Preface
Every day, for ten months of the year, my cow Fern translates the sun and rain that fall on my small acreage into life-supporting, nourishing milk. With superb efficiency she borrows the energy in cellulose (think grass, upon which humans starve) and reinvests it into a food more perfect than anything in the supermarket. No mangrove swamps or rain forests are destroyed in the manufacture of this product. No water to float a battleship is diverted for her purposes. No grain that might otherwise have been cracked into ethanol or bargained to the starving is apportioned to her use. Fern accomplishes this feat without burning any gasoline. She does this through the magic of wild fermentation in her rumen, the same process employed by cabbage worms and everything else that lives by splitting cellulose. Right now is the moment to abandon the fiction that cows are high on the food chain. The only things that live lower on the food chain than cows and caterpillars are bacteria. Fern is a one-stop food factory, using sun, rain, grass, and rumen fermentation to produce complete-protein milk; the cow does all the work today, and tomorrow she will do it all over again.
Fern’s predecessor, old Helen Hefferlump, finally got so arthritic that we knew making it through another Maine winter would be a painful hardship and we needed to end her suffering. Should we wait until she broke her hip on the ice? The options were burying her (impossible in frozen ground) or putting her into the freezer where she would feed many people for a year. Why would Helen prefer to be wasted? Our local butcher said he and his family were raised on aged dairy cows and the meat would amaze us. He was right. Here we can abandon another fiction: the idea that avoiding meat takes strain off the planet. Something eats everything. Life and death merge. Taking animals out of the equation just leaves a vacuum to be filled by insects.
Our prevailing livestock production system is grotesque but at its worst does not remotely approach the waste attributed to it; those mega water requirements and fossil fuel demands attributed to livestock are scary memes, their numbers too vast for mental arithmetic. Efforts to discover any research-based evidence for these beliefs will founder because none exists. And food policy based on fictional numbers is doomed.
Pursuit of an anti-meat agenda will only delay effective investment of our energies. The choice is not between maintaining our omnivore status or “getting over the meat habit and freeing up grain for hungry multitudes,” and it never will be.
The cultivation of plants depends upon stoop labor or fossil fuel; apart from animal traction, there is no other way to achieve it. Grazing cows efficiently harvest their own food.
The waste in our existing food production system comes from pulling food out of the loop between soil and eaters, commodifying it, bashing it around to its nutritional detriment, and selling it back to consumers who have already paid for it once with subsidies and will fork over at the cash register and then pay again at the doctor’s office. The assumption that glues together the corporate food system is that you and I will not and should not be bothered with home or strictly local food production. I have spent most of my eight decades living the real food truth that, yes, you can produce your own food without any help from agribusiness and with minimal dependence on fossil fuel. Not only can you do this, but it is a source of satisfaction, and often joy. You always know you are doing something worthwhile. The small local farm including animals is the only reliable land-based food production unit. It is a microcosm of the natural world. It creates no environmental debt. It is safe. And it will belong to you.