You learned in first grade about the magic of the food chain, right? Algae gets eaten by flies get eaten by frogs get eaten by crocodiles get eaten by people get eaten by God, and so on. But that is grossly outdated. Modern life has a different set of way stations in the cycle of consumption. Here are two ways it REALLY works now.
THE NICE LITTLE FARM PATH (Move your cursor over the images below)
THE FACTORY FARM PATH
If you are trying to decide between big farms and small farms, you need to factor in some details that don’t really fit in a food cycle graph.
At the feed yard, your factory calf and 80,000 of his buddies spend the majority of each day crammed in pens where they eat, sleep, and shit. The farm calf is left to wander and graze as he will.
The uniform administration of antibiotics by Cactus Feeders ultimately strengthens the shit-born bacteria besieging factory-calf’s immune system, whereas Dick and Torrey only give medication to li’l farmy if and when he’s actually sick.
The distance covered by the factory path reflects the range of factory-calf’s possible distribution, so that if there’s anything wrong with the industrial frankenbeef before shipping, not only is there no way to trace it back to cow zero, but you’re also left guessing how many other people in how many other places are eating things made from the same issue-meat (hence those million-pound recalls every so often); meanwhile, if you get sick from your burger at the White Dog, all you have to do is call up the chef and crisis averted. It may mean doing a little extra work and being a bit nerdy about where you eat, but in the end keeping it close to home is a pretty fucking good idea.
LEROY GUMPTION
You may be going for an extreme poker champion thing, but you look more like a club promoter from a kids’ show.
Mixing it up with cowboy boots and the Academy Awards sounds fun in your head but it makes you look like a hesher that made millions of dollars taking a shit. KOMMENTARE/VERGR÷SSERN ALLE SEHEN
