Well this is my second college essay. I figured since I posted my first one, that I might as well post the second one... I got a higher B on this one. It's about grass though, so if you read it, it is going to be boring. And I not looking for reviews, so unless you really want to... I don't expect you to review.

PLEASE NOTE: Some of you seem to think that this is an essay I wrote for a college application. IT IS NOT. This is an essay I wrote for a college CLASS.

Grass: An Endless Field Of Green

Grass is a widely known plant that grows throughout the world. No matter where you live, you have encountered the plant at least once in your life. And if you happen to live in a rural area then you probably see the color green on a day to day basis. It is not even cultivated or eaten by humans, but that does not seem to stop us from allowing it to grow everywhere. Many things that we eat are fed off of grass, like cows, and other farm animals. But most people in the world know nothing about grass other then those who farm it like Joel Salatin, who is mentioned in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But grass is not a simple plant as it is thought of it be; it is a very complex and somewhat difficult to understand. It would be better of more people were to understand grass better. There are four things about grass that most of the world does not know and we probably should be more educated about the plant that we see everyday and everywhere: what exactly makes up a single blade of grass, the difference between how a human looks at the plant and how an animal does, the importance of the plant in today’s society, and the dreaded ‘second bite’ rule that the farmers that call themselves ‘grass farmers’ go by.

Grass has been growing on this planet for thousands of years. It might even be as old as the earth itself, but there is no further evidence of this theory. It can be guessed that it is far older than the dinosaurs, for it was one of the plants that the herbivores chewed on other than the leaves of the trees. Even though it is not as simple as we think it to be, a blade of grass is made up of simple parts. “The most familiar element of a grass plant contains two parts, the leaf blade and the sheath, which is formed by the leaf rolling itself around the stem. All the leaves, stems and roots originate from the same area, the crown” (“Grass”). As long as the crown is intact a blade of grass will continue to grow, allowing for it to be trimmed and mowed on occasion. The grass spreads “out from a parent plant and this is a common growth characteristic” (“Grass”). This is the way that lawns, grassland, and pastures have been forming for years. According to Joel Salatin, who drew a graph that represented the growth where the y-axis represented the growth of the grass while the x-axis represented the number of days since the grass was last dined upon. Afterward he mentioned that “the growth starts out real slow like this, but then after a few days it begins to zoom. That’s called ‘the blaze of growth,’ when the grass has recovered from the first bite, rebuilt its reserves and root mass, and really taken off” (Pollan 189). That’s why it is so important to not allow the cows a second bite.

Compared to humans, animals look at grass in an entirely different way. Animals, especially cows, look at a field of grass as a feast, “a salad bar of different kinds of grasses for their eating pleasure” (Pollan 186). Cows have a way of picking out the grass that tastes the best and avoiding the not so great tasting kinds. For, there are not only blades of grass in a pasture, but also many other kinds of green plants (called legume) that the cow does not like to eat and therefore, will not touch. The strange thing is though is that cows are capable of consuming grass in the first place because there is something called the ‘rumen’ in their digestive system that helps the cows digest the food. This is the reason why people do not eat grass because there is nothing in our system to help us digest it. The strange thing is why, as omnivores did we not evolve with something like this in our digestive system? The answer can be found on an online forum, “the reason for this is because we’ve evolved to be able to consume higher energy foods and keep our brain fed. And that has distinguished us from other species for thousands of years” (JREF Forum). So, we have evolved to the point that we do not need a rumen, for we do not need to be eating grass when we could be eating food with more nutritional value then grass can offer us.

The plant is very important in today’s society. Since there is so much of it and since it does grow on every continent (accept Antarctica) it does provide us with some of the oxygen that we breathe. It also feeds some of the animals that we in turn slaughter and kill for our own consumption. An acre of grass goes farther than an acre of corn, which is understandable because an acre of grass can feed a lot of cows while an acre of corn can only feed so many after it has gone through the process to make it edible for the animal to eat. According to Pollan, “Researchers at the Land Institute have studied this question, and calculated that in face more nutrients are produced- protein and carbohydrate- in an acre of well-managed pasture than in an acre of field corn”(199). So, you would think that grass is more important to farmers that corn is, but that is not the case. Farmers seem to care more about their precious corn then the grass. Not even taking into account the fact that if the grass was not there then there would be no farm to begin with.

Another thing about grass that is very important to those who plan on growing and cultivating it is the ‘second bite’ rule. This is not really a rule to begin with since most farmers do not even go by this. But, some do, like Joel Salatin, who we learned about in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He says “the rule says that when cows munch on the grass it is important that they not take more than one bite on any given blade” (Pollan 189). For, if they did then the blade would not have time to replenish itself or perform photosynthesis due to the fact that the part of the blade that performs it is no longer there; therefore, it would end up dying due to the loss of food and sun. Many farmers do not even go by this rule, and they are now paying the price, tufts of grass in their field are slowly starting to dwindle and then completely disappear. If they are careful they could lose a whole field to this kind of thing.

In conclusion, the human race seems to take advantage of grass. No one really sees the big part that it plays in the food chain. Without grass, what would the cows eat? Granted they could be fed something akin to grass. That would include a mixture of corn and other ingredients (including some parts of another cow), but Pollan says that this only causes disease in the cow (Mad Cow Disease is just one of those diseases) and often only allows the cow to grow faster so the cow is ready to be slaughtered at a much faster rate. But more importantly it costs more to do this. Grass is very important in today’s society and it were to not take good enough care of it, it could be gone before we even knew what had happened.