You Gonna Eat That?

While I was born in Virginia, and have spent over half of my life as a Virginian, I grew up in suburban Maryland. In that area, a week at the beach meant a trip to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware or Ocean City, Maryland. The Grand Fury station wagon would be packed with towels and coolers, we would anxiously put on our swimsuits in an effort to be ready for that first wave, and we’d join the throng of thousands heading east on Route 50 in search of sun and sand.

“Are we there yet?” was always a mile or two down the road, but we quickly learned to recognize landmarks that would tell us how close we were to our destination. The most prominent one was the smell. Was it the smell of salt air, or the dank muskiness of tidal marsh?

No. It was the powerful aroma of chicken processing wafting from Salisbury, Maryland.

The Eastern Shore, and much of Virginia, is dotted with chicken farms and processing plants that provide us with nuggets and tenders. In the United States, we kill over 30 million chickens every single day to provide these morsels. Chickens produce about as much waste as they eat food, and in the case of Delmarva, this means over 3.2 billion pounds of waste – which flows into the Chesapeake Bay. This is nitrogen, phosphorus, antibiotics, and steroids.

You know how your fresh chicken in the local grocery has that “yum-yum” pink color? They get this with an antibiotic compound called roxarsone. It’s arsenic. A symptom of arsenic poisoning is a reddening of the flesh. Chickens excrete 95% of the roxarsone they’re fed. So chew on that.

So maybe switch to beef?

A pound of commercially grown beef requires 28 times more land, 11 times more water, and contributes 5 times more greenhouse gasses than a pound of chicken or pork. We like to feed our cattle grain, and mostly in the form of corn.   Cows are ruminants, and can’t really process corn. They like green, leafy grasses. So all of that corn gives them gas and makes them bloat. These gasses contribute around ¾ of the livestock produced greenhouse gasses because…well…the cows fart. One experiment fed the cows green scrubbies like you use to scrub pots as a mechanism to “scrub the guts” of flatulent bovines. On some large farms, the ranchers got a great deal on rejected candies from our biggest sweets producers. Poured those jawbreakers and tarts right in the feedbag. The sugar allowed the cows to put on weight faster and the paper and plastic wrappers provided roughage. Really.

This doesn’t even take into account the environmental impact of the corn that we feed our livestock. Most (almost all) of the corn grown in America ends up at a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) where it ends up in a cow, chicken, or pig. These lots contain thousands of animals (or millions in the case of chickens), and are basically giant cesspools. An animal can go from birth to death and never see sunlight, never eat grass, and never drink from a stream. In Iowa, they raise 18 million pigs each year on these types of operations. That’s a lot of slop, and a lot of manure. This corn has also replaced our sustainable crops, causing erosion, and is encouraging the use of billions of tons of fertilizer and pesticides.

How did we screw up corn?

When I was younger, most of my family was scattered through Southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia. Every holiday and the majority of every summer were spent around the farm of my great-grandparents. They kept a modest head of cattle, a full henhouse, and a sty full of pigs. They ate grass, foraged for bugs, and dug for acorns – like cows, chickens, and pigs are supposed to do. On frequent occasions, we ate them. They were delicious.

We could, however, clean up after them in an afternoon and pronounce everything that they consumed.

*  Chris Crews is a Keep Virginia Beautiful member, an environmental advocate, and omnivore.