Pushback against a “meatless day” proclaimed by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis last month was predictably vigorous. It was part of the “war on rural Colorado,” said a state senator who runs a cattle-feeding operation. Twenty-six of Colorado’s 64 counties adopted “meat-in” proclamations. Governors from the adjoining states of Wyoming and Nebraska even gleefully designated an “eat-meat” day.
Afterward, Polis’s press aides pointed to the hundreds of do-good proclamations the governor issues each year, and the governor quickly declared his beef brisket the rival of any in Colorado.
But this proclamation differed from those affirming truck drivers, bat awareness and breakfast burritos. It called for broad change. Using the language of a “MeatOut” Day proclamation written by an animal rights group, his statement cited the benefits of a plant-based diet in reducing our carbon footprint, preserving ecosystems and preventing animal cruelty. It also noted the growing alternatives to meat, dairy and eggs.
In the 1880s, when my great-grandparents homesteaded in eastern Colorado, they grazed cattle on the short-grass prairie. Ranchers still do. Once off the range, though, our beef production is best understood as an industrial process. The foundation is grain.
In his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates explains the modern pyramid of protein: A chicken eats two calories’ worth of grain to give us one calorie of poultry. For cattle, it’s six calories of feed to produce one calorie of beef. I’ve stood in rows of corn tassels 12 feet high at maturity, the growth boosted by luxuriant applications of fertilizer. I’ve pinched my nose while driving past feedlots large enough for 80,000 or more head. I’ve heard the bellow of cows minutes away from the knife at slaughterhouses.
Denver no longer has slaughterhouses but still prides itself on its livestock heritage. The annual Western Stock Show puts cowboy hats in high-end restaurants and strip joints alike. Cattle represent 50% of Colorado’s $7 billion agriculture economy, and livestock altogether 70%. After Polis’s proclamation, livestock producers debated boycotting Denver’s Stock Show for other venues — perhaps Oklahoma.
Even a legislator from one of metro Denver’s poorer neighborhoods objected to Polis’s proclamation, pointing out that nutritious vegetarian options aren’t available to many of her constituents.
But it’s not just low-income areas that lack meal choices. Fast-food franchises in big cities and small towns all cater to the lowest-common denominator, their high-volume enterprises predicated on cheap meat, especially beef. The consequences are that we now have bulbous bellies and too many heart attacks. We struggle to live with restraint.
The meaty issue here is not about meat vs. no-meat. Rather, it’s about scale and processes. What have we sacrificed in pursuit of volume?
Credit the ranchers who graze cattle holistically in an attempt to replicate the once-vast herds of bison. But also note that grass-fed beef needs buyers. Most holistically raised cows get further fattened on grain. That’s where the market is.
There’s also the looming issue of cows contributing to climate change, as highly polluting methane comes out of both ends of cattle. Gates, always the technologist, insists that innovation can reduce the carbon output of agriculture by reducing our yen for real beef. He put his money where my mouth is by investing in a vegetarian product called the Impossible Burger. Last week I had one. It fooled me. I thought it was beef.
Meanwhile, the urban-rural divide remains starkly real and evident in voting and development patterns. While cities struggle to contain their growth, many small towns struggle to hang on. Ironically, the economies of most of these at-risk rural towns are premised on industrial-scale agriculture.
Rural Colorado never has liked Polis, a savvy businessman from the exurbs of Boulder who favors market solutions. He had barely warmed his gubernatorial seat when handmade signs began showing up on rural country roads asking “Why does Polis hate…” You fill in the blank.
This meatless proclamation was tone-deaf. It could have narrowly affirmed meatless alternatives rather than decried meat. Denial and anger will not prevail, though. I’m reminded of when coal producers, 10 and 15 years ago, were fighting the future of renewables instead of figuring out their place in the world to come.
Though most of us may continue to eat beef, some of us have already begun to shift away. Polis was perhaps the unwitting messenger of that truth — that cows in the West are no longer sacred.
Allen Best contributes to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes about energy and water in Big Pivots, his e-magazine.
The issue isn’t so much Cattle as it is too many people. The world cannot support 7,874,965,825 people. It’s unsustainable.
I bring this up in a lot of conversations and it always seems to be received with a little discomfort. A lot of issues we face today could be fixed by a drastically reduced human population, and we are essentially the real problem.
This is one of the best articles I have read in a long time, touches upon this and many other issues of our time.
https://quillette.com/2021/04/04/facts-dont-care-about-your-diversity-training-certificate-a-critique-of-credentialism/
“Denial and anger will not prevail, though. I’m reminded of when coal producers, 10 and 15 years ago, were fighting the future of renewables instead of figuring out their place in the world to come”
It could be possible that they have come to the conclusion that if the world keeps moving the way its moving that there will be no place for their livelihood and that’s were the anger and denial come from?
Governor of a beef producing state making talking about a meatless day is a little tone deaf … (still, he didn’t say “do meatless Mondays”), but equally farmers essentially saying that everyone should eat meat daily is equally tone deaf when you look at the health of the consumers and the world. The US has a general population health issue. Sure, there’s the minority who are crazy healthy, but the vast majority of adults are very far from healthy.
Listening to the podcast series Timber Wars, someone talked about how Bill Clinton went to Oregon to help in the environmentalists vs timber industry issues, and he was very perceptive. The issue is change. The timber industry saw the issue as the environmentalists, but the issue was that the old growth was running out regardless, and change was coming to small mill towns.
The height of beef consumption per person has likely passed. Sure, population growth will increase absolute demand and exporting, but ranchers getting angry that people are trying to be healthier is not gonna change it.
I agree with pretty much everything you said here Kris, except the people raising and selling Cattle today are almost exclusively not ranchers. They are feed lot operators. It’s more of a meat factory, than a ranch.
Wrong.
Do some research. The world can support far more. Just not based on a coal energy/meat based future.
the foto shows jackass junction. that would be in oatman, arizona, a town on the old route 66. arizona has an (over)abundance of (wild) burros, like the ones that roam free in oatman. we also have an old tourist stop on the I – 17 that runs from phoenix to flagstaff. it is called jackass acres. we better enjoy these old bygone relics cuz change is on the horizon in the grand canyon state. we r being overrun by fleeing californicators who might not accept such rural descriptive names…….
Though I’m a vegetarian, I was recently surprised by the well-researched book “The Big Fat Surprise,” which contends that animal protein and fat is not the health boogeyman we have all been led to think it is for the last 30-40 years. As documented in the book, there is no evidence that links saturated fat or serum cholesterol to heart disease, and no proof that the Mediterranean diet significantly improves health or longevity. (Much research points to carbs, and particularly refined carbs, as the real danger, as they promote insulin secretion, a hormone reduces the body’s ability to burn stored fat.) I know this sounds like the opposite of of everything we’ve been taught, but 20-30 years of “low-fat” foods and diets have simply made our society fatter–People were much more normal-sized back when breakfast consisted of bacon and eggs. Why? Read the book! (None of the preceding should be construed as support for industrial-style animal production.)
“The consequences are that we now have bulbous bellies and too many heart attacks.” What evidence do you have that this is caused by eating meat as opposed to eating processed food, processed sugar, processed grain, seed oils, etc.?
The previous sentence states “Fast-food franchises in big cities and small towns all cater to the lowest-common denominator, their high-volume enterprises predicated on cheap meat, especially beef.” I take that to include all the things that go with cheap beef – the processed “food” that comes from fast-food restaurants which use refined carbs, sugar, salt, palm oil, etc. It’s all of it and all processed.
Most of America’s health problems don’t stem from beef but all the processed garbage we eat.
It could just as easily have been eat, fish, poultry or mutton day.
Polis doesn’t like meat so nobody should like meat…
For years, we’ve been warned of the downfalls of processed foods, now it’s meat. In fact, the best choice is vegetables processed so much they taste like meat. Yeah, that’s what’s healthy for you, just ask Bill Gates.
As someone who hails from Colorado, does not eat meat and cares about human impact on our planet, I love that he did this. He might not be perfect and it is a little tone deaf but it’s a genuine effort to encourage awareness. And it may be a shot across the bow of the industrialized meat complex but you know, I have been hiking through trashed riparian zones and seen cow shit in the most beautiful of places on my public lands for a long time and we could do with a fewer cows.
F*** bill gates! Just because he’s rich doesn’t mean he knows everything about everything, we’re sick and damn tired of being lectured to by people who are so wealthy they are completely divorced from reality. Stop telling us what to do and how to live our lives. This country did just fine before the bureaucrats, tech oligarchs and politicians decided they knew best how we should live.