The Omnivores Dilemma

Chapter #4- The Feedlot (Making Meat)

Name: ______________________________________________
1: Pg. 65- The corn plant has colonized how much of the American continent?
2: Pg. 66-67- How have Americas food animals undergone a revolution in lifestyle?
3: Pg. 67- What is a CAFO?
4: Pg. 67- What happened to the all of the farmland once the animals left? Where did all of the
corn go?
5: Pg. 68- What is the idea of a closed ecological loop?
6: Pg. 68- What are the two main problems with animal feedlots?
7. Pg 70- What is the coevolutionary relationship between cows and grass? Explain.
8. Pg. 71- Why would pastures become the great American desert without ruminant animals?
9. Pg. 71- What gets a steer from 80 to 1,000 pounds in just 14 months?
10. Pg. 71- Why is weaning the calves the most traumatic time on the ranch?
11. Pg. 73- What is the only reason contemporary animal cities arent as plague-ridden or
pestilential as their medieval human counterparts?
12. Pg. 73- So if the modern CAFO is a city built upon commodity corn, it is a city afloat on an
invisible sea of ____________
13. Pg. 75- Why is corn fed meat less healthy for us?
14. Pg. 75- What practice of feeding cows led to the Mad Cow Disease?
15. Pg. 77- How are we choosing which cows we want to select to breed?
16. Pg. 77- What is the #1 ailment found with cows fed on corn? Why- explain.
17. Pg. 78- What is acidosis and what does it cause in the cow?
18. Pg. 78- What percentage of cows at slaughterhouses are found to have abscessed livers?
125,000 square miles.
Animals now live in cities, small spaces.
Concentrated Animal Feed Operation.
They grew corn, went to paddocks, pastures and barnyards.
To stop waste.
Fertility problems and pollution.
The cows give the grass some sunlight, and the grass is the cows lunch.
Pastures wouldt be able to grow crops without any cattle.
Corn and new drugs.
Because cows mope for days.
Because of the modern antibiotic.
petroleum.
Because humans have not adapted to ruminants.
Feeding cow parts back to cows.
On the amount of corn they eat without getting sick.
Is bloat, The fermentation of the rumen produces a lot of gas.
Makes stomach acidic. make the cow eat dirt.
15 to 30 percent.
19. Pg. 78- What is the leading causes of the evolution of antibiotic resistant superbugs?
20. Pg. 79- What chemicals are found in the manure lagoon on CAFOs?
21. Pg. 80- How many pounds of corn does it take to make 4 pounds of beef? What is the ratio
for chicken?
22. Pg. 82- How has the new strain of E. Coli (O157: H7) evolved and what is the problem with
it? How can this problem be fixed?
23. Pg. 82- How are the costs associated with the CAFOs externalized? Explain.
24. Pg. 83- Discuss the path of corn backward from the corn fields and discuss the implications.
25. Pg. 83- How much of Americas petroleum usage goes to producing and transporting our
food?
26. Pg. 84- If a cow reaches his full weight- how much oil will he have consumed in lifetime?
27. Pg. 84- You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a
feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or
have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil- Discuss.
Evolution.
Nitrogen and phosphorus, heavy metals, hormone residue and persistent chemicals.
32 for beef, and 2.8 for chicken.
It has a new acidic-resistance, it can shake off our stomach and kills us.
Based on environmental costs: the amount of burned corn, and pesticides to grew it.
Corn starts in the elds a monoculture under rain of pesticide and fertilizer.
The nitrogen runs off into rivers and lakes. The fertilizer needed to grow the corn.
1/5.
35 gallons of oil.
Because of all the chemicals that the products have, we are becoming like them. Acquiring
there toxics and chemicals that they have within. We are
meat, oil and corn. We also eat the hormones that were injected in cows.