Try eating a mouthful of grass.
Actually, don’t.
But if you did, you wouldn’t get much out of it. Your digestive system isn’t built to turn grass and other tough, fibrous plants into dinner.
A cow’s is.
That’s one of those simple things I’ve known forever but never really stopped to think about.
A cow can stand on a hillside that isn’t particularly useful for growing vegetables, eat plants you and I couldn’t live on, and turn them into beef and milk.
She can also eat certain leftovers and by-products from crops and food production that humans don’t normally eat.
That’s pretty remarkable when you think about it.
We talk a lot these days about complicated ways to make food more sustainable. New products. New factories. New technology.
Meanwhile, the cow has been running her own fermentation system for a very long time.
No software update required.
The Part We Sometimes Miss
This doesn’t mean every cow is raised on nothing but grass on some beautiful hillside with Julie Andrews singing in the backgr…
