Word: eating
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sometimes you have to eat an animal to save it. That paradox may disturb vegetarians, but consider the bison: 500 years ago, perhaps 30 million of these enormous mammals inhabited North America. By the late 1800s, several forces--natural climate changes and Buffalo Bill--style mass killings among them--had slashed the bison population to something like 1,000. And yet today North America is home to roughly 450,000 bison, a species recovery that has a lot to do with our having developed an appetite for them...
...before William Cody (the most famous of several men known as "Buffalo Bill") was even born, a freak cold snap left a layer of ice over the Wyoming prairie so thick that even the biggest bison bulls--which can weigh a ton--couldn't break through to eat grass. Millions of bison perished, and the species never returned to that state's grasslands...
...ranchers care for bison because they can make money selling their meat. And so bison are flourishing again because they have the evolutionary advantage of tasting good and having survived to a time when we all need to eat leaner. We win, and bison win. Of course, the individual bison we eat lose, but the nature of the paradox is that most never would have a chance at life at all if we didn't provide a reason for their husbandry. Vegetarians may argue that no life is better than one cut short at slaughter, but in terms of maximizing...
Plus, there's another reason to eat bison: doing so is good for the planet. Bison are leaner than cattle because they are still wild animals who range and eat grass; they do not tolerate confinement well, and so they cannot be fattened the way we do cattle, which we have bred to eat rich corn mixtures their entire adult lives. Growing corn to feed cattle costs the nation dearly in terms of pesticide and fertilizer runoff. The pollution and inhumanity of the confinement-feedlot beef system make it one of postwar America's biggest ecological blunders...
Bison, on the other hand, eat grass that grows freely, and the manure they produce is a natural fertilizer. True, some bison ranchers are irresponsibly corralling and then "finishing" their animals with a fattier diet of grain just before slaughter. This makes the meat richer, more like beef. Ted's Montana Grill serves grain-finished bison, for instance, although CEO George McKerrow Jr. says the chain is testing grass-finished meat for consistency and quality...