6 Decisions You’ll Make
they wanted. I also spent more time observing each while doing chores,
locking away mental images of their presence.
The morning it happened began like any other. As I walked to the
barn, they stuck their heads into the feeding stalls and prepared to eat.
But this time I did not break open bales of hay or scoop out silage.
Adjacent to the stalls was a loading chute, which had been there their
entire lives. Backed up to it was the livestock carrier with its gates
opened. As I looked at the cattle, they peered back at me, still waiting
to be fed.
But instead of food, I pushed their heads out of the stalls while
my father and brother surrounded them and herded them toward the
loading chute. Confused and scared, a few searched for an opening to
escape. But when the first one scampered up the loading ramp and into
the truck, the others followed. While the driver closed the gates and
secured his load, they huddled together in unfamiliar surroundings.
As the truck slowly drove away, some stared back at me. This was the
day they never could have seen coming. The abundance of food had
ended the night before. Each time a load of cattle was dispatched to the
slaughterhouse, similar sentiments of melancholy followed—as I knew
that for them, this was the end of the line.
With the impersonal modern food system we support, cattle are
there to fulfill a specific purpose—to transform energy that plants had
previously captured from the Sun. On the farm, we harvested and fed
this energy to them; they in turn converted and stored it as meat—
muscle and fat. When consumers enter the supermarket and stop in the
meat department, that muscle and fat is waiting for them in various cuts
of meat and packages of ground beef.
At times, I have wondered: does the modern food system exist to serve
consumers, or do consumers exist to serve the modern food system?
Without people, the system is incomplete. The energy that begins with
the Sun and is passed through plants and then into animals still needs
to be converted into dollars. Plants have done their part. Animals have
done their part. What remains is up to individual human consumers.
Through price and persuasion, the modern food system recruits each
of us to carry out this final step that transforms food calories into money.
The more calories we take in, the more money flows back to the food
system. From the dollars-and-cents vantage point of the modern food