The Burger’s Secret: Why the Way We Farm Is Breaking the Planet

fourteen-year-old Maya balanced the double cheeseburger on her paper plate, the melted cheddar oozing over the edges onto her fingers, sticky with grill grease and summer sweat. The backyard cookout was in full swing: her dad flipped burgers on the rusted charcoal grill, sending up puffs of hickory smoke that tangled with the smell of cut grass and lemonade, her little brother chased the golden retriever across the lawn with a half-eaten corn cob, and her grandma passed around a bowl of potato salad while laughing at her uncle’s terrible joke about lawn flamingos. But Maya’s eyes were on her grandpa, who sat hunched on the old folding chair by the oak tree, his faded Iowa State baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, a can of ginger ale sweating in his calloused hand, his gaze fixed on the line of cornfields stretching past the edge of the yard. He hadn’t touched his burger. Maya wiped her fingers on her jeans and wandered over, the grass cool under her bare feet. “Grandpa? You okay? You haven’t eaten anything.” He looked up, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepening when he saw her plate. “Just thinking, is all.” “About what?” He nodded at the burger. “You like that burger?” “Duh,” Maya said, taking a bite. The patty was juicy, the bun toasted just right, the tang of pickles cutting through the richness of the cheese. “It’s the best one dad made all summer.” Grandpa chuckled, a low, rough sound like gravel shifting. “I used to raise the cows that made those burgers, you know.” Maya paused mid-chew. She knew grandpa had been a farmer when he was younger, but he never talked about it much. “Really? The cows that make the beef for the grocery store?” “The very same,” he said, tapping the scar that ran along his left forearm, a pale white line from when a fence wire had snagged him while he was herding cattle through a storm when he was 25. “I had 120 acres of pastureland just outside Des Moines, back in the 80s and 90s. Ran 40 head of Angus cattle, plus a few dairy cows. Those cows ate nothing but grass and hay I grew right there on the farm. No antibiotics, no weird feed additives, no cramming them into tiny pens. Took two years to get a cow big enough to sell for beef, but the meat was good. Marbled just right, tasted like what beef is supposed to taste like. Sold enough every year to pay for your mom’s and your aunts’ college tuitions, plus put food on our table for the whole year with money left over.” He paused, his gaze drifting back to the cornfields. “That land’s gone now. Sold it to a corporate farming outfit in 2005, when I couldn’t compete with their prices anymore. They tore up all the pasture, put in irrigation, planted nothing but genetically modified corn and soy. Not the kind you eat, either—feed corn, for cattle. And the cows? They don’t graze on grass anymore. They’re packed into feedlots an hour away, 5,000 head crammed into a space the size of a few football fields, standing in their own manure, eating corn laced with antibiotics to keep them from getting sick in the crowded pens. They go from baby to slaughter in 14 months now. Half the time it took when I was farming.” Maya set her burger down on the plate, the grease seeping into the paper. The tang of pickles and cheese that had tasted so good a minute ago now felt sharp on her tongue. “Why do they do it that way?” “Because it’s cheaper,” grandpa said, his voice tight. “And faster. They can produce more meat for less money, so they sell it cheaper, and small farmers like me can’t keep up. But nobody talks about the cost that doesn’t show up on the price tag at the grocery store.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You know how we learned in school that cows make methane when they burp? That’s not just a silly fact. All those cows crammed into feedlots, eating corn they can’t digest right, burp out a lot of methane. Methane is 28 times worse for the planet than carbon dioxide over 100 years, kid. The United Nations says all the cows, pigs, sheep, and goats raised for meat and dairy around the world produce 14.5% of all the greenhouse gases that humans put into the atmosphere every year.” Maya’s eyes widened. She’d learned about greenhouse gases in science class last semester, but she’d always thought cars and factories were the big ones. “Fourteen point five percent? That’s more than cars?” “Way more,” grandpa said. “All the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world only make up about 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions. All the livestock in the world makes more than all of that combined. And it’s not just the burps. To grow all that corn and soy to feed those cows, they cut down forests—especially in South America, where they’re clearing the Amazon rainforest to make room for soy fields. The Amazon is called the ‘lungs of the Earth’ for a reason, kid. It sucks carbon out of the air. When they burn it down to make pasture or crop fields, all that carbon goes back into the atmosphere. Every year, they clear an area of Amazon rainforest the size of two entire Connecticuts, mostly to grow animal feed.” He nodded at the burger again. “And that’s just the start. A third of all the arable land on the entire planet—land that could be used to grow food for people—is used to grow food for animals. Think about that. We could be growing corn and wheat and vegetables for hungry people on that land, but instead we grow it for cows, and then we eat the cows, and we only get a tiny fraction of the calories back.” Maya frowned. “What do you mean, tiny fraction?” “It’s called the trophic level efficiency,” grandpa said, holding up one finger. “Think of energy like a bucket of water. When you pour it from one bucket to the next, half of it spills out. Plants turn sunlight into calories, right? When a cow eats 100 calories of corn, it only keeps about 10 of those calories to grow its own body. The other 90 are lost—pooped out as manure, turned into methane, used up just keeping the cow alive. So when you eat that 10-calorie piece of beef, you’re effectively using 10 times as much plant food as you would if you just ate the corn directly. If everyone ate as much meat as people do in the United States, we’d need two more Earths just to grow enough feed for all the livestock.” Maya looked down at her half-eaten burger, then at the empty soda can her little brother had tossed into the recycling bin earlier. She’d always thought being vegetarian was just a “personal choice,” something people did because they liked animals or wanted to be healthy. She’d never thought about it as a math problem, a land use problem, a climate problem. “But it’s not just the meat, is it?” she said, remembering the half-eaten bag of chips she’d thrown out at school last week, the moldy strawberries she’d forgotten in the back of the fridge two weeks ago. Grandpa shook his head. “No. The UN says 1.3 billion tons of food gets wasted every year. That’s one third of all the food produced on the entire planet. Enough to feed every hungry person on Earth three times over. Some of it rots in the fields because farmers can’t get a good enough price for it to pay for the labor to pick it. Some of it gets thrown out in grocery stores because it’s bruised, or misshapen, or a day past its ‘sell by’ date—even though it’s perfectly safe to eat. Some of it gets thrown out in restaurants because people order too much, or left to rot in home fridges because we buy more than we can eat. All that rotting food produces methane, too, just like cow burps. Food waste alone makes up about 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the third biggest emitter in the world, after China and the United States.” He nodded at the cornfields again. “That corn out there? Half of it goes to feed cattle. The other half? A lot of it goes to make ethanol for cars, or high fructose corn syrup for soda and candy. We grow enough food to feed everyone, but we use most of it for stuff th