Husband-and-wife environmentalists Denis Hayes and Gail Boyer Hayes have a simple solution to the environmental havoc currently wreaked by the modern cattle industry: Consume less beef and dairy. When you do indulge, they write, buy organic dairy and grass-fed and finished beef. 

It sounds almost simplistic. But these suggestions belie the staggering amount of research the pair put into Cowed, an eye-opening, thorough treatise on the way cows have become a monoculture in our nation’s food industry and the many ills that spiral out from this arrangement: cow manure collects in lagoons, which create a toxic health hazard; the animals themselves are fed hormones, antibiotics and vast amounts of grain, which gives them indigestion and makes us sick; their living conditions are inhumane.   

It hasn’t always been this way. Humans maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the gentle beasts until advancements in corn yields in the 1940s enabled the rise of massive feedlots and factory farms. Nowadays, CAFOs, Big Ag, and the government agencies at their mercy are formidable opponents in the fight to make the beef and dairy industries truly sustainable. 

Cowed can get dry at times. It includes a careful look at studies on dairy’s true nutritional value (it’s not as great as we think), whether mad cow disease is a threat in American beef nowadays (more testing is needed), and a detailed account of the political chicanery that enables corn farmers to rake in subsidies. But, the Hayes point out, Big Ag ultimately depends on the whim of consumer demand. Our choice to consume organic, humane products is, they write, “a profoundly political act.”

Cowed, by Denis Hayes and Gail Boyer Hayes (Norton, March 2015)