Joe Rioux's Digital Portfolio

It was a breezy evening in late fall when the sunset hit northern Arizona. I had been searching all day for whatever leaves would change amongst the thousands of evergreen junipers that dotted the cattle ranch I grew up on. A month or so earlier the trees were whipping as winds kicked up by monsoons swept northern Arizona. I had been tasked with raising an orphaned calf to become a healthy steer. My calf’s name was Elmo and like all our steers in October, Elmo climbed onto the large metal truck and drove off. When I returned home from my leaf searching, we all sat down to partake in hamburgers cooked by my mother. They were extraordinary burgers. Partway through the meal I had found value in the phrase homegrown when my father proudly exclaimed how tasty Elmo was. I was halfway through a burger of a friend I raised and it occurred to me that what I was doing was strange, I fed this cow milk and kept him alive for the summer and now was eating him, and enjoying it. I decided, rather simply at the time, Elmo was food, he was born on the ranch to be food and he has become what he was made to be. 

My views on food have changed throughout my life, Growing up on a 59,520-acre ranch is unfathomable to me sometimes. My mind can’t comprehend managing that amount of land, The northern Arizona plateau was joked by locals to be unsuited for life and this humor had a hint of truth. The land was barren, the ground lied about being ground as the rains revealed a chalky clay foundation. The rains however were few and far between, and often everyday ranch hands, primarily my father, would drive water around the entire 59 thousand acres, filling small divots in the mud and clay, bastions for the cattle to escape the harsh desert surrounding them. Cattle are surprisingly adaptive to their surroundings, although this wasteland proved difficult for the creatures. Often calves would become orphaned as their mothers perished in the freezing winters and those calves would become surrogates, or hand raised by the Rioux’s. I often wonder if we did more harm to the land then help by forcing it to live. The constant death that surrounded me growing up and the fact of our lifestyles led me to a view of food that I hadn’t thought of. I knew that every animal we raised was for food, the chickens next door were food, as well as the pigs down the road. These animals wouldn’t exist without being food. The animals that are happy and the animals that are suffering are both the same things, food.

During the Omnivore's Dilemma, it speaks of grass and grain as if they are opposites, a foil to each other. That's when I discovered how our cows were fed, once again proudly exclaimed by my parents. “Grass-fed! Grain finished!” Our cattle would eat the grass surrounding them as what little of it there was. It was ripe with nutrients, there weren't pastures on the ranch and they roamed freely.  After they’d grown up enough, of what scale determined this I am unfamiliar, the cattle would be shipped to feedlots for 2 months or so to be fattened before harvesting. This muddied the apparent black and white of farming. Our cattle grazed freely, on deadly land, but they only spent minimal time at feedlots, a non-optimal outcome but we didn’t run a cultural display, it's a business, as most food is.

My calf Elmo was big enough that October to be rounded up, and shipped. He was of the new cattle that my family had fed sweet feed on top of the grass diet, a grain rich in nutrients that would allow for less time at the feedlots and helped sustain the cows through the dryer seasons. When Elmo had been shipped I hadn’t fully grasped what would be happening to him, two months later he was in my mouth and I still hadn’t grasped the full extent of what had happened to him. I was happy with my burger that night and never felt any remorse for eating my pal. Some folk would find that statement appalling, and to an extent, I understood why, I’d known this cow it’s whole life, I was attached to it like a pet. Although I always knew, in the back of my mind that every cow I saw grazing was, in essence, an investment, a part of our jobs. We grew the cattle until they could be harvested for profit, then we’d repeat this cycle which kept my family alive, as well as feeding many other people. These years of my life defined not only how I viewed the meat industry but how I viewed food as a whole. 

I have been challenged by my diet choices throughout my life. I have shown dangerously underweight almost all my life and I assume this has to do with how I eat. In my growing years my diet was consistently a large amount of protein and carbohydrates, I avoided vegetables and milk throughout my early childhood which may have resulted in my physique. I have left out a large portion of what I ate though, sugar, I ate a large amount of sugar throughout my entire life, I have more than a couple sweet teeth.  This constant indulgence in sweets led me to start treating food as a pleasure, this was prominent for a long period. After leaving my ranch and moving to Durango I developed more of an interest in what I was eating. The folks I surrounded myself with often made me try healthier and more local options to what I was eating previously. I met local ranchers akin to myself previously, if on a smaller scale, and when the opportunity was presented I attempted to buy meat and produce from local sources. Although these opportunities were not nearly as common leading to a reliance on many of the store-bought products, this roadblock helped me get started down my path to discovering a better food ethic.

Often the arguments against factory farming give me a wave of hopeful optimism that the world as we know it could be supported by a local growing and personal gardens. As much as I’d love to see New York covered in tomato gardens and surrounded by miles and miles of local farmers supporting everyone in the city. This view is beyond unrealistic, and the notion of abolishing factory farming is short-sighted as feeding a nation the size of the US couldn’t be done without mass production. The sheer amount of change that would need to take place would uproot the grocery system and during the transition period leave many Americans wanting. 

I have found that the best way for me to protest the wrong ethics pertaining to food and its consumption, is being conscious of where my food comes from, I found myself attempting to trace what farms or feedlots the products in my home came from, although this proved more difficult than imagined, an easier way to distinguish is to participate in local markets and food circulation. I do not believe the country will be able to rid itself of mono-crops and feedlot farming but I think if most people made an effort to at least change some of their meals to local choice, this would not only help the local economy as well as pushing a more food conscious mindset.  

In the society we live in it does not fall under the requirements of corporations to tell their consumers how the product arrived at their plates, it has become the public's job to discern and use reason to choose the food options that make sense for us. There need be no abolishing or uprooting of the system when a solution is accessible through education, if the majority of people knew what was in the food they previously digested without a second thought many of them would start being more cautious of what they're eating. Through informing the masses of the truths and filthy secrets of the food industry we can hope for a better future of food as the masses vote with what matters, their wallet.