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Behlmann: Learning where your burger, steak come from educational
Published 5/28/2009 in Beef Empire Days
A life cycle flashed before my eyes.
In the Finney County Fairgrounds grandstand arena, cattle were herded into pens for professional livestock judge Marcine Moldenhauer to pick the best in the Beef Empire Days Live Show.
In the background, cattle trucks waited to load up the cattle and transport them to Tyson Fresh Meats, where they'll appear Saturday night for the Carcass Show. (You can guess what happens in between.)
In my hands, a Styrofoam plate weighed down by a juicy-enough-to-toss-my-vegetarian-diet-out-the-window Roto-Mix Cattlemen's Cookout steak.
The whole thing's a bit disconcerting when presented like that.
And what's merely awkward and thought-provoking for me has got to be a whole lot weirder for the cattle.
Bum deal for the cattle, but for me and the hundreds of others who partook in the free lunch, maybe this concentrated presentation of where your meat comes from isn't such a bad idea.
Growing up in a suburb of St. Louis, where the closest farm is miles away, I never thought much about the origin of my food. It came in packages and colorfully labeled boxes from Schnucks, Dierbergs, Shop 'n Save or some other St. Louis area grocery store. End of story.
Of course we knew — in a factual sense — that beef came from cattle, pork came from pigs, bread came from wheat and just about everything else had corn in it.
But somehow, there was a disconnect -- a gap between knowledge and true comprehension. In our minds, the wheat fields we passed when we left town for a trip had little to do with the cereal we had eaten that morning.
Here, things are different. Agriculture is a look out the window, a whiff of the wind, a way of life.
Here, a lot of kids get it because they grow up with it, and Beef Empire Days aims to educate some of the others, Deann Gillen-Lehman, vice president of the Beef Empire Days Board of Directors, said Wednesday in a Garden City Telegram podcast.
"It's about educating the community about actual beef and how it starts, how they feed out, how it goes to harvest, then it winds up in your supermarket," she said.
That education was available for young and old alike at the fairgrounds on Wednesday, as members of the public got a chance to try their hand at judging livestock, then see how their ratings compared to those of a professional judge.
Youth also had that opportunity, through a judging competition for 4-H members.
And they gave me an education, explaining what they look for in an animal intended for breeding purposes or meant for, well, steak.
As far as I'm concerned, these kids are ahead of the game, and kudos to 4-H and their agriculturally informed families for getting them there — because knowledge of agriculture, and respect for the hardworking people who do it, is important regardless of what field youth choose to enter in the future.
And while eating steak while watching cattle head to their deaths might have given me pause, what's truly disconcerting is to continue pushing food into our mouths without knowledge of its origin.
Web editor Emily Behlmann can be e-mailed at ebehlmann@gctelegram.com.
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