Imagine there’s no cattle
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Am I the walrus?

Lenin

One day when I was inspecting a drove of cattle at a railway station, a cattle dealer fell under a locomotive and it sliced off his leg. We carried him in to the infirmary, the blood was gushing from the wound—a terrible business, he kept begging us to find his leg and was very anxious about it.

He had twenty rubles in the boot that was on that leg, and he was afraid they would be lost.

Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries

Beef is oil prices and geopolitics
Beef is Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip

Some beef is big and some beef is small
But what y’all call beef is not beef at all

Beef is real life happenin everyday

Mos Def

Dad: Working is a very hard, soul-numbing and joyless experience son.

Son: Gosh, thanks for preparing me for the future dad.

You’re the best.

Dad: If I can make sure you’re ready for the dead-end bleakness of adulthood, then I’ve done my job.

We engage in a brief, awkward conversation in which we try to find common ground:

“You watch sports?” he asks.

“No. You read?”

“No. You like cars?”

“Not much. You like movies?”

“DC, not Marvel. Marvel is shit.”

“How about travel?”

“Branson. Hunting?”

“Antique hunting!”

“Like, shooting old animals, you mean?”

After a perfectly timed pause, I say, “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

We don’t know why our ancient cave-dwelling ancestors were at war with the cows, and tragically we never will.

We do know that hunting animals every day was a pain in the ass, until someone came up with the idea of also eating plants, which were easier to catch because they couldn’t run away.

This simple act of laziness led to the invention of farming.

Early farmers invented a high-tech wooden machine for containing animals called a fence.

And with this new technology, humans quickly enslaved sheep, chickens, goats, and their number one enemies: the cows.

Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Earth

Why our hunter-gatherer ancestors made the sudden transition to agriculture is one of the great mysteries of human history.

Hunter-gatherer economies always focused on the here and now. People did not spend a great deal of effort doing more than meeting their needs for the day. They engaged the land with consummate skill and, in some ways, with consummate ease. While they endured intensely difficult times, for the most part living off the land seems a very straightforward way of making a living. And we are supremely adapted to living as hunter-gatherers.

The transition to farming changed everything.

Farmers who make the effort to have the best fences, to guard their fields, to weed most diligently—those are the ones that succeed. So with the advent of farming, suddenly there was a very clear relationship between effort and reward.

When we think about cattle, we have to understand that in early agricultural societies, meat was very expensive and very rare. People used livestock to do work.

It is no coincidence that the word “cattle” and the word “capital” have the same etymological roots. (Both derive from caput, Latin for “head”—in case you’re into the whole Latin thing.) You protecting your assets is exactly like a young herdsman standing there protecting his cows from potential predators. When we talk about capital and capital growth, the metaphor is very much a herd of cows.

Agriculture’s greater productivity supports larger populations, and populations always grew rapidly to the maximum size supported by the land. As populations grew, and perhaps a harvest or two failed, suddenly the thinking became: “Well, we need more land.”

So agriculture became a great expanding force, eventually leading to the creation of cities. When we think of the ancient past, we think mostly in terms of cities—Rome, Athens, Sparta—but, in all these societies, most people still lived outside the city and worked the land. Even in the most sophisticated societies, 80% of people were living in the countryside, focusing all their efforts on producing what they needed to survive.

Life in cities encouraged two things: (1) the ability to control, manipulate, and use surpluses from the countryside as a means to accumulate power and wealth; and (2) the creation of a vast array of new professions, catalyzed by the great cultural melting pot of city life, and powered by all the spare energy being siphoned from the countryside.

With cities, you suddenly had the birth of all sorts of artisan skills—complex cooking techniques, arts and music, sciences. Artisan colleges became far more than simply communities of work—they became sources of identity. In many senses, those ancient cities are like time-traveling microcosms of the future that we’re in now.

Now very few of us work the land, and we’re all in the business of expending energy—energy cultivated by farmers outside the cities, energy plucked from the ground in the form of fossil fuels, and so on.

We’re now faced with a situation where, as a society, we enjoy extraordinary abundance—but it is very unevenly distributed. One of the fundamental problems of a more automated, more productive economy is that the work that any individual can do is less and less capable of generating substantial amounts of wealth. Now, the best way to generate wealth is to inherit a bit of wealth and put that wealth to work. Capital creates capital.

Consequently, it is very difficult for people to work their way out of poverty. We should approach this problem as we would approach any other problem—an engineering problem, say, like building a bridge over a river. It is incumbent upon us to experiment.

The way our economy is organized poses far greater risks than it potentially brings us benefits. We now face the grand challenge of reorganizing it before it reorganizes us—into oblivion.

James Suzman, Work

Keyrock: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m just a caveman. I fell in some ice, and later got thawed out by some of your scientists.

Your world frightens and confuses me. My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts.

Bart: Don’t have a cow, man!

P Willy: Just sit back, relax, and savor the fruits of my procrastination.

You won’t believe what they look like now!