christmas.
No' to drug money - Dr. Daniel J. Carlat wants to limit corporate sway over psychiatry
No' to drug money
Dr. Daniel J. Carlat wants to limit corporate sway over psychiatry
NEWBURYPORT -- There are names for what Dr. Daniel J. Carlat once was, and he does not hesitate to use them: "Drug whore," he suggested calmly. "Hired gun."
"There's really no nice way to say it. If you're being paid to offer an opinion you're not all that confident that you believe, you're corrupt," he said.
Six years ago, Carlat, a psychiatrist and textbook author who trained at Massachusetts General Hospital, found himself in demand by drug companies. Like a great many prominent psychiatrists, he was offered generous sums to give instructional talks about medications at lunches and dinners with his colleagues: $500 or more per "lunch-and-learn," $1,000 or more per dinner. He did it for about a year, speaking mainly about antidepressants, for a total of $30,000 or so beyond his salary of about $120,000.
But then his conscience rebelled. A drug salesman chided him one day for showing "less enthusiasm for our product" than usual and "I had a kind of epiphany," said Carlat, also on the faculty of the Tufts University School of Medicine. "I realized the obvious -- that I was being paid to say good things about drugs, regardless of what my actual opinions were."
He not only walked away from the extra money and perks, he resolved to fight what he saw as an increasingly pernicious influence on psychiatric practice.
These days, operating from an old brick building in this quaint seaside town, he sees patients and puts out The Carlat Psychiatry Report, a monthly newsletter on psychiatric developments that aims to be more aggressively free of drug-company influence than any other, from its content to the financial ties of its writers.
Potential conflicts of interest are a growing concern in all of medicine, from cancer doctors who own scanning centers to cardiologists who prescribe specific blood-pressure drugs while accepting payments from companies that make them. Several states have recently passed laws mandating that drug-makers report such ties, but the great majority of payments remain undisclosed.
By all indications, "psychiatrists are among the most conflicted of the medical specialties," said Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer , a Tufts University professor and author of "On the Take," a book about what he describes as medicine's complicity with big business. With new drugs available for common conditions such as anxiety and depression, the pharmaceutical industry has been recruiting armies of psychiatrists to market them in recent years, he said.
He has met Carlat, Kassirer said, and "I'd say he's the real thing. He honestly believes that psychiatry has gone too far, and by the way, so do I."
Not everyone agrees that company payments are a problem in psychiatry. Like many doctors, psychiatrists who accept money tend to argue that they are not about to be swayed by the consulting fees or research grants they get from companies.
From the industry point of view, drug companies are simply paying the market rate for bona-fide services and the expertise that prominent psychiatrists can provide, said Scott Lassman , a spokesman for PhARMA, the national trade association for pharmaceutical companies.
"The people who are doing this are professionals and care a lot more about their reputation in the community than about whatever money they're making by providing these services," he said. "I don't think they're going to say anything that they don't believe, and the companies certainly wouldn't want them to."
In psychiatry, Carlat said, one drug tends to be much like another, and a psychiatrist may -- as he once did -- rationalize that it does no harm to patients to push one drug over another.
But when he started to look around at the bigger picture of drug companies' influence on psychiatry, "I said, 'This is unbelievable! Our field as a whole is progressively being purchased lock, stock, and barrel by the drug companies: this includes the diagnoses, the treatment guidelines, and the national meetings."
Perhaps worst of all, Carlat said, drug companies have come to sponsor so much of continuing medical education -- the courses that doctors must take to retain their licenses -- that the companies can set much of the agenda.
"Instead of getting educated about psychotherapy, about how to better manage our practices, about epidemiology and the public health concerns of underserved populations, what we're getting is lecture after lecture about how to diagnose depression and use antidepressants to treat it; how to diagnose insomnia and use sleeping pills to treat it; how to diagnose bipolar disorder and use mood stabilizers to treat it," he said.
In particular, Carlat said, he is appalled that his prestigious former employer, Mass. General, has chosen to accept millions of dollars of drug-company money to sponsor its continuing psychiatry courses. MGH says that its pharmaceutical sponsors have no input on the courses.
Carlat's newsletter is by no means anti psychiatry; it is meant for psychiatrists and their patients. Nor is it anti medication; Carlat himself prescribes drugs in his private practice all the time, he said, "because they work."
But it aims to cut through layers of drug advertising and studies sponsored by drug companies to a relatively spin-free bottom line.
The Report might warn, for example, that a new drug is merely a tweaked version of an older drug whose patent is about to expire -- meaning the new drug is probably not worth its sticker price.
In 2004, the Report concluded that a new anti depressant, Cymbalta, offered no significant advantages over existing drugs, and that its maker, Eli Lilly, was massaging the data to make it look better than it was. The article and its headline, "Cymbalta: Dual the Reuptake, Triple the Hype," drew a lengthy complaint from Eli Lilly, replete with 24 footnotes that Carlat then published on the Report's website, with his own rebuttal.
The Report (online at thecarlat report.com) does carry interviews with psychiatrists who have financial ties with drug companies, Carlat said, but only because it is simply impossible to find prominent psychiatrists without such ties. He asks experts to disclose any financial ties in print.
Carlat seems to have struck a nerve. From a tiny 2002 start-up, the newsletter has grown to a circulation of 2,300 -- almost enough to begin paying himself a salary for his three days a week of writing and editing, Carlat said. Subscriptions range from $89 a year for individuals to $149 for institutions.
Dr. Steven Sharfstein , immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association, the field's major professional group, said he believes that Carlat may be part of a larger movement, "a change in sensitivity and sensibility" about pharmaceutical industry involvement in psychiatry.
Sharfstein said he has no hard data, "but I believe there's a trend that people are moving away." His own hospital, Sheppard Pratt Health System near Baltimore, has stopped letting drug companies sponsor lectures.
"So now we just don't have fancy snacks," he said. "It just didn't feel right."
Carey Goldberg can be reached at goldberg@globe.com.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Five Boro Bike Tour
Alexa and I are doing the Five Boro Bike Tour this weekend. The following information is from their web site.
May 6, 2007, marks the 30th anniversary of the Tour through the five boroughs of New York City. Join us for this exhilarating ride, the largest recreational cycling event in America (30,000+ cyclists).
Who Comes to the Tour?
In 2005, as in all recent years, two-thirds of our riders were men, one-third women. More than 50% were between 25 and 45 years old. Just over 600 people traveled from Canada, and just under 200 from a mix of other countries. Japan, the Netherlands, and Great Britain sent around 50 people each. Just about 50 percent of our riders came from New York State, with about a third of all riders from New York City. More than 3,000 came from the New England states and 8,500 from the mid-Atlantic states other than New York. In all, 44 states were represented. Almost a thousand young people up to 14 years old joined in, and another thousand 15 to 17 year olds. Almost 500 riders were age 66 or older.
Ivan Dominguez, top sprinter on the Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team, will be riding in the Tour and signing autographs at the Festival along with teammate Bobby Lea.
The Commerce Bank Five Boro Bike Tour travels through the five boroughs of New York City on traffic-free roads, thanks to the cooperation of City agencies and officials. At 42 miles, the route is doable for cyclists of all levels. The most significant hills are at the bridges. Experienced cyclists can challenge themselves at these climbs, while beginning cyclists and not-quite-in-shape riders can relax and refuel at the rest areas and spend the whole day enjoying the Tour and Festival. Whatever your plan, be sure to follow the directions of Tour marshals as you ride. They will warn of spots where you should slow down or exercise caution.
Riders enter the start lineup from Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan. We travel up Church Street and the Avenue of the Americas through the skyscraper canyons of Midtown Manhattan, and then it's on into Central Park, which is in full bloom this time of year. Continuing north out of the park, the Tour travels through Harlem and then over to the Bronx and back on bridges spanning the Harlem River.
Back in Manhattan, you'll ride down the FDR Drive, a highway where bicycles aren't usually allowed. The first rest area is about half a mile down FDR Drive, at 116th Street.
After continuing on FDR Drive a couple more miles, you'll cross the Queensboro Bridge (aka the "59th Street Bridge") to borough #3, Queens. The next rest area is in Astoria Park, along the East River with beautiful views of Wards and Randall's Island and the Manhattan skyline. The route hugs the river and travels through industrial neighborhoods, passing Roosevelt Island. A third rest area is in Queens at the Con Edison Learning Center.
Before you know it, you'll be crossing the Pulaski Bridge into the venerable neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Soon you'll reach the fourth rest area at Commodore John Barry Park, adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Your ride continues to downtown Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Bridge, where you'll enter the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, miraculously clear of its usual traffic crush on Tour Day. Now you can fly over the Gowanus Canal and along the South Brooklyn waterfront, reaching the shoreline park in Bay Ridge. One more rest area at John Paul Jones/Cannonball Park awaits you.
Leaving the final rest area, you'll circle round the ramp leading up and over the iconic Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. A final long climb up and long downhill brings you to Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. Treat yourself to a relaxing break at the Festival--buy lunch, have a massage, check out the vendors and exhibitors, and rest for a while on the grass while you enjoy the live music.
When you're ready to go, you have a choice: Admire the harbor views on a brief new scenic route through Fort Wadsworth, or take a slightly more direct route. Either way, you'll end up at the Staten Island Ferry for a free ride back to Manhattan. Wave at Lady Liberty as you pass and celebrate your accomplishment: 42 miles in the greatest city in the world!
Discover How Your Beef is Really Raised
Discover How Your Beef is Really Raised
By Michael Pollan
New York Times March 31, 2002
reprinted at http://www.mercola.com/2002/apr/17/cattle1.htm
Garden City, Kansas, missed out on the suburban building boom of the postwar years. What it got instead were sprawling subdivisions of cattle.
These feedlots -- the nation's first -- began rising on the high plains of western Kansas in the 50's, and by now developments catering to cows are far more common here than developments catering to people.
You'll be speeding down one of Finney County's ramrod roads when the empty, dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see -- which in Kansas is really far.
I say ''suddenly,'' but in fact a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma whose Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men's-room than cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach of a feedlot for more than a mile.
Then it's upon you: Poky Feeders, population 37,000. Cattle pens stretch to the horizon, each one home to 150 animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that it eventually dawns on you isn't mud at all.
The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedlot's beating heart: a chugging, silvery feed mill that soars like an industrial cathedral over this teeming metropolis of meat.
I traveled to Poky early in January with the slightly improbable notion of visiting one particular resident: a young black steer that I'd met in the fall on a ranch in Vale, S.D. The steer, in fact, belonged to me.
I'd purchased him as an 8-month-old calf from the Blair brothers, Ed and Rich, for $598. I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room, board and meds and hoped to sell him at a profit after he was fattened.
My interest in the steer was not strictly financial, however, or even gustatory, though I plan to retrieve some steaks from the Kansas packing plant where No. 534, as he is known, has an appointment with the stunner in June.
No, my primary interest in this animal was educational. I wanted to find out how a modern, industrial steak is produced in America these days, from insemination to slaughter.
Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has become problematic in recent years. Though beef consumption spiked upward during the flush 90's, the longer-term trend is down, and many people will tell you they no longer eat the stuff.
Inevitably they'll bring up mad-cow disease (and the accompanying revelation that industrial agriculture has transformed these ruminants into carnivores -- indeed, into cannibals).
They might mention their concerns about E. coli contamination or antibiotics in the feed. Then there are the many environmental problems, like groundwater pollution, associated with ''Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.''
(The word ''farm'' no longer applies.) And of course there are questions of animal welfare. How are we treating the animals we eat while they're alive, and then how humanely are we ''dispatching'' them, to borrow an industry euphemism?
Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed by the shame of killing and, since Upton Sinclair's writing of ''The Jungle,'' by questions about what we're really eating when we eat meat.
Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry. (What grocery-store item is more silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?)
Yet I recently began to feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I'd try to own it, in other words.
So this is the biography of my cow.
The Blair brothers ranch occupies 11,500 acres of short-grass prairie a few miles outside Sturgis, S.D., directly in the shadow of Bear Butte. In November, when I visited, the turf forms a luxuriant pelt of grass oscillating yellow and gold in the constant wind and sprinkled with perambulating black dots: Angus cows and calves grazing.
Ed and Rich Blair run what's called a ''cow-calf'' operation, the first stage of beef production, and the stage least changed by the modern industrialization of meat.
While the pork and chicken industries have consolidated the entire life cycles of those animals under a single roof, beef cattle are still born on thousands of independently owned ranches. Although four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson's subsidiary IBP, Monfort, Excel and National) now slaughter and market more than 80 percent of the beef cattle born in this country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a funnel that starts out as wide as the great plains.
The Blairs have been in the cattle business for four generations. Although there are new wrinkles to the process -- artificial insemination to improve genetics, for example -- producing beef calves goes pretty much as it always has, just faster.
Calving season begins in late winter, a succession of subzero nights spent yanking breeched babies out of their bellowing mothers. In April comes the first spring roundup to work the newborn calves (branding, vaccination, castration); then more roundups in early summer to inseminate the cows ($15 mail-order straws of elite bull semen have pretty much put the resident stud out of work); and weaning in the fall. If all goes well, your herd of 850 cattle has increased to 1,600 by the end of the year.
My steer spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his mother, No. 9,534. His father was a registered Angus named GAR Precision 1,680, a bull distinguished by the size and marbling of his offspring's rib-eye steaks.
Born last March 13 in a birthing shed across the road, No. 534 was turned out on pasture with his mother as soon as the 80-pound calf stood up and began nursing. After a few weeks, the calf began supplementing his mother's milk by nibbling on a salad bar of mostly native grasses: western wheatgrass, little bluestem, green needlegrass.
Apart from the trauma of the April day when he was branded and castrated, you could easily imagine No. 534 looking back on those six months grazing at his mother's side as the good old days -- if, that is, cows do look back.
(''They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today,'' Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, with a note of envy, of grazing cattle, ''fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or bored.'' Nietzsche clearly had never seen a feedlot.)
It may be foolish to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can say that a cow grazing on grass is at least doing what he has been splendidly molded by evolution to do. Which isn't a bad definition of animal happiness.
Eating grass, however, is something that, after October, my steer would never do again.
Although the modern cattle industry all but ignores it, the reciprocal relationship between cows and grass is one of nature's underappreciated wonders.
For the grasses, the cow maintains their habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold; the animal also spreads grass seed, planting it with its hoofs and fertilizing it. In exchange for these services, the grasses offer the ruminants a plentiful, exclusive meal.
For cows, sheep and other grazers have the unique ability to convert grass -- which single-stomached creatures like us can't digest -- into high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess a rumen, a 45-gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria turns grass into metabolically useful organic acids and protein.
This is an excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the animals and for us. What's more, growing meat on grass can make superb ecological sense: so long as the rancher practices rotational grazing, it is a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food on land too arid or hilly to grow anything else.
So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn't tasted a blade of grass since October?
Speed, in a word.
Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf's allotted time on earth. '
'In my grandfather's day, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter,'' explained Rich Blair, who, at 45, is the younger of the brothers by four years. ''In the 50's, when my father was ranching, it was 2 or 3.
"Now we get there at 14 to 16 months.''
Fast food indeed.
What gets a beef calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements -- and drugs, including growth hormones. These ''efficiencies,'' all of which come at a price, have transformed raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not everybody is convinced that this is progress. ''Hell,'' Ed Blair told me, ''my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on 850.''
Weaning marks the fateful moment when the natural, evolutionary logic represented by a ruminant grazing on grass bumps up against the industrial logic that, with stunning speed, turns that animal into a box of beef. This industrial logic is rational and even irresistible -- after all, it has succeeded in transforming beef from a luxury item into everyday fare for millions of people. And yet the further you follow it, the more likely you are to wonder if that rational logic might not also be completely insane.
In early October, a few weeks before I met him, No. 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves themselves, stressed by the change in circumstance and diet, are prone to get sick.
On many ranches, weaned calves go directly from the pasture to the sale barn, where they're sold at auction, by the pound, to feedlots. The Blairs prefer to own their steers straight through to slaughter and to keep them on the ranch for a couple of months of ''backgrounding'' before sending them on the 500-mile trip to Poky Feeders.
Think of backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: the animals are confined in a pen, ''bunk broken'' -- taught to eat from a trough -- and gradually accustomed to eating a new, unnatural diet of grain. (Grazing cows encounter only tiny amounts of grain, in the form of grass seeds.)
It was in the backgrounding pen that I first met No. 534 on an unseasonably warm afternoon in November. I'd told the Blairs I wanted to follow one of their steers through the life cycle; Ed, 49, suggested I might as well buy a steer, as a way to really understand the daunting economics of modern ranching.
Ed and Rich told me what to look for: a broad, straight back and thick hindquarters. Basically, you want a strong frame on which to hang a lot of meat. I was also looking for a memorable face in this Black Angus sea, one that would stand out in the feedlot crowd.
Rich said he would calculate the total amount I owed the next time No. 534 got weighed but that the price would be $98 a hundredweight for an animal of this quality. He would then bill me for all expenses (feed, shots, et cetera) and, beginning in January, start passing on the weekly ''hotel charges'' from Poky Feeders.
In June we'd find out from the packing plant how well my investment had panned out: I would receive a payment for No. 534 based on his carcass weight, plus a premium if he earned a U.S.D.A. grade of choice or prime. ''And if you're worried about the cattle market,'' Rich said jokingly, referring to its post-Sept. 11 slide, ''I can sell you an option too.'' Option insurance has become increasingly popular among cattlemen in the wake of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease.
Click here to read the continuation of this story
New York Times March 31, 2002
Dr. Mercola's Comment:
When I first became aware of grass-fed beef, I was only superficially aware of the importance of omega-3 oils. I have now grown to appreciate that balancing the optimum amount of omega-3 oils is one of the most important things you can do to stay healthy.
If you are not yet familiar with the benefits of omega-3 oils, please review my recent article on the cardiovascular actions of omega-3 oils.
Most nutritionist don't yet realize that it not only the amount, but the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 oils that controls much of our disease and health outcomes.
That is why it is so important to consume animals that are primarily eating grass. These animals will have far lower levels of the potentially dangerous omega-6 oils that nearly all of us have a surplus of.
The practical way to do this is to consume free-range chickens and turkeys and pasture or grass-fed beef. Unfortunately, you cannot buy this grass-fed beef at your local grocery store.
Obtaining free range poultry is relatively straight forward but you must be careful regarding the beef. Many stores will advertise grass-fed beef but it really isn't. They do this as ALL cattle are grass fed, but the key is what they are fed the months prior to being processed.
As this wonderful article explains most all cattle are shipped to giant feed lots and fed corn to fatten them up. I knew this before reading this incredible story, but I now have a far better understanding of the process.
You will need to call the person who actually grew the beef, NOT the store manager, to find out the truth.
The least expensive way to obtain authentic grass fed beef would be to find a farmer who is growing the beef who you can trust and buy a half a side of beef from him. This way you save the shipping and also receive a reduced rate on the meat.
An inexpensive, yet effective way to determine if the meat is really from a grass fed animal is to purchase the ground beef. Slowly cook the beef till done and drain and collect all the fat. Grass fed beef is very high in omega-3 fats and will be relatively thin compared to traditionally prepared ground beef.
It will also be a liquid at room temperature as it has very few saturated fats which are mostly solid at room temperature.
However, most of us live in large urban areas and do not have the time for this process. Just as it would be ideal to have an organic garden and grow your own vegetables, most of us elect not to do that for time or space reasons.
I used to have an organic garden, but my schedule just would not allow me to have that luxury anymore. So, if you are convinced, like I am, that grass-fed beef is better for you and you would like the convenience of being able to order it over the Net, you can buy grass-fed beef online, shipped overnight to your door, at Grassfed Organics.
Hadrick and I squeezed into the heated cab of a huge swivel-hipped tractor hooked up to a feed mixer: basically, a dump truck with a giant screw through the middle to blend ingredients.
First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick.
Why?
The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed. The shift to a ''hot ration'' of grain can so disturb the cow's digestive process -- its rumen, in particular -- that it can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics.
After we'd scooped the ingredients into the hopper and turned on the mixer, Hadrick deftly sidled the tractor alongside the pen and flipped a switch to release a dusty tan stream of feed in a long, even line. No. 534 was one of the first animals to belly up to the rail for breakfast. He was heftier than his pen mates and, I decided, sparkier too. That morning, Hadrick and I gave each calf six pounds of corn mixed with seven pounds of ground alfalfa hay and a quarter-pound of Rumensin. Soon after my visit, this ration would be cranked up to 14 pounds of corn and 6 pounds of hay -- and added two and a half pounds every day to No. 534.
While I was on the ranch, I didn't talk to No. 534, pet him or otherwise try to form a connection. I also decided not to give him a name, even though my son proposed a pretty good one after seeing a snapshot. (''Night.'') My intention, after all, is to send this animal to slaughter and then eat some of him. No. 534 is not a pet, and I certainly don't want to end up with an ox in my backyard because I suddenly got sentimental.
As fall turned into winter, Hadrick sent me regular e-mail messages apprising me of my steer's progress. On Nov. 13 he weighed 650 pounds; by Christmas he was up to 798, making him the seventh-heaviest steer in his pen, an achievement in which I, idiotically, took a measure of pride. Between Nov. 13 and Jan. 4, the day he boarded the truck for Kansas, No. 534 put away 706 pounds of corn and 336 pounds of alfalfa hay, bringing his total living expenses for that period to $61.13. I was into this deal now for $659.
Hadrick's e-mail updates grew chattier as time went on, cracking a window on the rancher's life and outlook. I was especially struck by his relationship to the animals, how it manages to be at once intimate and unsentimental. One day Hadrick is tenderly nursing a newborn at 3 a.m., the next he's ''having a big prairie oyster feed'' after castrating a pen of bull calves.
Hadrick wrote empathetically about weaning (''It's like packing up and leaving the house when you are 18 and knowing you will never see your parents again'') and with restrained indignation about ''animal activists and city people'' who don't understand the first thing about a rancher's relationship to his cattle. Which, as Hadrick put it, is simply this: ''If we don't take care of these animals, they won't take care of us.''
''Everyone hears about the bad stuff,'' Hadrick wrote, ''but they don't ever see you give C.P.R. to a newborn calf that was born backward or bringing them into your house and trying to warm them up on your kitchen floor because they were born on a minus-20-degree night. Those are the kinds of things ranchers will do for their livestock. They take precedence over most everything in your life. Sorry for the sermon.''
To travel from the ranch to the feedlot, as No. 534 and I both did (in separate vehicles) the first week in January, feels a lot like going from the country to the big city. Indeed, a cattle feedlot is a kind of city, populated by as many as 100,000 animals. It is very much a premodern city, however -- crowded, filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air.
The urbanization of the world's livestock is a fairly recent historical development, so it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky Feeders would recall human cities several centuries ago. As in 14th-century London, the metropolitan digestion remains vividly on display: the foodstuffs coming in, the waste streaming out. Similarly, there is the crowding together of recent arrivals from who knows where, combined with a lack of modern sanitation.
This combination has always been a recipe for disease; the only reason contemporary animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.
I spent the better part of a day walking around Poky Feeders, trying to understand how its various parts fit together. In any city, it's easy to lose track of nature -- of the connections between various species and the land on which everything ultimately depends.
The feedlot's ecosystem, I could see, revolves around corn.
But its food chain doesn't end there, because the corn itself grows somewhere else, where it is implicated in a whole other set of ecological relationships. Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.
I started my tour at the feed mill, the yard's thundering hub, where three meals a day for 37,000 animals are designed and mixed by computer.
A million pounds of feed passes through the mill each day.
Every hour of every day, a tractor-trailer pulls up to disgorge another 25 tons of corn. Around the other side of the mill, tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks, into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplement.
In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen; next to these are pallets stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin and tylosin, another antibiotic. Along with alfalfa hay and corn silage for roughage, all these ingredients are blended and then piped into the dump trucks that keep Poky's eight and a half miles of trough filled.
The feed mill's great din is made by two giant steel rollers turning against each other 12 hours a day, crushing steamed corn kernels into flakes. This was the only feed ingredient I tasted, and it wasn't half bad; not as crisp as Kellogg's, but with a cornier flavor. I passed, however, on the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea.
Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50 cents less than the cost of growing it.
The rise of the modern factory farm is a direct result of these surpluses, which soared in the years following World War II, when petrochemical fertilizers came into widespread use. Ever since, the U.S.D.A.'s policy has been to help farmers dispose of surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible through the digestive tracts of food animals, converting it into protein.
Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable foodstuff, making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals on small plots of land.
Without cheap corn, the modern urbanization of livestock would probably never have occurred.
We have come to think of ''cornfed'' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn't. Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat.
A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier. (Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6, which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine and CLA, another ''good'' fat.)
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef. In the same way ruminants have not evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating grain-fed animals. Yet the USDA's grading system continues to reward marbling -- that is, intermuscular fat -- and thus the feeding of corn to cows.
The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm, there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories. Of course the identical industrial logic -- protein is protein -- led to the feeding of rendered cow parts back to cows, a practice the F.D.A. banned in 1997 after scientists realized it was spreading mad-cow disease.
Make that mostly banned. The F.D.A.'s rules against feeding ruminant protein to ruminants make exceptions for ''blood products'' (even though they contain protein) and fat. Indeed, my steer has probably dined on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June. ''Fat is fat,'' the feedlot manager shrugged when I raised an eyebrow.
FDA rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to cows. Feather meal is an accepted cattle feed, as are pig and fish protein and chicken manure.
Some public-health advocates worry that since the bovine meat and bone meal that cows used to eat is now being fed to chickens, pigs and fish, infectious prions could find their way back into cattle when they eat the protein of the animals that have been eating them. To close this biological loophole, the FDA is now considering tightening its feed rules.
Until mad-cow disease, remarkably few people in the cattle business, let alone the general public, comprehended the strange semicircular food chain that industrial agriculture had devised for cattle (and, in turn, for us). When I mentioned to Rich Blair that I'd been surprised to learn that cows were eating cows, he said, ''To tell the truth, it was kind of a shock to me too.''
Yet even today, ranchers don't ask many questions about feedlot menus. Not that the answers are so easy to come by. When I asked Poky's feedlot manager what exactly was in the protein supplement, he couldn't say. ''When we buy supplement, the supplier says it's 40 percent protein, but they don't specify beyond that.'' When I called the supplier, it wouldn't divulge all its ''proprietary ingredients'' but promised that animal parts weren't among them. Protein is pretty much still protein.
Compared with ground-up cow bones, corn seems positively wholesome. Yet it wreaks considerable havoc on bovine digestion. During my day at Poky, I spent an hour or two driving around the yard with Dr. Mel Metzen, the staff veterinarian. Metzen, a 1997 graduate of Kansas State's vet school, oversees a team of eight cowboys who spend their days riding the yard, spotting sick cows and bringing them in for treatment.
A great many of their health problems can be traced to their diet. ''They're made to eat forage,'' Metzen said, ''and we're making them eat grain.''
Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination.
But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal's lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal's esophagus), the cow suffocates.
A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick.
Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.
Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. ''I don't know how long you could feed this ration before you'd see problems,'' Metzen said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would eventually ''blow out their livers'' and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.
Click here to read the continuation of this story
New York Times March 31, 2002
Dr. Mercola's Comment:
When I first became aware of grass-fed beef, I was only superficially aware of the importance of omega-3 oils. I have now grown to appreciate that balancing the optimum amount of omega-3 oils is one of the most important things you can do to stay healthy.
If you are not yet familiar with the benefits of omega-3 oils, please review my recent article on the cardiovascular actions of omega-3 oils.
Most nutritionist don't yet realize that it not only the amount, but the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 oils that controls much of our disease and health outcomes.
That is why it is so important to consume animals that are primarily eating grass. These animals will have far lower levels of the potentially dangerous omega-6 oils that nearly all of us have a surplus of.
The practical way to do this is to consume free-range chickens and turkeys and pasture or grass-fed beef. Unfortunately, you cannot buy this grass-fed beef at your local grocery store.
Obtaining free range poultry is relatively straight forward but you must be careful regarding the beef. Many stores will advertise grass-fed beef but it really isn't. They do this as ALL cattle are grass fed, but the key is what they are fed the months prior to being processed.
As this wonderful article explains most all cattle are shipped to giant feed lots and fed corn to fatten them up. I knew this before reading this incredible story, but I now have a far better understanding of the process.
You will need to call the person who actually grew the beef, NOT the store manager, to find out the truth.
The least expensive way to obtain authentic grass fed beef would be to find a farmer who is growing the beef who you can trust and buy a half a side of beef from him. This way you save the shipping and also receive a reduced rate on the meat.
An inexpensive, yet effective way to determine if the meat is really from a grass fed animal is to purchase the ground beef. Slowly cook the beef till done and drain and collect all the fat. Grass fed beef is very high in omega-3 fats and will be relatively thin compared to traditionally prepared ground beef.
It will also be a liquid at room temperature as it has very few saturated fats which are mostly solid at room temperature.
However, most of us live in large urban areas and do not have the time for this process. Just as it would be ideal to have an organic garden and grow your own vegetables, most of us elect not to do that for time or space reasons.
I used to have an organic garden, but my schedule just would not allow me to have that luxury anymore. So, if you are convinced, like I am, that grass-fed beef is better for you and you would like the convenience of being able to order it over the Net, you can buy grass-fed beef online, shipped overnight to your door, at Grassfed Organics.
What keeps a feedlot animal healthy -- or healthy enough -- are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed -- a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant ''superbugs.''
In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth.
But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for what we feed them.
I asked Metzen what would happen if antibiotics were banned from cattle feed. ''We just couldn't feed them as hard,'' he said. ''Or we'd have a higher death loss.'' (Less than 3 percent of cattle die on the feedlot.) The price of beef would rise, he said, since the whole system would have to slow down.
''Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space,'' he concluded dryly, ''I wouldn't have a job.''
Before heading over to Pen 43 for my reunion with No. 534, I stopped by the shed where recent arrivals receive their hormone implants. The calves are funneled into a chute, herded along by a ranch hand wielding an electric prod, then clutched in a restrainer just long enough for another hand to inject a slow-release pellet of Revlar, a synthetic estrogen, in the back of the ear.
The Blairs' pen had not yet been implanted, and I was still struggling with the decision of whether to forgo what is virtually a universal practice in the cattle industry in the United States. (It has been banned in the European Union.)
American regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to human health has been proved, even though measurable hormone residues do turn up in the meat we eat. These contribute to the buildup of estrogenic compounds in the environment, which some scientists believe may explain falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls.
Recent studies have also found elevated levels of synthetic growth hormones in feedlot wastes; these persistent chemicals eventually wind up in the waterways downstream of feedlots, where scientists have found fish exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
The F.D.A. is opening an inquiry into the problem, but for now, implanting hormones in beef cattle is legal and financially irresistible: an implant costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight of a steer at slaughter, for a return of at least $25.
That could easily make the difference between profit and loss on my investment in No. 534. Thinking like a parent, I like the idea of feeding my son hamburgers free of synthetic hormones. But thinking like a cattleman, there was really no decision to make.
I asked Rich Blair what he thought. ''I'd love to give up hormones,'' he said. ''If the consumer said, We don't want hormones, we'd stop in a second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the market signal's not there, and as long as my competitor's doing it, I've got to do it, too.''
Around lunch time, Metzen and I finally arrived at No. 534's pen. My first impression was that my steer had landed himself a decent piece of real estate. The pen is far enough from the feed mill to be fairly quiet, and it has a water view -- of what I initially thought was a reservoir, until I noticed the brown scum.
The pen itself is surprisingly spacious, slightly bigger than a basketball court, with a concrete feed bunk out front and a freshwater trough in the back. I climbed over the railing and joined the 90 steers, which, en masse, retreated a few steps, then paused.
I had on the same carrot-colored sweater I'd worn to the ranch in South Dakota, hoping to jog my steer's memory. Way off in the back, I spotted him -- those three white blazes. As I gingerly stepped toward him, the quietly shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted, and there No. 534 and I stood, staring dumbly at each other.
Glint of recognition? None whatsoever. I told myself not to take it personally. No. 534 had been bred for his marbling, after all, not his intellect.
I don't know enough about the emotional life of cows to say with any confidence if No. 534 was miserable, bored or melancholy, but I would not say he looked happy. I noticed that his eyes looked a little bloodshot. Some animals are irritated by the fecal dust that floats in the feedlot air; maybe that explained the sullen gaze with which he fixed me.
Unhappy or not, though, No. 534 had clearly been eating well. My animal had put on a couple hundred pounds since we'd last met, and he looked it: thicker across the shoulders and round as a barrel through the middle. He carried himself more like a steer now than a calf, even though he was still less than a year old. Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation. ''That's a handsome looking beef you've got there.''
Staring at No. 534, I could picture the white lines of the butcher's chart dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket. One way of looking at No. 534 -- the industrial way -- was as an efficient machine for turning feed corn into beef.
Every day between now and his slaughter date in June, No. 534 will convert 32 pounds of feed (25 of them corn) into another three and a half pounds of flesh. Poky is indeed a factory, transforming cheap raw materials into a less-cheap finished product, as fast as bovinely possible.
Yet the factory metaphor obscures as much as it reveals about the creature that stood before me. For this steer was not a machine in a factory but an animal in a web of relationships that link him to certain other animals, plants and microbes, as well as to the earth.
And one of those other animals is us.
The unnaturally rich diet of corn that has compromised No. 534's health is fattening his flesh in a way that in turn may compromise the health of the humans who will eat him. The antibiotics he's consuming with his corn were at that very moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the environment they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect us and resist the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and whatever happens to it also happens to us.
I thought about the deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I were standing in. We don't know much about the hormones in it -- where they will end up or what they might do once they get there -- but we do know something about the bacteria. One particularly lethal bug most probably resided in the manure beneath my feet.
Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.
Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids -- and go on to kill us.
By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection. Yet this process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has discovered that switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in the final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.
So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways to be not cheap at all. While I stood in No. 534's pen, a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed.
The animals stepped up to the bunk for their lunch. The $1.60 a day I'm paying for three giant meals is a bargain only by the narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take into account, for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning by E. coli or all the environmental costs associated with industrial corn.
For if you follow the corn from this bunk back to the fields where it grows, you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop.
Keep going and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''
But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from the sun; now that corn constitutes such an important link in his food chain, he is the product of an industrial system powered by fossil fuel.
(And in turn, defended by the military -- another uncounted cost of ''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to slaughter weight.
Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.
Sometime in June, No. 534 will be ready for slaughter. Though only 14 months old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds and will move with the lumbering deliberateness of the obese. One morning, a cattle trailer from the National Beef plant in Liberal, Kan., will pull in to Poky Feeders, drop a ramp and load No. 534 along with 35 of his pen mates.
The 100-mile trip south to Liberal is a straight shot on Route 83, a two-lane highway on which most of the traffic consists of speeding tractor-trailers carrying either cattle or corn. The National Beef plant is a sprawling gray-and-white complex in a neighborhood of trailer homes and tiny houses a notch up from shanty.
These are, presumably, the homes of the Mexican and Asian immigrants who make up a large portion of the plant's work force. The meat business has made southwestern Kansas an unexpectedly diverse corner of the country.
A few hours after their arrival in the holding pens outside the factory, a plant worker will open a gate and herd No. 534 and his pen mates into an alley that makes a couple of turns before narrowing down to a single-file chute. The chute becomes a ramp that leads the animals up to a second-story platform and then disappears through a blue door.
That door is as close to the kill floor as the plant managers were prepared to let me go.
I could see whatever I wanted to farther on -- the cold room where carcasses are graded, the food-safety lab, the fabrication room where the carcasses are broken down into cuts -- on the condition that I didn't take pictures or talk to employees. But the stunning, bleeding and evisceration process was off limits to a journalist, even a cattleman-journalist like myself.
What I know about what happens on the far side of the blue door comes mostly from Temple Grandin, who has been on the other side and, in fact, helped to design it. Grandin, an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State, is one of the most influential people in the United States cattle industry.
She has devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less stressful and therefore more humane by designing an ingenious series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps and stunning systems. Grandin is autistic, a condition she says has allowed her to see the world from the cow's point of view.
The industry has embraced Grandin's work because animals under stress are not only more difficult to handle but also less valuable: panicked cows produce a surge of adrenaline that turns their meat dark and unappetizing. ''Dark cutters,'' as they're called, sell at a deep discount.
Grandin designed the double-rail conveyor system in use at the National Beef plant; she has also audited the plant's killing process for McDonald's.
Stories about cattle ''waking up'' after stunning only to be skinned alive prompted McDonald's to audit its suppliers in a program that is credited with substantial improvements since its inception in 1999. Grandin says that in cattle slaughter ''there is the pre-McDonald's era and the post-McDonald's era -- it's night and day.''
Grandin recently described to me what will happen to No. 534 after he passes through the blue door. ''The animal goes into the chute single file,'' she began. ''The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he's straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a 25-degree angle, and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground and he's being carried along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can't look down and see he's off the ground. That would panic him.''
Listening to Grandin's rather clinical account, I couldn't help wondering what No. 534 would be feeling as he approached his end. Would he have any inkling -- a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line -- that this was no ordinary day?
Grandin anticipated my question: ''Does the animal know it's going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them, going into the squeeze chute on the feedlot, getting their shots and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die, you'd see much more agitated behavior.
''Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a pneumatic-powered 'gun' that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When it's done correctly, it will kill the animal on the first shot.''
For a plant to pass a McDonald's audit, the stunner needs to render animals ''insensible'' on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second shot is allowed, but should that one fail, the plant flunks.
At the line speeds at which meatpacking plants in the United States operate -- 390 animals are slaughtered every hour at National, which is not unusual -- mistakes would seem inevitable, but Grandin insists that only rarely does the process break down.
''After the animal is shot while he's riding along, a worker wraps a chain around his foot and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg, he's carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his throat.
Animal rights people say they're cutting live animals, but that's because there's a lot of reflex kicking.'' This is one of the reasons a job at a slaughter plant is the most dangerous in America. ''What I look for is, Is the head dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He'd better not be trying to hold it up -- then you've got a live one on the rail.'' Just in case, Grandin said, ''they have another hand stunner in the bleed area.''
Much of what happens next -- the de-hiding of the animal, the tying off of its rectum before evisceration -- is designed to keep the animal's feces from coming into contact with its meat. This is by no means easy to do, not when the animals enter the kill floor smeared with manure and 390 of them are eviscerated every hour.
(Partly for this reason, European plants operate at much slower line speeds.) But since that manure is apt to contain lethal pathogens like E. coli 0157, and since the process of grinding together hamburger from hundreds of different carcasses can easily spread those pathogens across millions of burgers, packing plants now spend millions on ''food safety'' -- which is to say, on the problem of manure in meat.
Most of these efforts are reactive: it's accepted that the animals will enter the kill floor caked with feedlot manure that has been rendered lethal by the feedlot diet.
Rather than try to alter that diet or keep the animals from living in their waste or slow the line speed -- all changes regarded as impractical -- the industry focuses on disinfecting the manure that will inevitably find its way into the meat. This is the purpose of irradiation (which the industry prefers to call ''cold pasteurization''). It is also the reason that carcasses pass through a hot steam cabinet and get sprayed with an antimicrobial solution before being hung in the cooler at the National Beef plant.
It wasn't until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler, 36 hours later, that I was allowed to catch up with them, in the grading room. I entered a huge arctic space resembling a monstrous dry cleaner's, with a seemingly endless overhead track conveying thousands of red-and-white carcasses.
I quickly learned that you had to move smartly through this room or else be tackled by a 350-pound side of beef. The carcasses felt cool to the touch, no longer animals but meat.
Two by two, the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the rails, six pairs every minute, to a station where two workers -- one wielding a small power saw, the other a long knife -- made a single six-inch cut between the 12th and 13th ribs, opening a window on the meat inside.
The carcasses continued on to another station, where a U.S.D.A. inspector holding a round blue stamp glanced at the exposed rib eye and stamped the carcass's creamy white fat once, twice or -- very rarely -- three times: select, choice, prime.
For the Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of truth, for that stamp will determine exactly how much the packing plant will pay for each animal and whether the 14 months of effort and expense will yield a profit.
Unless the cattle market collapses between now and June (always a worry these days), I stand to make a modest profit on No. 534. In February, the feedlot took a sonogram of his rib eye and ran the data through a computer program.
The projections are encouraging: a live slaughter weight of 1,250, a carcass weight of 787 pounds and a grade at the upper end of choice, making him eligible to be sold at a premium as Certified Angus Beef. Based on the June futures price, No. 534 should be worth $944. (Should he grade prime, that would add another $75.)
I paid $598 for No. 534 in November; his living expenses since then come to $61 on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the feedlot (including implant), for a total investment of $917, leaving a profit of $27. It's a razor-thin margin, and it could easily vanish should the price of corn rise or No. 534 fail to make the predicted weight or grade -- say, if he gets sick and goes off his feed.
Without the corn, without the antibiotics, without the hormone implant, my brief career as a cattleman would end in failure.
The Blairs and I are doing better than most. According to Cattle-Fax, a market-research firm, the return on an animal coming out of a feedlot has averaged just $3 per head over the last 20 years.
''Some pens you make money, some pens you lose,'' Rich Blair said when I called to commiserate. ''You try to average it out over time, limit the losses and hopefully make a little profit.'' He reminded me that a lot of ranchers are in the business ''for emotional reasons -- you can't be in it just for the money.''
Now you tell me.
The manager of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of steaks from No. 534 before his carcass disappears into the trackless stream of commodity beef fanning out to America's supermarkets and restaurants this June.
From what I can see, the Blair brothers, with the help of Poky Feeders, are producing meat as good as any you can find in an American supermarket. And yet there's no reason to think this steak will taste any different from the other high-end industrial meat I've ever eaten.
While waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I've explored some alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays you can find hormone- and antibiotic-free beef as well as organic beef, fed only grain grown without chemicals.
This meat, which is often quite good, is typically produced using more grass and less grain (and so makes for healthier animals). Yet it doesn't fundamentally challenge the corn-feedlot system, and I'm not sure that an ''organic feedlot'' isn't, ecologically speaking, an oxymoron. What I really wanted to taste is the sort of preindustrial beef my grandparents ate -- from animals that have lived most of their full-length lives on grass.
Eventually I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me a quarter of a grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most of my freezer. I also found ranchers selling grass-fed beef on the Web;
I discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than supermarket beef. Whatever else you can say about industrial beef, it is remarkably cheap, and any argument for changing the system runs smack into the industry's populist arguments.
Put the animals back on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it takes too long to raise beef on grass, and there's not enough grass to raise them on, since the Western range lands aren't big enough to sustain America's 100 million head of cattle.
And besides, Americans have learned to love cornfed beef. Feedlot meat is also more consistent in both taste and supply and can be harvested 12 months a year. (Grass-fed cattle tend to be harvested in the fall, since they stop gaining weight over the winter, when the grasses go dormant.)
All of this is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot system is hard to refute. And yet so is the ecological logic behind a ruminant grazing on grass. Think what would happen if we restored a portion of the Corn Belt to the tall grass prairie it once was and grazed cattle on it.
No more petrochemical fertilizer, no more herbicide, no more nitrogen runoff. Yes, beef would probably be more expensive than it is now, but would that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every day might not be such a smart idea anyway -- for our health, for the environment.
And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.
So how does grass-fed beef taste?
Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out to be the best steak I've ever eaten. But unless the meat is carefully aged, grass-fed beef can be tougher than feedlot beef -- not surprisingly, since a grazing animal, which moves around in search of its food, develops more muscle and less fat.
Yet even when the meat was tougher, its flavor, to my mind, was much more interesting. And specific, for the taste of every grass-fed animal is inflected by the place where it lived. Maybe it's just my imagination, but nowadays when I eat a feedlot steak, I can taste the corn and the fat, and I can see the view from No. 534's pen. I can't taste the oil, obviously, or the drugs, yet now I know they're there.
A considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing (and, O.K., chewing) a grass-fed steak: a picture of a cow outside in a pasture eating the grass that has eaten the sunlight.
Meat-eating may have become an act riddled with moral and ethical ambiguities, but eating a steak at the end of a short, primordial food chain comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and light is something I'm happy to do and defend. We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.
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