Posted inCommentary & Opinion

We Have Seen the Mad Cow, and It Is Us

by Richard Manning

Mad cow disease is not the point; it’s a symptom of a deeper ill. The feedlot system is cruel, wasteful and dangerous. It entails a litany of abuses, but its inefficiencies can be summed in energy use. It takes about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to make a calorie of feedlot beef. Grass-fed cattle require less than a third as much.