Temple Grandin, the eponymous HBO biopic about the education and early career of the professor, author, and animal behavior expert is, in many ways, also a story about cows. Near the beginning of the film, a 19-year old Grandin is lying in a cow pen surrounded by animals; her face is smudged with manure and she’s grinning wildly. The scene foreshadows Grandin’s lifelong effort to transform the treatment of animals within industrial agriculture and, in the words of Polyface Farm’s Joe Salatin, “let cows express their unique cowness.” Similarly, this scene shows a rare, carefree moment in the life of a high-functioning person with autism, struggling to make a place in the world. The film as a whole attempts to let Grandin express her own “Grandin-ness.”

Temple Grandin moves chronologically with Grandin (played surprisingly well by actress Claire Danes) from her first summer spent on an aunt and uncle’s ranch in the late 1960s – where her close bond and ultimate identification with the cows expands on her nascent interest in their welfare – through college and graduate school, to her early professional years as a researcher, animal welfare advocate and livestock consultant. We see Grandin laughed at, discredited, ignored and harassed. And yet, even in the harsh, male-dominated world of industrial livestock, she finds an entry point, via her heightened visual and auditory sensitivity, into the lives of the animals.

What Danes’ Grandin lacks in traditional social skills, she more than makes up for in perseverance. In one scene she dons men’s clothing (never to take them off again), rolls in mud, and drives an oversized pickup truck to gain entry to a giant Arizona livestock facility she hopes to study. While the handlers and cattlemen around her maintain a familiar emotional and intellectual distance from the animals, we see Grandin crawl through cattle dips, chart the cows’ movement when they’re anxious and listen, literally, to the sounds they make when they’re frightened.

Her close observations and attention to animal psychology pay off when Grandin is invited to design her first livestock facility, where she builds a “dip” for bathing the cows that has them enter the water through a curved passageway meant to simulate their natural pattern of movement. By keeping the animals angelically calm, she cuts down on the need for animal handlers. Even viewers who have never considered the well being of livestock can understand the elegance of her design, and the film’s intermittent use of diagrams—meant to simulate Grandin’s visual sensibility—only serve to strengthen her case.

Like Grandin herself, the film stays ruthlessly on point. “We raise them for us,” Grandin’s character says on more than one occasion, “We owe them some respect.” Grandin’ approach is pragmatic and she appears to take industrial-size livestock facilities as a fact of life. But her goal to reform their design is expressed in terms that the industry can relate to: “I believe that what’s good for the animal is also good for business,” she tells a conference room full of skeptical cowboy-hat-wearing executives.

While the film doesn’t concern itself with larger questions about meat eating or the unnatural and overblown scales of the confined animal feeding lots, Grandin creates systemic change by physically re-designing a slaughterhouse. (We are told in the film’s credits that over the last several decades, Grandin has had some control in designing as many as half of the slaughter facilities in the United States.) The film illustrates Grandin’s core belief: that a cow’s life is as valuable for its own sake as it is for our consumption. So when she envisions a cow on its way to a slaughterhouse she has designed, she sees the animal as, “in that moment…..still an individual.” “It was calm,” she says, “and then it was gone.”

Like the real Grandin, the film’s central character takes concrete, lasting steps toward a more humane food system. But Temple Grandin shouldn’t be dismissed as an innocuous, feel-good film. Some viewers may choose to see it as a challenge—a challenge to give all differently-abled people an opportunity to articulate their vision of the world—and an invitation to treat every animal as a creature of value, deserving of our utmost respect.

Watch a clip of the BBC movie, ”The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow“, on the real Temple Grandin

Here is the trailer for the HBO film:

This piece caused a flap on Civil Eats a couple weeks back and it got people talking, which is what is supposed to happen here. Responsible and passionate meat wholesalers and processors like Marissa Guggiana, who believe animals should be raised humanely in ways that are healthy for eaters, the soil, the water, and ecosystems weighed in, as did many readers.

As many commenters pointed out, the study I cited didn’t compare grass-finished animals raised the way Dave Evans at Marin Sun Farms or Joel Salatin raise theirs. It’s true that beef raised on pasture and fertilized by the animals can sequester carbon, but the problem is with the animals themselves. Ruminant animals emit methane gas, no matter what you feed them or how they are raised and the producers who use integrated pasture management techniques instead of chemicals are a minority. Methane gas is said to be 21-23 times more effective at warming the planet than CO2. For a long time I thought grass-finished beef was much better for the environment because of how it’s raised.

But strictly from a global warming perspective, I no longer believe that is true. The piece I wrote was about my own struggle with the ethics of eating meat (as it relates to the animals themselves and the environment—especially global warming) and the progression of ideas from the people who have influenced me and many others. Coming to terms with ruminant animal’s contribution to climate change is the next phase in the progression of my personal meat-eating ethics.

There are several producers local to my area who do it right. I will gladly eat the meat they provide (once in awhile). I am not now and have never been a vegetarian. I know that many Civil Eats readers feel the same and are members of meat CSAs and farmers’ market shoppers, friends of ranchers, or ranchers themselves. And I commend them.

It’s the other people I worry about.

In the face of a very real globalized, industrial food system, what choices will they make at the meat counter? Case in point: my local grocery store in Berkeley carries 3 different brands of grass-finished beef. One is from Uruguay, and the other two from the US, at least one is from California. Consumers who have a vague knowledge that grass-finished beef is more sustainable and healthier for them, will likely choose based on cost or where the beef is from. Not only will they not know how this beef was raised, but it won’t really matter from a methane emissions standpoint. We don’t even have to get into the environmental issues around buying beef from Uruguay. It’s a complex issue promising to get even more muddled as demand for sustainably raised meat grows and grocery and super stores get into the game. There will be a race to produce grass-fed beef as cheaply as possible through the same market forces that make organic milk at Wal-Mart affordable and organic only to the letter of the law. The latest news on global warming has me convinced that we cannot afford to simply replace grain fed animals with grass-fed ones. We need to eat a lot less meat. Or figure out how to deal with the methane.

Not everyone who wants to join a meat CSA can, due to supply constraints, and then there are plenty of people who wouldn’t care to. It’s about the methane as well as the transportation issues and the inefficiency inherent in eating animals instead of plants. I don’t advocate slaughtering all farm animals and requiring that everyone live on plants, but I think that we need to talk about this, and bring it out in the open so we can step up our already considerable efforts to develop a food system that is more sustainable and does not contribute more than its fair share (whatever that means) to global warming. Since livestock activities are said to be responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions, cows seem like a good place to start.

Photo: Skinnyde

The clamor is getting louder: Cows are bad news for the environment.

It’s astounding how far we’ve come in a few short years. It all started in spring 2006 with Michael Pollan telling us in The Omnivore’s Dilemma to think about how the animals we eat are raised. Because of the inherent cruelty, and human and environmental health problems associated with factory farming and CAFOs, thoughtful eaters like me, and many of the omnivorous people reading this, started eating pasture raised chickens and eggs, and grass-finished beef. It was more expensive, but I told myself I was facing up to the moral complexities of meat eating and it felt good knowing that the animals and the land were treated better in the production of my food. I embraced this more mindful way of eating and enjoyed treating meat as a special occasion food to be given my utmost respect and attention.

Later that same year, we learned that the food system is responsible for more greenhouse gasses (about one-third) than any other sector, including transportation, and that livestock is responsible for 18% of that. Michael Pollan published another book telling us to eat real food, not too much at that, and mostly plants. More recently Mark Bittman published Food Matters, which is essentially an environmental guide to eating, adopting some of the same principals we learned from Pollan (with recipes). Along the way, Bittman found that eating lower on the food chain more often and cutting out processed food, helped him lose 35 pounds, lower his cholesterol and blood sugar, and vastly improve his health. Then, back in December, here on Civil Eats, Paula Crossfield talked about eating less meat to lower our carbon emissions.

Now I’m going to reveal something that will make conscious, occasional, and passionate meat eaters very sad. While we’ve been enjoying our once or twice a month allotment of grass-finished beef in the form of a small burger, or modest portions of savory stew, or spicy chili, the climate scientists have been doing their work. They’ve recently discovered that, from a global warming perspective, so called sustainable and humanely raised pasture reared beef is no better. In fact, it’s worse.

This story in Science News details the findings revealed during a recent panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia said that greenhouse gas emissions for grass-finished livestock are roughly 50% higher than for grain-finished livestock. Wait, really?

Apparently cows that are fed grass throughout their lives simply eat more. So when you raise cows on pasture, you’re adding more inputs into an already inefficient production system. Pelletier’s research also shows that intensive pasture management, fertilization and renovation cause emissions of their own. And of course, pasture requires more land area (and sometimes deforestation) than CAFOs. I think what we are seeing here is that grass-finished beef is now big business. Due, no doubt, to the demand caused by books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we’re seeing grass-finished beef that more closely resembles factory farming than either Pollan or the grass farming hero of his book, Joel Salatin, ever intended. Turns out the Sierra Club, in a prescient piece from 2004, asked if grass-fed beef was merely a diversion from the reality that beef production, no matter much we might want it to be different, is the most inefficient way to raise food.

So what’s a conscious eater to do? With this new information chipping away at my meat-eating philosophy, I think I’ll have to take these new thoughts and ponder them carefully over a lunch of lentils and rice (with lots of caramelized onions). For further reading on the subject check out this piece in Living Green Magazine.

Photo: TerData