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    Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf: The Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation
    Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf: The Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation
    Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf: The Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation
    Ebook453 pages6 hours

    Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf: The Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation

    By Peter Lovenheim

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    When Peter Lovenheim stood in line at McDonald's to buy a Happy Meal for his daughter, which would come with a Teenie Beanie Baby—either a cow named "Daisy" or a bull named "Snort," he found it strange that young children would be expected to play with cuddly toy cows one minute and eat the grilled remains of real ones the next. Lovenheim suddenly saw the disconnect between what we eat and our knowledge of where our food comes from. Determined to understand the process by which living animals become food, Lovenheim bought two calves from the dairy farm where they were born and asked permission to spend as much time as necessary hanging around and observing everything that happened in their lives.

    This is the 2013 Edition with a new Preface by the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateApr 29, 2013
    ISBN9781626756984
    Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf: The Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation

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    Reviews for Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf

    3.5/5

    19 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The author decides to follow a calf through the meat process, 'from conception to consumption". He starts by watching a bull be "collected", and the the cow inseminated, and ends with the slaughterhouse. In the meantime, over a two year period, the author struggles with moral and ethical dilemmas, gets to know people in the business, and finds out a lot more than perhaps he bargained for. Overall, a good solid book and easy to read, but the author violates one of the cardinarl rules of journalism - he gets involved with the people he's writing about. He understand this, obviously, because he mentions several times how wrong it is of him to get involved with the calves he has bought, but he doesn't seem to spot that his objectivity might be a bit impaired by his friendship with the humans. He also has the unfortunate habit of looking at the world a bit more simplistically than is ideal, while thinking he's looking at it realistically. He commits what I consider a major (and potentially) dangerous blunder of naivete, when he talks with a ruthless, high-powered business man and when he realizes the guy has a picture of his grandkid on his desk, suddenly assumes he must be a nice guy because he has grandkids. For some reason, we've gotten into the unfortunate habit in this country of thinking that ruthless, heartless businessmen will also be friendless, loveless Scrooges or Mr. Potters. This also has the unfortunate side affect of rendering the shy loner a scary individual, when nothing may be further from the truth. He also deals with his subject way too superficially; he raises a lot of issues, but misses the real question on many of them, such as the use of bovine growth hormone in milk cows, and he totally drops the ball in the routine use of antibiotics in cow feed. This could be because he doesn't consult any biologists other than a farm vet, and he doesn't consult any books except industry written and sponsored books. As a result, he has written a book that, rather than being an expose or a solid non-fiction book, is only rendered grittier than Charlotte's Web by the descriptions of some fairly brutal practices. These he assumes must be done because the people doing them say they are necessary. This weakens the book considerably, as there is absolutely no discussion of environmental issues or even really human health issues, and the animal health issues are dealt with only superficially. He does come to a conclusion that is biologically accurate in reference to whether human's need to eat meat, but there were some encounters through the course of it that just left me cold. In addition, his continual insistence on how hard the farmers work (something I don't doubt, since I was raised on a farm myself, and my grandfather was a dairy farmer) often came off sounding like an accusation that the rest of the world doesn't work. That is not true, and many of his assumptions for that reason sound extremely insulting. Overall, a decent introduction to the meat industry for people who don't want to have to work too hard, but there are much better sources out there.
    • 3/5
      The author decides to follow a calf through the meat process, 'from conception to consumption". He starts by watching a bull be "collected", and the the cow inseminated, and ends with the slaughterhouse. In the meantime, over a two year period, the author struggles with moral and ethical dilemmas, gets to know people in the business, and finds out a lot more than perhaps he bargained for. Overall, a good solid book and easy to read, but the author violates one of the cardinarl rules of journalism - he gets involved with the people he's writing about. He understand this, obviously, because he mentions several times how wrong it is of him to get involved with the calves he has bought, but he doesn't seem to spot that his objectivity might be a bit impaired by his friendship with the humans. He also has the unfortunate habit of looking at the world a bit more simplistically than is ideal, while thinking he's looking at it realistically. He commits what I consider a major (and potentially) dangerous blunder of naivete, when he talks with a ruthless, high-powered business man and when he realizes the guy has a picture of his grandkid on his desk, suddenly assumes he must be a nice guy because he has grandkids. For some reason, we've gotten into the unfortunate habit in this country of thinking that ruthless, heartless businessmen will also be friendless, loveless Scrooges or Mr. Potters. This also has the unfortunate side affect of rendering the shy loner a scary individual, when nothing may be further from the truth. He also deals with his subject way too superficially; he raises a lot of issues, but misses the real question on many of them, such as the use of bovine growth hormone in milk cows, and he totally drops the ball in the routine use of antibiotics in cow feed. This could be because he doesn't consult any biologists other than a farm vet, and he doesn't consult any books except industry written and sponsored books. As a result, he has written a book that, rather than being an expose or a solid non-fiction book, is only rendered grittier than Charlotte's Web by the descriptions of some fairly brutal practices. These he assumes must be done because the people doing them say they are necessary. This weakens the book considerably, as there is absolutely no discussion of environmental issues or even really human health issues, and the animal health issues are dealt with only superficially. He does come to a conclusion that is biologically accurate in reference to whether human's need to eat meat, but there were some encounters through the course of it that just left me cold. In addition, his continual insistence on how hard the farmers work (something I don't doubt, since I was raised on a farm myself, and my grandfather was a dairy farmer) often came off sounding like an accusation that the rest of the world doesn't work. That is not true, and many of his assumptions for that reason sound extremely insulting. Overall, a decent introduction to the meat industry for people who don't want to have to work too hard, but there are much better sources out there.
    • 4/5
      This was a very good book, very easy to read, a good story and educational. I love agriculture and I learned a lot about the dairy industry from this book. It wasn't always easy to read, but I thought Lovenheim did quite a good job of writing his story "unemotionally," even though it seemed mostly clear that he didn't really like what he was seeing a lot of the time. Overall, he did a good job of not interfering in the conception to consumption process.

    Book preview

    Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf - Peter Lovenheim

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