Joseph Taintor’s theory of increasing societal complexity as a means of problem solving, which I posted about last week, is truly exemplified in the story of our food system. I have an example to share: the story of beef production.

The traditional method for producing a steak would go something like this: cows would feed off an existing pasture of grasses, and as they fed, they would pick up grass seed in their hooves, which they would deposit elsewhere to grow themselves more food, and they would fertilize the ground as they went. Cows are rumenants, specially evolved species that have a rumen full of bacteria to process grass before digesting it in a stomach. Those of us without rumens cannot digest grass.

In 3-5 years, when they grew large enough, they would be slaughtered for their meat, and sent to markets and butchers.

Today, the process begins on a farm. 100-200 pounds of natural gas derived nitrogen fertilizer are sprayed per acre onto corn fields, which produce 10 billion bushels of corn a year. About 60% of this harvest feeds cows being fattened for meat.

At the same time, mail order bull sperm inseminates cows, who turn out a calf every year. The calves live on grazing ranches with their mothers for about 8 months, then they are weaned and driven to feedlots, where they spend about 5 months gaining about 800 lbs.
At the feedlots, which house 10s of thousands of cows at a time, a million pounds of feed are consumed each day. The feed is designated and mixed by computers, and is made up of ¾ corn, and ¼ combination of liquefied fat, protein supplement (molasses and urea, a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas), liquid vitamins, synthetic estrogen, antibiotics, and some alfalfa hay for roughage. The cows eat a daily ration of 32 pounds of feed, the weight of which is almost entirely corn.

Cows can’t digest corn. Cows eat grass, which is processed in the neutral-ph level rumen before going to the stomach: which is why we are taught that cows have two stomachs. Cows evolved to eat forage and we’re making them eat grain.

A corn diet leads primarily to acidification of the rumen, because you don’t need one of those to eat corn. The acidiotic rumen leads to heart burn, bloating, scoriasis of the liver, and a long list of other illnesses and diseases. Antibiotics are given to all cows – healthy and sick – to slow liver deterioration and prevent bloating. Even with the antibiotics, cows cannot last on a corn diet for much longer than 150 days because eventually their livers blow out. So, they must get to a certain weight within that short period, at which point they go to the slaughterhouse to be turned into cuts of meat. More than likely, the meat will become inputs into an equally lengthy process which ends in fast food meals and microwave dinners.

The evolution of raising beef cattle, from its fairly simple beginnings on pastures to its multi-input pollutathon in which we feed cows food they can’t digest can be tracked through a series of varied and interrelated problems in many areas of the economy.

Entire books are written about pieces of this puzzle, but in the end, it only goes to prove Taintor’s theory: a wide range of problems are solved through the increasingly complex beef raising process we run, and in turn our beef raising process creates a wide range of problems we need to solve. Can these problems be solved by simplifying, by reducing energy consumption and increasing sustainability, or are natural processes history by this point?