There was plenty to see; orchards stretching to the horizon, ten avocadoes at a roadside stall for a dollar, parched grassland and hundreds of hectares of blackened earth where another seemingly spontaneous roadside fire had taken hold. There were fire trucks continuously putting out these blazes on both the I-5 and the 101 as we travelled.
The GPS beeped to alert us that petrol and food were available ten miles ahead, but the name of the restaurant put me off and we pushed on to the next stop. I spent a few minutes wondering what sort of place would call itself Cowschwitz , sure that the negative connotations would put far more people off than those who would appreciate the “joke”. I filed it away as extremely poor marketing and soon forgot about it in the excitement of seeing a Taco Bell for the first time ever.
At Taco Bell I got myself a Double Chalupa Box, a feast which consisted of a deep fried wheat flour gordita shell filled with beef and vegetables along with two hard shell tacos and a drink the size of my head. I really wish Restraunt Brands would hurry up and bring this to our shores. The meal cost me $5, or it would have except for the annoying American habit of adding sales tax to everything, and left me unable to eat another bite.
My trip continued in this vein, cheap filling and plentiful food at every turn: hot dogs for $1.79 at the Seven Eleven, $2.99 cheeseburgers at In N Out, southern fried chicken and grits for $12 and all you can eat buffets for $25. There was so much food available for such little money that we usually weren’t even hungry when breakfast time rolled around.
When I got home I came across the snap I took of the GPS when it alerted me to Cowschwitz, and a quick google soon revealed that what I had passed was in fact Harris Ranch. It’s California’s largest beef producer and the largest ranch on the West Coast, producing 150 million pounds of beef per year. Cowschwitz is a phrase coined by animal rights activists to convey their distaste at the feedlot system of raising beef, drawing parallels between the feedlot and war time death camps. Getting that phrase on a GPS map stopped me from going to California’s sixth busiest restaurant (57th busiest in the entire USA).
The feedlot was empty when we drove past so I didn’t see what the activists are upset about, but I do see that animal behaviour expert Temple Grandin calls the phrase “cowschwitz” a public misperception, saying that Harris Ranch does a great job of looking after its animals.
There are many reasons food is so cheap and readily available in America, and one of those reasons is highly efficient production on a truly massive scale.
It’s all very well to hold your nose as you drive down the I-5 and mock the farmers based on nothing more than an impression gained as you whiz past at 70mph, but I wonder how many Americans would be willing to forgo their affordable cheeseburgers and cheap Taco Bell in return for a less intensive pastoral based farming system.
