Where Are All The Cows McDonald Uses
Out beyond the highway fences,
where the grass leans slow beneath a storm,
a man in cracked boots spat tobacco into the dust
and asked me that question once.
“Where are all the cows
that McDonald’s uses
to make their hamburgers?”
Well—
they ain’t standing in one holy pasture
under golden light
waiting for Ronald McDonald to come collect them.
No.
They are scattered like rain across the republic.
Texas.
Kansas.
Nebraska.
Montana.
Black cattle chewing silence beside rusted ponds.
Brown cattle pressed shoulder to shoulder in winter wind.
Millions of wet noses steaming at dawn
while the country sleeps with grease on its breath.
A calf is born under a moon no customer will ever see.
It stands shaky in manure and straw,
and some rancher rubs life into its ribs
with hands rough as cedar bark.
That calf grows.
Grass first.
Then feedlots.
Then trucks rolling at midnight
like iron coffins headed east.
And somewhere in a city
a teenager tears open a paper wrapper
without ever thinking
about the animal
or the man who raised it
or the smell of blood that never leaves a slaughterhouse floor.
That’s the strange arithmetic of America.
The cow disappears
so the burger can exist.
And the farther people get from the pasture,
the more they believe hamburgers are born
already flat and wrapped in yellow paper.
But every burger had eyes once.
Every rancher buried dogs he loved.
Every field remembers hoofprints after rain.
You ask where all the cows are.
Friend,
they are everywhere.
Hidden inside the machinery of hunger,
inside highways and freezer trucks,
inside the hands of tired men
who wake before daylight
so strangers can eat for three dollars and change.
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