THIS SCIENCE STORY STARTED WITH A BIGGER QUESTION

by Carol Cruzan Morton

On the science beat, there are a lot of predictable ways to carve out stories lurking in the modern American beef industry. The latest study in a peer-reviewed journal or a disease outbreak might trigger a news article about mad-cow disease, E. coli contamination, or antibiotic resistance. An enterprising journalist might take an authoritative look at trends in groundwater pollution or animal welfare.

Instead, Connecticut writer Michael Pollan bought himself a cow. It was a rancher’s idea, really. Told from a cattleman’s point of view, the resulting cover story in the March 31 New York Times Magazine about how a cow becomes a steak resonated with vegetarians and meat-eaters, spawned follow-up stories in other media, and even boosted the tiny boutique grass-fed beef business.

Unrestrained by word count and the conventions of the science beat, Pollan presents “Power Steer” as a story about personal choices and universal connections. Behind the scenes, his deliberations offer insights for other writers.

The story started in a typical way for his NYT magazine assignment. His editors wanted him to do something on USDA meat inspections. After a couple of weeks of research and further consultation with his editors, Pollan identified the narrative thread on which he could hang the larger issues of the modern industrialized cattle industry.

“We decided to find one animal and tell his life story,” said Pollan. He and his editors applied the training they all received (on staff at Harper’s magazine) to find the microcosm in an unmanageably broad idea and hang the larger issues off a simple story. A dizzying laundry list of issues—food safety, feedlots, government regulations, humane slaughter, hormones—all came together in watching an 80-pound calf turn into a 1,200-pound hamburger-ready steer.

“Too much science writing stops at the level of explaining difficult-to-grasp concepts,” said Pollan, who instead approaches science-based stories as decisions people have to make in their day-to-day lives, and addresses the science as one point of connection to people’s lives. “Don’t start with the journal article,” he advised, “start with the bigger question.”

Finding a representative cow presented another set of issues. For example, there are regional differences in how beef is raised, he said. Eventually, he bought a cow from the Sturgis, S.D., cattle-rancher neighbors of a writer and buffalo-rancher acquaintance. In contrast, for a new book with the same premise, Portrait of a Burger as A Young Calf, upstate New York writer Peter Lovenheim purchased a bull and heifer at a nearby dairy farm after he learned that at least half the meat in most fast-food burger patties come from culled, or retired, dairy cows.

In Pollan’s case, rancher Ed Blair suggested the writer might as well buy a steer, as a way to understand the daunting economics of modern ranching. Good idea, Pollan thought. That neatly defined a first-person perspective for his story.

One of the secrets in first-person narratives is finding an interesting first person, Pollan said. “Where do I stand? Who am I going to write the story as? Can I write as a meat-eater? As someone having a crisis about meat? As a mother? As a father? You have to define your first person. And the writer as first person isn’t always the best choice. Readers don’t connect with a man or woman who works for a newspaper.”

Uncomfortable with the omniscient voice of much journalism, Pollan remains inspired by George Plimpton’s experience as an inept rookie quarterback for the Detroit Lions in the book Paper Lion, the mid-1960s classic on participatory journalism. “The first person gives comic possibilities,” Pollan said. “I always write as an amateur. I never write as an expert. I can dramatize the process of learning—why I asked the questions and how I came to answer them.”

Much of the article’s dramatic tension comes from the decisions Pollan makes about his cow as he reveals the many and sometimes surprising ways in which the industrial Midwest feedlot system feels wrong. As a calf, No. 534 spends the first six months in the Blairs’ lush pastures where both the cows and the grass live in a mutually beneficial, sustainable, solar-powered ecosystem.

Pollan wrote empathetically about the ranchers who raised his cow—their decreasing profit margins, their stewardship of their animals—but his tone changes when the cows are shipped for fattening to a modern Midwestern feedlot. Physically and metaphorically, the feedlots bear the critical burden of Pollan’s exposé, although, in the manner of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the book, not the movie), Pollan blames a flawed system, not evil individuals. (After his article was published, the Blairs told Pollan that they wish he’d been harder on them and easier on their industry.)

“What gets a beef calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements, and drugs—including growth hormones,” Pollan wrote. “These ‘efficiencies,’ all of which come at a price, have transformed raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not everybody is convinced that this is progress.”

Pollan describes a destructive set of ecological relationships created by modern feedlots that revolve around corn. “We have come to think of ‘corn-fed’ as some kind of old-fashioned virtue,” Pollan wrote. “We shouldn’t.” A growing body of research suggests health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef, he wrote. Quoted in follow-up stories on National Public Radio, Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters was struck by the links Pollan made between the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in the feedlot, which take vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil—about 284 gallons of oil for one cow, Pollan figured.

More gruesome, the digestive tracks of cows can’t handle corn feed, leading to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease, and a general weakening of the immune system, prompting prophylactic antibiotics that contribute to antibiotic resistance in humans. Even worse, cows are also dining on animal body parts from chickens, pigs, and fish, that in turn fed on bovine meat and bone meal, potentially keeping the risk of mad-cow disease alive.

The hardest decision Pollan made, he said, was not preventing the hormone implant that contributes to the buildup of estrogenic compounds in the environment and has been implicated in falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls. On the other hand, “an implant cost $1.50, adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight of steer at slaughter, for a return of at least $25,” Pollan wrote.

Although tempted by dozens of offers of (paid) rescue and refuge for his cow, Pollan stayed consistent in his role as cattleman whose living was dependent upon the final weight of his cow, even after his article was published. “I decided not to for a couple of reasons. One, it seemed a meaningless sentimental gesture to save one out of 100 animals, an empty gesture designed to flatter people’s sense of virtue rather than accomplish anything,” he said. “It’s better to ask your butcher and your restaurant for grass-fed beef and build a demand that will create better lives for animals. Saving one animal discharges that obligation.

“Two, as a journalist, I made commitments that I would see the process through,” Pollan said. “No. 534 was part of a package of 100 animals that the Blairs committed to the slaughterhouse. I would have embarrassed everyone I wrote about. To have changed rules would have compromised my ability as a journalist to do future articles. Who would ever play ball with me?”

Also, it made a better story. “If you write from a position of perfect defensible virtue, you don’t connect with the reader,” Pollan said. “Instead, I’m saying, ‘I’m like you. I live in an imperfect world and make compromises about things.’ People do bad things for good reasons. We’re often stuck with conditions we can’t alter. Different logics come into play—the logic of cheap food, the logic of the environment, the logic of animal welfare. If they’re all in alignment, they’re not interesting stories.”

Nearly three months after his article, on June 15, when No. 534 was scheduled for slaughter, Pollan was in Atlanta on tour for the paperback release of his book, The Botany of Desire. He marked the occasion with a dinner of corn-fed ribeye steak, which he did not enjoy. Ultimately, Pollan never learned how much his cow weighed at slaughter and what grade of beef it rated. And he hasn’t been paid for his cow, which if he was lucky, was expected to earn a $3 profit on his $917 investment.

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Carol Cruzan Morton is a correspondent for the Boston Globe and a science writer for the Harvard Medical School Office of Public Affairs.

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