Betty Fussell: Raising Steaks

Betty Fussell: Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef (2008, Houghton Mifflin)

The Cowboy and the Machine (p. 4):

We Americans have a very different take on steak because we have a very different history. When I wrote the story of corn a couple of decades ago, looking for the most American of all foods, I discovered my indebtedness to the native cultures of the New World, who first cultivated that plant thousands of years ago. I also learned how modern America had, in the last century, changed the face of the globe by being the world's first country to fully industrialize a plant so that it could do anything petroleum could. At the time, I'd thought I'd write next about beef because it, too, seemed such an American food, so iconic of American culture. I didn't then realize that American beef had become as much as industrial by-product of corn as ethanol is.

(p. 5):

I'd already learned from corn that geography is destiny. The destiny of beef was shaped by the 100th meridian, conveniently marked by the Mississippi River. That mighty river divides the wet East from the dry West, just as it had divided, until the nineteenth century, British-colonized territory from Spanish territory. But our minds and imaginations shape geographical facts, and our different expectations create different landscapes. What my British ancestors saw when they imagined the West was a larger England, with forests and meadows just like those of the eastern seaboard Colonies. What the Spanish saw was a larger Spain, with desert highlands and mountains like those of Mexico. I'm sure that all a British yeoman wanted was a cottage for his family and just enough land to plow, while all a Spanish herdsman wanted was a nice hacienda with peons serving the patrón. While Britishers looked forward to the egalitarianism of a new world founded on Reason, Spaniards looked back to the feudalism of an old world serving God, pope, and king. One vision was utopian and utilitarian, the other monarchic and nostalgic.

The geography here is a bit confused. The 100th meridian is about 400 miles west of the Mississippi, which in the 18th century divided British from Spanish America. John Wesley Powell called out the 100th meridian as the boundary between the potential agricultural plains and the desert west. Numerous efforts to grow wheat west of the 100th meridian have more often than not met with failure. A more natural line is the one dividing tallgrass prairie and shortgrass prairie, which is between the two.

Beefy Boys (pp. 14-15):

It's hard to think of Manhattan, a small rock with steel-and-glass skyscrapers perched on it, as cow country. But Manhattan was once a major cattle site for every aspect of the beef industry, and until World War II, Manhattan was the largest slaughtering/processing site on the entire Eastern seaboard and the fifth largest in the country, exceeded in volume only by Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Louis, all of them in the far more spacious Midwest. Today the sleek slab and curves of the United Nations Headquarters overlook the East River on what was until 1946 an industrial wasteland of slaughterhouses and railroad barge loaders. The coming together of slaughterhouses and railroads was a distinctive link in the formation of American cities, and Manhattan was no exception.

(pp. 18-20):

Wall Street is the proper name to link cattle with money. Unlike dairy cows, which pay for their room and board with milk and calves, cattle raised for meat are freeloaders until sold. The Latin word for money, pecunia, comes from pecus, or cattle, and Roman coins were often stamped with the figure of a bull; our word capital comes from chattel, meaning cattle; opur phrase "bull market" comes from the potential of breeding more cattle. Anciently, then, from the domestication of Caucasian aurochs 8,000 years ago, one measure of a man's wealth was his "property in cattle," the value of which was not realized until the property was traded or sold -- as meat, hide, tallow, bones. From the beginning, to talk about cattle was to talk about property and about moving that property to market. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both Spain and England enjoyed a large cattle surplus, so they were motivated in their own homelands to find ways of getting cattle to market efficiently. In Las Mariasmas, the marshlands of southern Spain where the Gladalquivir met the Atlantic, vaqueros on horseback rounded up herds of wildish Andalusian cattle and drove them to the market cities of Sevilla and Córdoba. In Britain, drovers from the Scottish Highlands herded their shaggy Highland cattle on foot along drover trails to London. Cattle were a common sight in London streets until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Smithfield live-cattle market was finally removed to Islington. The concentration of slaughterhouses in London was a common complaint of citizens like Charles Dickens, who cataloged their evils in Oliver Twist: "The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog."

Trade was in the mind of Pilgrim Edward Winslow when in 1624 -- just a year after the Dutch came to Nieuw Amsterdam -- he landed the first livestock in New England: "three heifers and a bull." He wanted to establish a breeding herd of Devonshire reds, not just to supply milk and labor for his farm, but to provide surplus for trade. Livestock was the root of England's economy and its expansion oversees, since in the seventeenth century, England had the highest ratio in Europe of livestock to people (in 1696, 4.5 million cattle, 12 million sheep, and 2 million hogs to 5.3 million people), and had already exported its surplus meat from "dry cows" and its dairy products from "milch cows" throughout Europe. [ . . . ]

In 1521, just two years after Cortés's first landing and a century before Winslow landed his cattle in Massachusetts, Spaniard Gregorio de Villalobos had landed the first cattle -- "six heifers and a bull" -- on the mainland of Mexico. But the cattle Villalobos brought with him had been born not in Andalusia, but in Hispaniola, where Columbus, on his second voyage in 1493, had landed a small number of cattle, "both for food and to assist the settlers in their work." Food first, then farm labor, then trade. In their own country, the Spanish had already established "an entrepreneurial, market-based, specialized cattle-ranching system" in Andalusia, where city fathers owned herds of cattle fed on the open range and tended by workers or slaves. A business model was in place for the Spanish entrepreneurial explorers and conquistadors as they swarmed to the New World to make their fortunes. Early on, Columbus had suggested to the Court that he pay for the cattle on his second voyage by sending back "Cannibals" as slaves, but the Court declined and soon cattle were paying for themselves. Luckily, Hispaniola ecology and Andalusian cattle were a perfect match. In the wet heat of the Indies, forage grew continuously and the tough longhorn breeds loved the heat. They reproduced so quickly that within a decade hundreds had gone wild and beef had become so abundant that the animals were killed merely for tallow and hides.

(pp. 20-21):

The first cattle to cross the present-day border between Mexico and the United States were the 500 "big and little cattle" brought to Francisco Vasquez Coronado in 1540 to feed his sizable expedition as it searched for a city glittering with gold, the fabled Cibola. After two years of wandering through New Mexico, the expedition failed, but many of the cattle and the thousand horses that also accompanied it escaped or were abandoned to the wild, so that the animals prospered even as the men did not. It is said that during the following two centuries, the spread of wild Spanish mustangs on the Plains exceeded any other introduction of a new species in a new land,and certainly it sped the transformation of nomadic Plains Indians into warriors. The first European to successfully bring in a breeding herd of any size (legend claims 7000, but 2500 was more probable) was Juan de Onate in 1598, at San Juan de los Caballeros, north of the Rio Grande, which launched the Texas cattle industry a good twenty-two years before Pilgrim Edward Winslow had even set foot on Plymouth Rock.

(pp. 22-23):

That the cattle boom in the second half of the nineteenth century coincided with our first major industrial boom was no accident. The shift from a rural small-farm economy to a giant urban industrial one was tectonic, and as permanent as the San Andreas Fault. In a mere twenty years, from 1867 to 1887, urban livestock markets shifted from the East to the Midwest, intensifying in turn the shift from the mixed farming of the East to large-scale ranching in the West as settlers, entrepreneurs, and engineers moved ever westward, gobbling up land. Between 1867 and 1880, four major railroads crossed the Plains -- the Union Pacific, Kansas Pacific, Northern Pacific, and the Sante Fe. Within this period, the slaughter of America's buffalo increased in speed and efficiency so that by 1893, only 300 of the original 60 million were left. "Nobody in history consumed buffalo the way the railroads did," Ian Frazier writes. "The remaining buffalo . . . disappeared up the tracks like water up a straw." As the buffalo disappeared, they were replaced not just by iron railroad tracks -- nearly 193,000 miles of them -- but, as General Phil Sheridan said with glee, "by "speckled cattle and the festive cowboy." Cattle drives had begun decades earlier, but the railroads opened new markets for the surplus of cattle that had gone wild in Texas during the Civil War, and the number and range of the drives increased exponentially.

Breaking the Wild: Starting out in Texas (pp. 29-30):

I'd flown to the little airport at McAllen to find cattle and history. I found few cattle but plenty of history. This southern tip of Texas that hooks way south into Mexico is where the American beef industry began, because Mexico is where American cattle began. In fact, this border country, bounded between Laredo on the west, Brownsville on the east, and the Nueces River on the north, belonged to Mexico until a mere century and a half ago, and the oldest ranches in America still belong to Anglo-Mexican families.

Now the ranches are no longer about cattle. Instead of picturesque herds of longhorns descended from ancient criollo, I found a few of the usual commercial breeds, but mostly I found wild and semiwild game. Lots of deer and javelina, of course, but also herds of the bulky Indian antelope called nilgai, African lechwe antelope, scimitar-horned oryx, and even zebra. Danny tells me there are more nilgai now in Texas than in India: 20,000 at the King Ranch, 30,000 at the Kennedy Ranch. "If we don't control their numbers, they'll outeat the whitetail," Dan says. His cousins Monica and Ray Burdette, who live nearby on their several thousand acres, have gone into a combination of ecotourism, guided bird-watching, and deer hunting to preserve the family farm.

(pp. 31-32):

Ray's on the board of the North American Deer Farmers Association, and a city person like myself is stunned to learn that their 13,000 members farm 700,000 fenced deer in a business worth $19 billion. Texas alone has 1,000 deer breeders, Ray says, and they've just hired a deer farmer to work in Washington as a lobbyist because "we need a guy in politics who's on the inside." Farmed deer are of three kinds: Most are native whitetail harvested for their racks, but recently Americans have begun to farm red and fallow deer for their meat, to compete with New Zealand's export to the States of 1000 tons of venison a year. U.S. deer farmers are now lobbying, Ray says, to get the same free USDA inspection of deer and buffalo that farmers of "traditional" livestock get. However much deer and buffalo are farmed, the government does not yet consider them "traditional" and since processors have to pay for their inspection, they don't want to handle them.

Ray's good at crunching numbers. Right now he has over 200 whitetails and 100 fawns in his pens, which means $2.5 million worth of deer within 40 acres. In contrast, it takes 30 acres to graze a single cow, which he can sell for only $600. Also, he can sell a doe for breeding for $6000, so what's the point of raising cows? In 1950 a calf was worth $350 and a truck $1500. Now a calf's worth $400, but the truck's worth $40,000. You have to find alternative ways to make a living, says Ray.

(p. 53):

Hunting in the home country [England] had been strictly a class matter. In 1605 James I had initiated a Game Act to limit hunting to gentlemen who had an annual income of £40 or more, or goods worth £200 or more. Yeomen could neither hunt nor own hunting weapons or dogs, which made both game and the pursuit of it a mode of private property. Because hunting was only for sport, it symbolized the height of human mastery over nature. Just like Texans with their deer feeders, royal hunters stacked the decks. Queen Elizabeth hunted what were in effect farmed deer within the enclosure of a park, and it was not uncommon to cut off a stag's foot before the animal was released to be chased by bloodhounds.

Playing Cowboy: Stops in Forth Worth, Texas, and Cheyenne and Cody, Wyoming; stock shows, auctions, rodeos, cowboys ersatz and real

The New Range Wars: (pp. 90-91):

Land ownership and machine ownership went hand in hand. Abraham Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862 extended Jefferson's Land Ordinance to cover 270 million acres. At the same time, the Pacific Railway Act gave 90 million of those acres to the railroads as an incentive to move forward, to speed the "progress" of the Machine. In 1869 the Central Pacific-Union Railroad was granted alternate 10-mile sections of a belt of land 40 miles wide from Omaha to San Francisco. That same year, Lincoln dispensed many million more acres under the Morrill Land Grant, which gave to each state 30,000 acres of public land to establish a state agricultural college. A century later, this would provide the USDA with a pool of scientific agricultural Progressivists who would cement the links between government, agriculture, and business, and promote the industrialization of all three.

The Eastern equation of democracy with 160 acres was repudiated by the geopolitics of the West. But Major John Wesley Powell was a lone heroic voice in contradicting Jefferson's Platonic ideal with empirical observation. The loss of an arm in the Civil War did nothing to deter this extraordinary explorer and ethnologist, whose credo in Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States in 1878 was in the context of progressivism a rebel cry: "knowledge and custom are particular to place." To report that the West was arid was to say that the Emperor has no clothes. Powell saw, as Wallace Stegner writes in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, that "Water is the true wealth in a dry land . . . if you control the water, you control the land that depends on it." But the "riparian rights" of English common law, on which American law was based, did not work for land that needed to be irrigated. (Riparian rights stated that a farmer had the right to use water on his land, the way a gristmill might use it, provided that he returned the water to the stream when finished.) Powell suggested that the West would require irrigation in 80-acre plots where that was suitable and the rest should be grazing land. Pasture farms would require not 160 acres, but sixteen times as much -- 2560 acres. He proposed topographic surveys to indicate water frontage and prevent water monopolies. Settlement should follow rivers, not grids, and should be modeled on communal villages like the Mexican ejido, which had evolved from fort to mission, built on a system of settling a village near water with shared lands surrounding it for grazing. He warned government agencies that a wet country must not impose its habits on a dry one. For his trouble, the government tucked Powell safely away as director of the obscure Bureau of Ethnology.

(pp. 91-92):

With buffalo out of the way, John Deere's cast-steel plow of 1837 was able to cut the thick mass of prairie sod and allow farmers to plant corn. For a time, longhorn cattle still grazing on native grasses replaced buffalo in the commodities market, but corn increasingly became food for fatter breeds of cattle like Hereford and Angus. Cattlemen followed the corn, just as they followed the railroad tracks, to market, where the coming together of cows, trains, and corn happened so fast that beef became a full-blown industry almost overnight. As early as 1876, 3 million pounds of beef had been transported by train and shipped to England in refrigerated ships. Five years later that amount had increased to 100 million pounds a year. In competition with plowmen, cattlemen began to use Joseph Glidden's new improved fences made of barbed wire to claim public-domain acreage for their own use. The war between ranchers and farmers was fueled by the conflict between Spanish law, which required farmers to fence in their crops to give animals free range, and English law, which required livestock owners to fence in their animals to protect crops. Branding, along with fencing, became a mechanism for enforcing corporate monopoly, and freedom was no longer equated with individual freeholds, but with corporate size.

(pp. 92-94):

Individual range rights included control of water, which was expanded by fencing. The government did not step in until the Forest Service was created in 1906, under the Department of Agriculture. Set up to manage water and timber on 191 million acres, the Service decided to require a permit and a fee for livestock grazing. The monthly fee was five cents per animal unit (AUM), an animal unit being one cow or horse, or five sheep or goats. Ranchers resisted in and out of court, and as a result the Supreme Court ruled that national forests are government property and that "The U.S. can prohibit absolutely or fix the terms on which its property may be used." Ranchers made an end run around valuable forest land by pressuring for marginal lands. The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 granted 640 acres of public land "deemed of no value except for livestock raising and forage" to any rancher who needed it for grazing. That the prairies would turn into a Dust Bowl a mere decade later would not have surprised Major Powell, but the fact that two decades later more than half the carrying capacity of the range was found to be "depleted" and 16 percent "extremely depleted" finally forced the government to act.

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 purported to regulate grazing allotments on public land, but under a new leasing system with token fees, it transferred millions of acres of public land to private ownership. As the Act did not apply to wild animals of any kind, including horses, 80 million acres of federal grazing land served livestock interests only. Clearly there were other legitimate uses of public land, but who was going to define what they were and how they would be apportioned? Enter the Bureau of Land Management, created in 1948 by merging the Grazing Service with the General Land Office under the Department of the Interior. Although the new BLM nominally controlled 262 million acres, it was from the beginning "understaffed, underfunded, and underpowered." While the Bureau was supposed to regulate uses and resources as conflicting as livestock, energy, mineral, timber, wild horses, fish habitat, and wilderness, in fact it favored stockmen. Hampered by a couple of centuries of contradictory laws involving public land, the BLM had no systematic legal guidelines until the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976. By this time, 84 percent of the lands under BLM control were determined to be in poor or deteriorated condition. As the BLM struggled to get its house in order by requiring a reduction in livestock, ranchers responded with the Sagebrush Rebellion, demanding that BLM sell its lands to them outright. Environmentalists responded with charges of a "Great Terrain Robbery." The problem is chronic: Only 2 percent of livestock producers in the U.S. graze on public land, but this constitutes 258 million acres of Western rangeland, or one acre out of five. Critics of the system claim that the producers are federally subsidized because the fee charged the rancher is absurdly small in relation to the current value of the land. Today the number of animal units on BLM land is about the same as it was in 1936, around 13.5 million. Although the monthly fee had risen to $1.97 by 1991, the true lease value would have been $8.70. Taxpayers were paying for the difference, as they continue to. This form of subsidy stoked the fires of environmentalists like Edward Abbey, who proclaimed the land "cow-burnt."

(pp. 95-96):

[Stacy] is articulate and precise about every variety of land-use issue. He is particularly vociferous on the subject of environmentalists who, in his view, manipulate, overextend, and pervert laws passed in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- the Endangered Species Act, the Water Act, the FLPMA, the Wilderness Act. "Sine the environmental community found ways to litigate using those laws, the BLM office doesn't have time to manage the land, it just does its best to stay clear of lawsuits." He points out that the first major victory for the "enviros," the spotted owl, shut down the timber industry, which was 30 percent of the economy in the Pacific Northwest -- and failed to stem the owl's decline.

Stacy finds the Forest Service more paralyzed even than the BLM, with no funds for people to manage grazing or monitoring, and heavy pressure from environmentalist groups who want no grazing at all. "Their image of the land is about 1800," says Stacy, "when you had grizzly bears and wolves roaming free." [ . . . ]

"Without public land, grazing in the West isn't much," Stacy says. In Oregon 60 to 70 percent of the land is public, in California 75 percent, in Nevada 94 percent. Ranchers have been losing since the beginning of the Forest Service, Stacy believes, portion by portion, cow by cow. If they lose the use of public land, they'll have to sell, but it's not the government who'll buy. Most of the land will go to developers. In the early 1970s, Oregon enacted some of the toughest land-use laws in the nation to protect open spaces, but when there is pressure to develop, land-use laws tend to go out the window.

Circling the Wagons (p. 101):

Conventional environmentalist thinking had assumed that cows on rangeland damaged the range, and therefore that the best way to recover it was to remove the cows. But Savory had found in the work of André Voisin, a French farmer-chemist whose Soil, Grass and Cancer (1959) linked both human and animal health to the health of the soil, a missing key: "Time, said Voisin, not the number of animals, controls overgrazing." How much time and in what season plants were exposed to animals was complicated by the fact that different kinds of plants grow at different rates in different kinds of environments. He divided environments between brittle and nonbrittle and found a major difference in plant growth in each. A brittle environment meant dry country with sporadic rainfall, like the American West, where dead vegetation dries out and breaks down slowly. Nonbrittle meant wet country with seasonal rainfall, like America's East, where dead vegetation breaks down quickly. The conventional way of resting the land by removing livestock (rotational grazing) works well in wet country, he concluded, but not in dry. In brittle environments, large numbers of herding animals are needed to keep the land healthy: their hooves pound dead plants into the earth, and their dung helps to compost and reseed it. While two-thirds of the earth's land environments can be described as brittle, Savory's immediate experience was with southern Africa, where buffalo and elephant herds were disappearing, along with the grass. When he came to the United States in 1979, in political exile from the Ian Smith government, he realized that America's herds of nomadic buffalo had once maintained a natural symbiosis on the High Plains, but when they were replaced by fenced cattle, the entire ecosystem changed and desertification began to create an American Sahara.

(p. 103):

Going to grass changes the rhythm of life on a ranch. "Grass-fed is almost a different species," says Bill Niman, "and the beauty of it is that you're using photosynthesis to produce flesh." Niman made his name in the 1990s by branding "Niman Ranch Meats" as a guarantor of animals "humanely and naturally raised" in sustainable environments. Today Niman's operation embraces 500 ranches, most of which raise hogs for good-tasting pork, but 50 of which supply cattle. "The beauty of beef," he says, "is that cows convert grass and naturally occurring florage to muscle and bone. In the West there are huge tracts of land where nothing but florage and grasses grow, and that's where mother cows and calves should grow."

Oregon Country Beef (OCB) (p. 110):

The traditional industrial beef chain moves in sequence: The cow-calf person sells to a backgrounder (or yearling operator) who sells to a feedlot who sells to a packer who sells to a wholesaler who sells to a retailer. But Oregon Beef owns the whole process, assuming responsibility and as much control as possible over what happens to its cows, from conception to consumption. Direct contact with end consumers -- the people who actually eat the cow -- has a strong impact on ranchers and consumers alike. To foster that contact, the Hatfields arranged for every rancher to do in-store demonstrations. North Pacific Whole Foods alone has twenty-two stores, so OCB families go together and spend the weekend in Portland. "We set up a little table in the store and demo our hot dogs and talk to people." Even reluctant ranchers became sold on the idea once they found out that people were really interested in what they did, how they lived, how their cattle lived. OCB also has a Customer Appreciation Day when all their working partners -- the feedlot owners, the meat cutters, the store owners, the chefs, and their families -- get together on one of the members' ranches for a giant barbecue.

(p. 114):

Maintaining cows' appetites means keeping them healthy. With the feedlot's head doctor, Dr. Min, I check out the hospital compound, which consists of twelve outdoor pens and additional space indoors for more severe cases, usually respiratory ones like pneumonia. Because OCB disallows antibiotics, they use vitamins, sulfa drugs, and lots of TLC. [ . . . ] If a steer's sick enough to require antibiotics, he's pulled out of the OCB program and sold to the generic groups.

I found another feedlot that bore evidence of TLC in Caldwell, Idaho, just over the border from eastern Oregon. This is one of the feedlots Bill Niman uses, and the locale is as different from his Bolinas ranch as coast fog from desert sun. "The challenge in raising beef," says Rob Stokes, who with his wife, Michelle, runs the Purple Sage Feedlot, "is to utilize the entire gastrointestinal tract, not just the stomach. The two common feeds we use for that are feather meal, which is a bypass protein, and distiller grains." "Feather meal" is hydrolyzed chicken feathers, in common use because their protein content degrades slowly in the rumen. The Stokeses pride themselves on having developed a number of refinements in their feeding methods. They bring in hay at the beginning of the season and carefully control its moisture. They steamroller their grain, flattening the corn kernels to make them easier to digest. They use an 80/20 grain-and-molasses mix with whey and lactose, then add sugar to provide energy and keep dust down in the ration.

Speed of fattening depends on breed, Stokes says, and in the West they stick with Herefords and Angus because of their consistency in putting on weight. The mega-feedlots in the Midwest tend to use bigger cattle, the Continental breeds, because they'll feed up to 1,500 or 1,600 pounds in the same amount of time.

(p. 115):

Most cooperative groups of ranchers come to grief over where and how to handle slaughtering and processing. Although an average of 30 million cows are "harvested" each year in America, all but a very small percentage of them are turned into meat by only three major packers. The industrial cliché that economy of scale breeds efficiency has also bred monopoly, and what many see as a cattle cartel. From the Hatfields' point of view, packers are just one part of the process and should not be calling the shots for both producers and consumers.

At the Agrabeef slaughterhouse (pp. 115-116):

On Sunday night, the cattle are delivered and held in pens overnight. Next morning two animals at a time enter the back chute, and since they've been in chutes before, they're not frightened. Each is shot with a bolt-action stun gun in the forehead. Then it slides down to a pit where a man takes one back hind leg, shackles it to a chain, levers it up to the rail, and slits the animal's throat so that it will bleed out immediately. It takes no more than two or three minutes from chute to rail. "The cows can't see ahead of them, so they're not wild-eyed or scared. They don't smell any blood." Remember, Doc is a vet, and his standard answer to customers' questions about the killing part is that the animals are not frightened. "I certainly hope that when my time comes, it's that gentle." "Quick" might have been a better word.

Because of the size of Washington Beef, which processes about 1000 head a day in contrast to OCB's 900 head a week, OCB was able to save nearly $100 per animal killed. Washington buys its cattle for the processing at a fixed price and then sells OCB back the boxed beef. Anything OCB can't use, like the hides and other waste parts, Washington sells. When the Hatfields discovered that only 12 percent of a carcass goes for top cuts like steaks, they realized that nobody can sell an animal for steaks alone. They located a regional chain called Burgerville with thirty-nine outlets and were able to turn their trim meat -- up to 16 tons a week -- into gourmet hamburgers.

They also have less "shrink" now, Connie explains. "We used to get paid on the basis of how much water is in the animal when you walk him to the scales. A buyer will look at your cattle, and if they think they've just had a drink, they'll pay you less because they don't want to pay for water. That's one kind of shrink. Another is when the seller weighs them when they go on the truck, but they may have a lot of manure in them, and you don't get paid for that when they go to the scales at the packer's. There's still a different kind of shrink in the grocery store if the butcher cuts steaks and nobody buys them until they begin to turn black and have to be ground into hamburger or given to an employee to take home. There's shrink all the way through."

Steve Kossler, at Homestead Market (pp. 118-119):

A local friend of his, he says, herds domesticated elk for hunters to shoot, which Homestead butchers for the hunters. The man used to raise elk for meat until the bottom fell out of the elk market, Kossler tells me, so now he just arranges "no-kill, no-pay" hunting parties. "The hunters didn't want the skins," Kossler says, "so we'll keep them, but I'm sure Willy will want the antlers." There's an international market for their velvet, which is full of glucosamine and chondroitin for the arthritic, and aphrodisiacal properties assigned to them by elderly Chinese. And there's always a market for dried antlers for decor. "One of our fellows does leatherwork and his daughter beadwork," Sue says, "so they mount the antlers in different ways and they're absolutely beautiful and sell well in Aspen -- worth more than the meat." The thing about elk meat is that it's low in fat but expensive, like buffalo, Sue explains. Nowadays there's not enough land for elk to graze, so you have to feed them supplements. "Wild" game takes on new meaning when I learn that they are even feeding buffalo now in feedlots. "Ted Turner's got many thousand bison in ranches in New Mexico and Wyoming," says Jim Ayer. "He's one of the largest landowners in the United States -- you should see his feedlots." According to Turner's Web site, he owns 2 million acres and plans to return some of his feedlot bison to grass so they can be marketed for a higher price as "Turner Reserve Grassfed Bison."

Buffalo Commons (p. 124):

Along with the buffalo went the prairie grass that had once covered 40 percent of the United States; now only 1 percent that can be called "native" remains. The name itself is a clue to how this came about: Prairie comes from the French for "meadows," as if the aboriginal grasslands of the Great Plains were pasture for sheep and cows. As our settlers moved east to west from the Mississippi to the Rockies, the sequence of tall grass to mixed grass to short grass charted the ecology from wet to dry, but prairie grasses were alike conditioned by buffalo, fire, and drought, their natural companions for survival. The strategy of the grasses was to grow long taproots; 60 percent of their tangled mass crept underground in search of water. Buffalo grazed the tops and moved on, their hooves trampling the earth, their manure fertilizing it, to encourage regrowth. This had been the message in the 1980s of Allan Savory. Fire and drought, claimed a couple of Eastern geographers from Rutgers University, Deborah and Frank Popper, were similarly needed for good maintenance, as were prairie dogs for the support of wildlife like ferrets and hawks.

(pp. 125-126):

The buffalo took hold, too, and in a sharp reversal, domesticated buffalo at the beginning of the twenty-first century are beginning to impact the meat business. In 2006 the National Bison Association -- upgraded from "National Buffalo Association" no doubt in an attempt to elevate the imagery of buffalo nickels to bison green bills -- listed 4000 private ranches raising a total of 270,000 buffalo in the United States, plus 150,000 in Canada, most of them in the Great Plains, where they belong. In addition there are around 20,000 in public herds, like those of Yellowstone Park, and 7000 on Indian reservations.

The Groves' buffalo are slaughtered at G&C Packing Company in Colorado Springs (pp. 128-129):

G&C was the U.S> plant where the owners of the patent for the rinse-and-chill method of blood removal first set up their apparatus on a trial basis, in the summer of 2000. The live animals come through the "drive valley" into the kill floor, where the room is kept at 40 degrees F. The buffalo are killed the same way cattle are: shot with a stun gun, then hung on the rail, where an incision is made in the neck. But instead of a "deep thoracic," better known as a "heart stick," to sever veins and arteries, only the jugulars are slashed, to keep the cardiovascular system intact. The common carotid artery is stripped out and a cannula is inserted into it so that a chilled isotonic liquid -- extrapurified water mixed with organic glycerin and then irradiated to sterilize it -- is forced through the cardiovascular system to push out the blood. This process is the most thorough way to remove blood there is, says Frank, and it lowers internal temperature immediately. "We get a pH drop in five minutes that normally takes thirty-six hours in the cooler." The results, he finds, are longer shelf life, a fresher product, and a cleaner taste. Yet only two other plants in the country use this method, because it takes an additional three to six minutes, and in a high-speed production plant where they're running a carcass every nine seconds, three minutes is huge. But for Frank's plant, the investment of $500,000 has changed them from a small local business to a national one.

Greening Beef (p. 141):

One of the earliest ranchers to equate healthy grasslands with good beef was Dale Lasater, scion of Lasater's Grasslands Beef and a fifth-generation rancher with an Ivy League pedigree. Dale has worked for industrial feedlots in Kansas and for the Peace Corps in Colombia, has been a student in Buenos Aires and a schoolteacher in Mexico. When he took over the family ranch in 1986, he was determined to put Wes Jackson's theory into practice: Treat the range as if it were wild and treat cattle like buffalo. [ . . . ]

"This [outside Matheson, CO] is marginal farmland," he explains as we drive across the prairie looking for some of his cattle, "but great ranching land." He names the plants as if they were pals: blue gamma, hairy gamma, western wheatgrass, switchgrass, sand grass. The weather is also personal. In a June without rain, the grass looked like August, but in late July the rains came, he said, and in August the prairies were spring green with a robin's egg blue sky. "Tallgrass prairie" means waist-high plants, he explains. "Mixed" means thigh-high, "short" means knee-high -- not a couple of inches, like turf or a lawn. The prairie is a living thing. "For you and me, this all looks the same when you look out across it," he says, "but for the plants it's not at all the same; each one likes a certain thing, a little more clay or a little less sand. We understand just a small piece of this whole miraculous system. Even though I know six or seven thousand names of grasses and forbs [herbs], I still don't know them all. We call ourselves ranchers and cattle people, but we're sun farmers. We simply promote the harvesting of the sun via these green plants."

(p. 145):

Advances in cattle genetics have also muddled calculation. The industry has increased beef volume in recent years without increasing cow numbers. Cattle are now bred to stay in the feedlot for a longer time, where they can increase their slaughter weight without getting overly fat. In the northern states, that weight is close to 1400 pounds and in the southern, 1200. In 2003 America produced 637 pounds of beef per cow per year, an increase of more than 50 pounds over five years. That means that beef poundage is increasing without any quantifiable warning in terms of increased cow numbers.

(p. 146):

The reign of corn as cattle field may be finished, [Allan] Nation told his audience at the Grasslands Association gathering. Corn eats up the profits because it's no longer cheap. Over 90 percent of the total energy needed to produce a pound of edible beef goes merely into keeping the cow alive. In order to make a profit, the feed a cow eats can have only negative value, which means if the cow weren't there, you wouldn't have to spend any money to control the vegetation. Over 70 percent of the world's beef cattle are located in the tropics and subtropics, where grass has negative value: There it's abundant and of poor quality.

Corn also kills the soil. Industrial monoculture has produced the most traumatize, battered, abused, and "boring" landscape on the globe, is the way Nation puts it. "Modern row cropping is the soil's equivalent of having been on the receiving end of a mugging by Jack the Ripper. . . . Your soil is in a state of shock." Commodity agriculture in the developed world is finished, he believes. In 2003 the United States was the world's number-three beef exporter; today it's not even in the top ten. While our country has increased its cow herd by 194,000 head, Canada increased its numbers by 300,000, Brazil by 1,400,000, and China by 2,500,000 in a global increase of 4,600,000 cows in a single year. Despite the projection of $77 billion of American agricultural exports in 2007, Nation believes that for America, "export agriculture is O-V-E-R." Every farm program, including the new Farm Bill of 2007, is another nail in the coffin because it is geared robotically to increasing production. Fueled by our religious belief in endless growth, America's economic machine dictates that all industries eventually become overcapitalized and overproduce.

Fussell next meets Joel Salatin, whose Polyface Farm was featured in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (pp. 147-148):

He celebrates grass. His small herd of 100 cattle shelters in open-sided barns, protected by portable shade mobiles as they are moved from one day's pasture to the next, which he measures by "cowdays" per acre. What one cow will eat in one day determines how many cows you can put on one acre. He can put as many as 400 because he supplies them with "salad bars." As he explains in Salad Bar Beef, what goes into the salad bar is the key to the happiness of his pastures and his cows. "An animal always eats dessert first," he explains. For a cow, the choice between clover and ragweed is like the choice for a human between ice cream and liver. The cow will always choose ice cream. I remember grass rancher Ernest Phinney telling me what was wrong with corn-saturated diets for cows in feedlots. "It would be like me locking you in a room for several months and forcing you to eat nothing but vanilla ice cream. You'd get really fat, but also really sick."

Salatin's solution to the ice-cream diet is a trick he calls "pulsing the pasture." His variety of rotational grazing, based on Virginia's pastureland and seasons, is to follow "the blaze of growth" in a plant's growth cycle. This charts the relation of root growth to top growth in an "S curve" and can be helped by letting a plant grow several inches before it's lightly grazed, then by letting it regrow to the same length before it's grazed again. In winter the entire farm, including the soil, hibernates. Soil needs rest because the organisms within it go to sleep. He makes a winter bedding of straw for his cattle and has devised a pulley-raised trough of hay which can be raised as the bedding grows higher with manure and urine, 3 pounds a day, covered each day with fresh straw. Wood chips and sawdust are mixed into the bedding as it grows, then whole corn kernels, so that the entire mass will ferment and generate heat. Cows do the mixing with their hooves and stay sweet and dry. In the spring, he send in the pigs to aerate the mixture as the animals root around for the corn. These are his "pig-aerators," his "living machines." This ready-mix compost is then spread on the fields to grow vegetables, hay, and new grasses for the salad bar.

Good Breeding (pp. 151-152):

Those breeds got their start in the mid-eighteenth century, in England, under the spur of needing bigger animals to provide more meat for the new urban markets. Farmers began to breed the ancient Celtic stock of Shorthorns selectively, for the ir large frame and ability to put on fat. In the 1780s, deliberate inbreeding produced the Durham ox, shown around the country as a monster cow of 3400 pounds. When the first Shorthorn was brought over to Virginia in 1783, it was called the Durham and touted as a good all-purpose breed that could furnish meat and milk, plow a field, and pull a wagon. Farmers quickly bred it with Spanish Longhorns to add tractability to its virtues. By the mid-nineteenth century, Midwestern farmers began to import Shorthorns in quantity for the expanding meat industry, and in 1846 they became the first beef breed to be registered in the United States in a Herd Book.

Anglo settlers in America had condemned the Texas Longhorns they encountered as barbaric. "They are indeed nothing else than Spanish cattle, direct descendents of the unseemly, rough, lanky, long-horned animals reared for so long and in such large herds by the Moors on the plains of Andalusia." An employee of the USDA described them more mildly as "semi-barbarians" that needed to be crossed with English stock for "self reliance and initiative." A second breed, the Hereford, had been developed in England around the same time as the Shorthorn and for much the same reasons. Like the Shorthorn, Herefords were bred to be much larger than they are today, but mere size became valued less than their early maturity, hardiness, and high yield of meat. By 1840, a major breeding herd was established in upstate New York, and after the Civil War, Herefords became known as "the great improver" when they were bred with Texas Longhorns, prized by that time only for their ability to survive both the cattle drives and transport by rail. The wide popularity of Herefords as improvers was strengthened after the 1883 Chicago Fat Show, when C.M. Culbertson won the grand championship for his Hereford steer Roan Boy and began the popularity for younger steers of 2 rather than 4 years. The Hereford's early maturity and "finishing ability" (the ability to fatten well on forage) helped revolutionize beef production in America at the turn of the century. But the same trait caused the breed to lose favor in the 1960s, when the beef market wanted a leaner, more muscled animal.

In comparison to these breeds, the Angus was a latecomer to America. The first were imported from Scotland to Kansas in 1873, by Scotsman George Grant. These, too, were crossbred with Texas Longhorns. The breed got a considerable boost when it was crossbred with the Aberdeen into the Aberdeen-Angus and won first prize at the International Exposition in Paris in 1878, after which it was imported into the Midwest in large numbers. Within a century, the Angus breed or crossbreeds had gone far to eliminate most other breeds in America.

But there are other minor breeds, adapted to specific locations, like the Scottish Highland (p. 162):

Of all cattle breeds, this is the showiest, but it's also one of the hardiest for cold weather, because of its weatherproof double coat, an outer coarse layer and a soft inner woolly layer, not unlike a buffalo's. Plus bangs called "dossan," a tuft of long hair over the eyes that makes a Highland look like an oversize shaggy dog and helps to prevent pinkeye and similar ailments. One might expect a breed that has survived since the sixth century in the fierce climate of the Scottish Highlands to learn how to grow a coat like this. The ones that didn't, died. Those that lived became especially good calvers and easy handlers, because they lived with their keepers: in winter, they stabled on the ground floor to keep the family warm in the room upstairs.

(p. 165):

"The focus of the beef industry has not been on the dinner plate," he says. "but on fast growth and carcass cutability per pound." That's industry-speak for tenderness, which he decodes with lawyerlike thoroughness. Increasingly the industry adds water to hamburger meat to increase both "tenderness" and weight. A lot of hamburger meat imported from Australia and New Zealand is made from bull beef that has a longer protein fiber than steer meat and is able to hold together even when you mix water in. A McDonald's or a Wendy's quarter-pounder will lose significant water and fat during cooking. "Water is free for the producer, but not the consumer." The industry is now at work to locate a "tenderness gene," he says, which may measure density but can't measure palatability.

Wally Congdon (pp. 165-166):

Wally gives his cows a bit of grain in the field to put enough fat on the outside of the animals so that he can hang their meat for twenty-eight days. Four weeks is a long time. The beef industry can't afford that kind of time or precooking weight loss -- dry-aging reduces an animal's body weight by about 8 percent -- and does no dry-aging at all. Instead, it substitutes "wet aging," which is the term for its system of vacuum-packing individual cuts in heavy plastic like Cryovac at the processing plant. The functions of the vacuum pack is to prolong shelf life, or preserve without change, which is the very opposite of natural aging, in which enzymes break down muscle fibers and develop flavor.

For Wally, thinking outside the industrial box keeps him outside the greening orthodoxies as well. To him, Allan Nation says inside the grass-fed box and Joel Salatin stays inside the rapid-weight-gain box. "They go partway, and they're clever missionaries about it, but they haven't changed the traditional target in agriculture from quantity to quality." It's not simply grass instead of grain that makes the difference. "Some days dealing with the grass-fed coalition is like dealing with the Christian right -- it's a zealous thing." On the other hand, he disapproves of anyone who "uses a feedlot, but implies that it ain't one." A feedlot is based on a fixed rate of pounds of production, which is very different from turning a cow loose in the pasture to grow its growth in its own sweet time.

The Smell of Greeley In Colorado, at the Greeley Hat Works (pp. 177-178):

Meantime, Trend has built a second and a third style hat for President Bush. The last one the president will give to visitors to his ranch in Crawford, Texas; the first he keeps in the Oval Office. Trent shows me a photo of the president and himself, with his "I'm-just-about-to-vomit" smile. When we step outside to say good-bye, I ask him, "what's that awful smell?"

"The smell of money," he says, and he doesn't mean from cowboy hats.

I'd tried to locate the source of that smell when I first came to town, a smell as inescapable as the smell of beer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or of chocolate in Hershey, Pennsylvania. As another visitor said, "At first I thought everyone here must have a horse in his backyard. Then I found out that the lots were to the east and the wind was coming from the east." The lots! Greeley has the largest concentration of cattle feedlots (CAFOs -- Confined Animal Feeding Operations) in the country, which has put the town on the map in a way it never expected.

That Greeley is home to both the best cowboy hats and the most concentrated feedlots in the country puts teeth in the paradox of the Cowboy and the Machine. But what struck me most was that while the symbolism of cowboying is ever more visible -- modeled by the president himself -- the reality of cowdom is ever more hidden. East of Greeley, ConAgra's feedlots run for a couple of miles on the north side of Highway 34, completely screened around the perimeter by tall hedges and fences. At the entrance a sign reads, "No public tours." Rising from the midst of what has been called a "concentration camp for cows" are the tall gray metal towers of the original silos, with the faded name "Monfort Feedlots" barely legible on the tallest tower. Cornfields abut the feedlots on either side, visibly enforcing the industrial equation of commodity cows with commodity corn. The cornfields are there for everyone to see, but the only way you can really see the cows in their concentrated encampment is from a helicopter or airplane.

(pp. 179-181):

In 1930 Warren Monfort devised a system to feed crop surpluses to his first 30 head of cattle,a nd by the end of World War II he was ready for the huge explosion of crop yields that would soon make corn cheaper than grass for feed. Ammunition plants that had geared up during the war to produce ammonium nitrate for gunpowder were converted after the war to high-nitrogen fertilizer factories. As early as 1946, farmers began to spread this fertilizer on cornfields throughout the Midwest, which tripled the harvest for that year and the next and the next. "We were at the right time in the right place, when World War II was over and everybody came home, everybody had money in their pockets, times were good," W.D. says. "It was a wonderful time to get started."

Yield would grow from 20 bushels per acre in 1900 to 138 in the 1990s. Excess corn from excess nitrogen was encouraged and maintained by federal price supports, a circular logic that feeds corn to cows today. [ . . . ]

The Monfort operation was the first modern large-scale feedlot, a pioneer in a movement that was shifting slaughterhouses and packinghouses from cities like New York and Chicago to cornfields in Kansas and Nebraska. The Monfort plant killed 7 head the first day it opened; seventeen years later, it was killing 2300 a day; by the 1960s, the feedlot accommodated 100,000 head. Monfort's annual revenues were over $85 million, and the company was Greeley's largest employer. In 1970 Kenny built another giant feedlot at Gilcrest. Four years later, he built a third one near Kersey and closed the original site because of chronic complaints about the smell. For a while, that smell seemed to be the only fly in the ointment of industrial progress.

Monfort eventually sold out to ConAgra (pp. 182-183):

In 2002 ConAgra was forced to recall 19 million pounds of beef tainted by E. coli, after the death of one woman and the illness of forty-five other people in sixteen states were traced to beef at the Greeley plant. ConAgra's form of damage control was to sell its meat company to Swift & Company but retain 46 percent ownership in Swift, so that the change was largely semantic. In 2004 Swift kept the packing plant but returned control of the feedlots to ConAgra, which then sold them to Smithfield, the world's largest hog producer and pork processor. The very next year, these same feedlots were regrouped under a corporate umbrella called Five Rivers Ranch Cattle Feeding L.L.C., which sounds a lot better than CAFOs, and which merged Smithfield with ContiBeef (a division of ContiGroup Companies, which were originally grain suppliers) to gain a feeding capacity of 813,000 head of cattle concentrated in ten sites in five states. [ . . . ]

In 2005 the trade directory Beef Spotter, the Feedlot Atlas listed a mere 800 feedlots covering twenty-four states, most of them located between the Mississippi and the Rockies, with the largest (over 100,000 head) concentrated in only four states: Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. Five Rivers, with its bucolic name, boasts that it is the world's largest cattle feeder, with the Greeley lots (now called M.F. Cattle Feeding) providing a mere 305,000 of its grand total. Cactus Feeders of Amarillo, Texas, created in 1975, boasts that its 520,000 cattle make it the world's largest privately owned feeding company. These are numbers games. The number that counts is that only 2 percent of these feedlots market 85 percent of the 34 million cattle slaughtered each year from a total of 97 million live ones to make 26 billion pounds of beef.

And now, of course, that integration is global. In 2007 Swift sold its processing plant to the largest beef processor in Latin America, JBS S.A., with headquarters in Brazil. With the name change, the company can sidestep Asia's ban on Brazilian meat because of foot-and-mouth disease, but despite all the convoluted name juggling, this is, in fact, the largest meat conglomerate in the world.

(pp. 185-186):

Cows like grain because it's tasty, but if you gorge them with grain and little else, bad things happen, like bloat and acidosis. Corn is mostly starch, and with too much starch, rumination shuts down and a layer of slime in the rumen traps gas the cow would normally burp. The result is bloat, where the rumen blows up like a balloon and, if untended, suffocates the cow. Corn also turns the normal pH of a rumen acidic, giving the cow acidosis, which can abscess the liver, produce ulcers, and weaken the entire immune system. Recent innovations in cattle's diets haven't alleviated the problem. When food-processing plants followed meat-packing plants into rural areas, feeders began to supplement corn with by-products from ethanol plants, breweries, and other food factories. "We started out feeding junk -- potatoes, carrots, beet tops, sugar beets -- then we went to feeding corn, hay, and silage, and now we're back to feeding junk again," Jim Miller comments wryly. Since I spoke to him, cows' junk diet has expanded to include chocolate bars, popcorn, pretzels, potato chips, and Tater Tots, all from food factories located near feedlots.

Such a diet necessitates heavy "subtherapeutic" reliance on antibiotics like rumensin (against bloat), tylosin (against acidosis), chlortetracycline, oxytetracyline, sulfamethazine. Apart from diet, crowding large numbers together results in bovine respiratory disease, better known as "shipping fever," or BRD, which can run through a herd like flu through a kindergarten. BRD can account for 75 percent of feedlot cattle illness. Industry magazines are packed with brand-name pharmaceutical ads: "Excede (Ceftiofur Cystalline-Free Acid) for extended BRD therapy"; Micotil (Tilmicosin injection) "Easy on your cattle. Tough on BRD"; "Got Scours? Get First Defense" from ImmuCell.

Besides antibiotic injections, cattle are routinely given growth-hormone implants, like the estrogen Revlar, which puts cattle on steroids; 92 percent of feedlot managers implant these routinely during the initial processing at the lot, half that percentage a second time, and 10 percent a third time. The hormones have only one function: to fatten up those cattle fast. The European Union has banned both drugs for the very good reason that Europe is concerned about the health of its meat eaters. The increasing concern among American eaters finally drove the National Research Council in 1999 to study "the potential risk to human health directly associated with the use of antibiotic drugs in food animal production" and to conclude that, yes, "there is a link between the use of antibiotics in food animals, the development of bacterial resistance to these drugs, and human disease." Common sense had told us as much long ago.

Slaughterhouse Blues In class at the meat department at Texas A&M (p. 193):

We've been told that genetics is the key to the growth ratio of bone, muscle, fat -- and especially of marbling. We've been told that a feeder can manage growth by slowing it down or speeding it up, but that he can't change the ratio. We're told that beef cattle are the true factory and feedlots merely the hotels where the manager's job is to turn out consistent occupants for the "harvester." We're told that each stage of the fragmented beef industry adds value and needs profit, from the seed-stock breeders to cow-calf producers to background feeders to feedlot feeders to slaughter/producers to retailers -- it's a very long chain strung together by complex mathematical equations that calculate profit and loss. It's about the money. [ . . . ]

We are assumed to be ready for a spectator tour of the Teaching/Cutting Lab of the Rosenthal Meat Science and Technology Center, from Harvest Room to Chill Room, where well-trained graduate students will do the work at academic -- not industrial -- speed. Whereas a large industrial plant will process 300 to 400 animals an hour, which means harvesting 6 steers a minute, or about 10 seconds per steer, our pace will be leisurely, a film in slow motion.

Gory details follow.

(pp. 201-202):

At the turn of the century, "modern efficiencies" demanded more and more concentrated ownership of the entire rationalized process, from breeders to retailers, and that remains the model of the beef industry today. Just as four major packers in the United States control over 83 percent of the slaughtering/processing segment, in 2004 five major retailers -- Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, Ahold USA -- controlled 46 percent of the marketing segment. But the tighter the integration at the meat end of the industry, the more the cattle end of the industry has put on protective blinders to flee reality. Fragmentation allows ranchers to concentrate on calving and weaning and shut their eyes to what happens to their babes once they've left the ranch. Unlike the meat end, the ranching end is not about the money. Despite their endles business talk and cowboy costumes, the majority of the 800,000 ranchers today who raise cattle cannot make a living out of cattle alone. The breaking point for profit is 500 head, but the average herd size in the United States is only 43 head, and 90 percent of U.S. cattle owners have herds under 100 head. That may account for the fact that the average age of a rancher today is sixty. That may also account for the fact that the imagery of ranching today is pasteurized nostalgia -- cowboys far distant from machines, revealed in racks of cowboy magazines named American Cowboy, C owboys and Indians, range, Cowboy, and Shoot! (yes, it's all about cowboy guns). Only big-time feedlots in conjunction with packers in conjunction with retailers -- in other words, the industrial beef chain, supported by government agencies -- make big-time money.

Mike Callicrate (pp. 208-210):

What concerns Callicrate is not just price but meat quality and its concomitant safety. "I'm concerned about what is in our food that we don't know is there." Imported cattle are a safety issue, as only about 1 percent of the 20 percent imported beef that the big packers slaughter is inspected. So are techniques like Advanced Meat Recovery (AMR), a process invented and patented in 1995 by Eldin Ross of Beef Processors, Inc. in Sioux City, Iowa, to salvage meat from bone crannies. Ross's machine takes small bones -- backbones, rib bones, and so on, throws them into a super grinder, and extrudes a bright red paste. Because the paste spoils quickly, it is frozen in pellet form and added to beef trim while grinding. "That's the stuff that's in your hot dogs, bratwursts, hamburger," says Callicrate. "USDA analysis shows that 35 percent of sample food-service hamburger patties contain brain and spinal tissue." [ . . . ]

Callicrate is appalled by the wholesale use of Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP). "It's nasty awful stuff that the consumer shouldn't be forced to buy," but it's now standard industry procedure for prolonging shelf life by removing oxygen in a sealed package and replacing it with nitrogen or minute quantities of carbon monoxide. This helps retain the red color of meat and delays the darkening associated with age, so that a consumer can't tell by looking how long a steak has been on a supermarket shelf.

In Wichita, KS, with Dell and Coy Allen (p. 213):

The brothers are proud that Kansas has the largest concentration of beef slaughterhouses in the United States in the triangle of Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal, with a capacity for 20,000 at each plant. Add Emporia, between Wichita and Topeka, which has an even larger plant of 25,000, and Kansas represents 25 percent of the country's total slaughtering capacity. As we speed like an arrow through thousands of acres of ripe corn, Dell explains that the state is now second in the country in the number of tillable acres, thanks to the Oglalla aquifer, although it is losing population because the average farm size is now 2000 acres. The cattle industry took off here, Dell says, because of the climate of the Plains -- more temperate than the Corn Belt, cooler evenings, less severe winters, less moisture -- so the packers moved here. Since the state controls the water, the state, in effect, controls the packinghouses and what is grown to feed the cattle. "In animal processing, nobody is as efficient as we are," says Dell.

In the Cargill plane near Dodge City (p. 216):

We begin with fabrication, in the hide-on side of the slaughter floor, where carcasses are washed in a high-pressure cabinet, a method Dell devised for Excel. As in Beef 101, air knives loosen the hide from the body, but here there's a specially designed "down puller" that strips off the hide like ripping off a shirt. Hooves are clipped with giant clippers, heads are skinned with tongues hanging, lined upright on poles like a scene from the Reign of Terror. The carcasses enter a pre-evisceration rinse, then there's a lot of scrubbing and vacuuming around the anal area before carcasses enter the hide-off side of the slaughterhouse. Here they are eviscerated and split, washed in a hot-water rinse cabinet, inspected by a USDA man, blasted again by steam. My glasses and camera lens fog up constantly as we move between freezing-cold chill rooms and boiling-hot steam, and even with the earplugs, the noise of the machinery is deafening. Underfoot, floors are slippery with fat and we have to be careful walking. The scale both dazzles and numbs as I try to take in the long rows of half carcasses replicated endlessly, at a fixed rate of speed, each with an identical thirteenth-rib cut. Tiers of workers are replicated behind them, each repeating a single task, each equipped with knives and a stone to sharpen them as they go. Their motions are rapid and precise as they trim and debone, trim and debone. Every so often they leave a knife on a tray to be honed on the electric sharpener.

(p. 217):

Renderers now like to be called "recyclers," and because they render 40,000 metric tons of "animal by-product" each week, we might as well call them "environmental protectionists." While there are about 250 rendering plants in the country, only 36 are certified users of the HACCP plan, which is voluntary; most o these are attached to a slaughter/processor so that the "source material" will be fresh. Dell tells me that Excel brine-cures the hides to preserve them before exporting to China and Korea for processing into leather. Blood they dry to sell as feed for dairy cattle. Bones and fat go into the maw of the giant raw material grinder and then into a continuous cooker, heated to 280 degrees, which frees fat from protein and bone and dehydrates the mass into a slurry. Liquid fat is separated from solids, now called "tankage," which is sent to the screw press, then to the pressed-cake conveyor; it will be sold for bone meal for pets and livestock feed. Edible fat will be also be used in pet and livestock feed, but inedible fat like tallow or grease will go into a wide, wide world of paints, lubricants, soaps, tires, fabrics, cement, polish ink, lipsticks, face creams, medicines, crayons. Like processed corn, processed animal fat is everywhere about us and on us.

Riding Point for the Industry (pp. 221-222):

There's no reason that the beef industry shouldn't be as full o contradictions as any other American industry that has grown up with the country for the last century and a half, but where agribusiness has more or less exterminated small farmers, the beef industry still has a large herd of small ranchers who cling to a vision of rugged independence utterly at variance with twenty-first-century realities. This is a group that perceives Big Government as Public Enemy #1. "The harder you work, the more the government comes around and trips you up," says a rancher listening to a panel on the Federal Lands Committee and the National Research Council. Yet this same club broke its own nonpartisan tradition in 2004 to endorse President bush for re-election. In part, the endorsement was payback for the FDA's slowdown in imposing the restrictions on animal feed that it had introduced in response to the new outbreak of BSE. Beyond political pragmatism, the group felt that Bush shared its identity. "I can't think of a better compliment for our president than to call him a cowboy," says Kathleen Clarke, appointed by Bush to the directorship of the BLM. "They're always on the side of right, they're against bad people, they have integrity, they're respected, and they always win." She gets a standing ovation.

The rest of Clarke's speech reveals further contradictions on cowboy issues. While her rallying cry is for "sustainable range lands and sustainable ranching" to "sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands, now and for the future," the group she addresses has long ago put the EPA and almost all environmental groups on its hate list. At a meeting of the Committee on Property Rights and Environmental Management, a feedlot owner complains that the EPA is trying to apply the Clean Air Act to CAFO emissions, even though they are "fugitive" and "naturally occurring." He asks, "How much more of this regulation can we take without forcing our kind of business out of the country?"

(pp. 228-230):

The manipulation of information has long been a given. The question is: Who's doing the manipulating and toward what end? In 1922, to reconcile the opposing forces of packers and producers, the NCBA created a new marketing committee, the National Live Stock and Meat Board, and set up a campaign to counter propaganda that claimed beef was harmful to health. "Scientific data to correct adverse propaganda should be collected, compiled and disseminated . . . among dieticians, physicians, hospitals, teachers, home demonstrators, household editors, agricultural colleges and others." While they skirmished from time to time, packers and cattlemen were united in viewing any critique of beef or the beef industry as the propaganda of Bad Guys threatening the Good Guys locked together on the Gibraltar of "sound science." I learn at a conference session on Issues and Activism that today the Bad Guys are so numerous they are organized into categories like Negative Advocacy Groups, Anti-Checkoff Groups, Opportunists, Competitors, Key Players, Greening Groupies. The first include Consumers Union, Center for Media & Democracy, Center for Food Safety, Earth First!, Farm Sanctuary, Humane Society USA, Land Institute, PETA, Sierra Club, Organic Consumers, Chefs Collaborative, and GRACE. Anti-Checkoff Groups include the Libertarian Party, Institute for Justice, Campaign for Family Farms, Land Stewardship Project, Washington Legal Foundation. Opportunists are all the alternate-health practitioners and chiropractors. Competitors are Whole Foods, Wild Oats, Working Assets, Organic Valley. Key Players are Consumers Union, Public Citizen, Consumer Federation of America, and a host of acronyms -- IATP, CIC, OCA, HSUSA, PIRG, ELF -- that cover "environmental philanthropists and food/farmer agricultural groups" -- just about anyone and everyone who "used their money to influence consumers and regulators" toward ends other than selling beef. Greening Groupies are condemned for "global warming hysteria," in the words of Steven J. Milloy of JunkScience.com, which "aims to debunk faulty scientific data used to further special agendas," including the prion theory of BSE. All opposition to "factory farming," the senior editor of Beef Magazine proclaimed in 2005, comes from environmentalists, animal rightists, "Marxists and other social radicals." Since the publication of Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser has been a favorite whipping boy, but now there's Michael Pollan, who "wants to make Americans fear their food," Marion Nestle, "one of the country's most hysterical anti-food-industry fanatics," and organic proponent Joan Gussow, queen of the "Nanny Culture."

An editorial in Beef magazine warns that all such environmentalists, animal rightists, and Marxists may be agents of bioterrorism, as "foreign terrorists may seek collaboration with these radical, domestic elements." Agro-terrorist attack strategies include causing "consumers to lose confidence in the safety of the food supply." Dan Murphy, whose column "The Vocal Point" appears regularly at Meatingplace.com, took the equation of beef-industry criticism with agro-terrorism a step further in 2005. The real agenda of organizations like the Center for a Livable Future (part of John Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health), PETA, and the Physicians' Committee on Responsible Medicine is "to destroy the evil meat industry -- by any means necessary." Murphy, editing his own prose, concludes that if you substitute for "meat industry" the phrase "godless infidels," the agenda fits the mission of "terrorists out to destroy Western civilization." Murphy's language heats up further a year later, in "Cow-Calf Weekly," when he portrays the beef industry as a sacrificial victim of the propaganda tactics "used by propagators of hate throughout history." Now dissenters are identified with Nazi storm troopers and Roman Caesars: "The hate and divisive rhetoric aimed at feeders, packers and the like is the same as that employed against blacks, Jews, women and a host of other groups singled out for persecution throughout time."

Interesting section on Temple Grandin (pp. 241-243):

She is perhaps the only reformer who's been able to effect major change within the industry because she is respected by all sides of the industry. Around 1996 she'd made a survey of major meat plants for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and found that most plants killed animals brutally, but she couldn't get any of the execs to listen until they visited a plant for themselves. McDonald's had brushed off animal-rights activists for years until a couple of deaths forced Jack in the Box in 1999 to recall meat tainted with E. coli. Finally a McDonald's executive named Bob Langert agreed to talk to Grandin. Langert said that until he met her, it was just a lot of rhetoric about animal cruelty, but she had figured out how to measure brutality so they could figure out how to fix it. He claims that her inspection system brought "exact science" to the slaughterhouse. Her words are simpler: "Their eyes got opened," she says. "Most had never been near a farm." She took eighteen executives through twenty-six plants. Burger King and Wendy's joined later. "You don't know what's outside the box," she says, "until you get outside the box." Grandin now keeps a scorecard on beef slaughterhouses that measures, among other things, what percentage of the cattle are vocalizing. The more she listened to cattle, she says, the more she realized their moos tell you how they feel. The scorecard winkles out the plants with big problems. The best plants do their own internal scoring, motivated by the possibility that they'll be removed from the supplier list if they don't comply.

Her position on implants is pragmatic. She's found no scientific evidence that growth implants are dangerous to humans, she explains: The implant is a pellet put under the skin of the ear, and when the animal is slaughtered, the ear is discarded -- "We're not eating ears." Antibiotics are another matter, they affect environment. And then there are genetic problems when we breed animals like dairy cattle, pigs, and chickens so big they get lame. As for BSE, "it's such a creepy disease," but there's science, and then there's what customers want. These are two different things. "If customers want every animal tested and want to pay for it, then we'll do it. The Japanese want them all tested. Okay, we'll be happy to do it, but we have to charge them for it and they have to pay for it." There's also a difference between spontaneous and genetic mad cows. BSE in a three-year-old steer might be spontaneous, but BSE in a twelve-year-old cow induces concern about feeding beef five parts poultry residue. "I think eventually we're going to have to figure out how to feed this stuff to automobiles."

(pp. 243-244):

But at the same time, no one has been more instrumental in connecting the quality of animal welfare to the quality of that animal's meat. "We've got to get rid of the cowboy-rodeo stuff, the yelling and screaming at animals," Grandin said in an NPR broadcast. "One of the things I've worked on is getting people to keep their mouths shut when they're moving cattle. It's very stressful, and stress affects the quality of the meat. Yelling and screaming will raise the heart rate more than just the sound of metal clanging and clanging."

Working with cattle raised questions for her ultimately about death and what comes after. "I hated the second law of thermodynamics," she says, "because I believed that the universe should be orderly." Evidently, it was not. When she worked at the Swift feedlots, she began to realize that people believe in an afterlife because the idea that once cattle walk into the slaughterhouse it's over for them forever is too horrible to conceive. "Like the concept of infinity, it is too ego-shattering for people to endure." But she also saw that for cattle the slaughter plant provided a much gentler death than nature did. At first, at the Swift plant, she couldn't bring herself to say that she had actually killed a live steer herself. She had designed a new kind of ramp and restrainer for them and called it "Stairway to Heaven." "I greatly matured after the construction of the Stairway to Heaven because it was real. It was not just a symbolic door that had private meaning to me, it was a reality many people refuse to face." She realized that most people never observe the birth-death cycle of living animals. "They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die." That's why for her slaughter is always a ritual function and that's why the place where the animal dies is a sacred place. As she told one interviewer, "None of these cattle would have existed, if we hadn't bred them. We owe them a decent life -- and a painless death. They're living, feeling things. They're not posts or machines." We also owe it to ourselves, she believes. People who have no problems doing atrocious things to animals at a slaughterhouse probably have no problem torturing people. She quotes Thomas Aquinas: One of the reasons we should treat animals humanely is so that people themselves don't get corrupted.

Mad Cows and Ethanol: Janet Skrabek, a "solid Republican businesswoman" living in New Jersey (pp. 250-252):

A prion is a renegade protein crystal that invades normal proteins and makes them duplicate the shape of the invader, in a kind of refolding and unraveling. Prions were discovered by Dr. Stanley Prusiner in 1997 as "an infectious agent unrelated to genetic material," a development so revolutionary it won him a Nobel Prize. Statistically such a case was very rare, one in a million, which meant at the most 250 to 300 cases a year in the United States.

In June 2003 Janet learned that another female employee from the racetrack had just died of sporadic CJD [Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease; the first was a family friend who worked for Janet's mother]. That made two deaths out of one hundred, rather than one in a million. "It was like my 9/11," Janet told me. "Everything changed." She began to look up local obituaries online and found that a man in the next town over had also died of CJD. Although he was not an employee at the racetrack, she learned that he was a season-pass holder and ate there at least once a week. Concerned for the health of her mother, Janet called the Center for Disease Control and the New Jersey Department of Health to alert them to this statistical anomaly. Their response was immediate and identical: "Little woman, you're not a scientist, forget it." Her eyes darken with the memory. "I'd never felt so dismissed in my whole life." She found a fourth case linked to the track, then a fifth and a sixth. "When I got to seven, I started to call the media." She called local guys and big guys like CNN, but the Texas cattlemen's suit against Oprah Winfrey in 1998 was still fresh in their minds. "Everybody was willing to listen, but nobody was willing to dover it." Oprah had won that suit in 2002, but it cost her over $1 million, and by that time thirteen states had adopted what's popularly called the Veggie-Libel Law against "food disparagement" of any kind, from apples to hamburgers.

So instead, Janet wrote an article for her local newspaper, and people from all over began calling her to report someone they knew who'd died of CJD. In December the first mad cow was discovered in America, in Washington state, and suddenly all the media she'd called were now calling her. The first reaction of government agencies was denial. Someone in Canada told her, "You know the policy -- if you have a cow die, shoot, shovel, and shut up." Dave Louthan, who'd slaughtered the affected cow, had said it was walking -- which is significant because walking cows usually aren't tested, only downers (sick cows that are unable to walk). Louthan claimed that government men with guns in their holsters came and put pressure on him to sign a document saying the cow had been a downer. He refused and went out and told the story and got fired. [ . . . ]

Janet had been working on mad cow full time ever sine and has discovered that CJD is just one expression of a frighteningly widespread and amorphous disease. She mobilized some New Jersey senators to ask the CDC and New Jersey's Department of Health to reinvestigate, but they refused even to look at tissue samples. Meantime, she'd found another cluster of CJD victims in Kingston, NY. She also found that Dr. Clarence "Joe" Gibbs, a specialist in diseases of the nervous system and particularly of prion diseases at the National Institutes of Health, had collected tissue samples of CJD victims for a study of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) -- the umbrella for prion diseases in animals and men. Despite the study's importance, when Dr. Gibbs died in 2001, the NIH closed down the entire project and planned to destroy the collected tissue samples until the families of the victims protested.

Meantime Janet was able to pinpoint at which establishment among the three restaurants and twenty-four concession stands at the Garden State Race Track all the victims ate regularly and half ate exclusively -- the ill-named "Phoenix." She was even able to locate the distributor who supplied its meat, but for her the distributor was not the point. "It's not a matter of a single distributor, but of the government covering up for large corporations," she says. "Coming from the corporate side, I never believed these things really happen. I thought corporate America had high moral values and those people who are activists out there picketing were strange." [ . . . ]

By 2006 Janet had discovered twenty-seven people who had eaten at the Phoenix Restaurant between 1988 and 1992 who had CJD as the cause of death written on their death certificates.

(pp. 253-254):

"Worse than that, they've made it illegal in the United States to test your own cows for mad cow disease," Janet says, citing Creekstone Farms, the small family-owned packing company that the USDA had prevented from testing its own cattle. After Creekstone was denied permission from the USDA in 2004, the company brought suit against the agency in March 2006; a year later the U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia ruled that the USDA's prohibition was unlawful; two months later, the USDA appealed and has continued to ban any private company from buying the test kits that would allow them to test their own herds. "There is no scientific reason to require universal testing," said the industry, and to do so would endanger consumer confidence. Increased testing might uncover here, as it had in E.U. countries -- after they'd agreed to impose new BSE testing in 1999 -- the disquieting fact that cattle declared to be BSE free were not. Don Stull, an anthropology professor at Kansas University, observes: "If Creekstone Farms tested every one of its animals, that would create pressure for the big boys to do the same, and they don't want that."

(pp. 254-255):

Richard Rhodes' Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague was written in 1997, six years before BSE was uncovered in the United States. It explained to the general public a new family of mysterious infectious diseases linked by prions. When you smell the roses, Rhodes warns, remember that rosebushes are fertilized with bone meal from dead cattle, the suspected source of BSE. Dr. Murray Waldman, a Toronto coroner, picked up the plague theme when he linked Alzheimer's disease to the prion disease family in 2004, in a book written with Marjorie Lamb, Dying for a Hamburger: How Modern Meat-Packing Led to an Epidemic of Alzheimer's Disease. Waldman describes studies in which researchers have injected cells from the diseased brains of Alzheimer victims into animals, which then developed effects indistinguishable from those of CJD. This was the link Dr. Prusiner had predicted twenty years earlier. As of today, 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's, a 10 percent increase within the last five years, which means that 13 percent of people over sixty-five and 42 percent of those over eighty-five will contract it.

(pp. 255-256):

Eventually Britain had to kill thousands of cows and institute an effective testing and tracking system. Europe followed, then Japan, but Canada and the United States did not. The FDA's feeble reform bill for cattle feed lulled the industry into a deep-sleep belief that mad cow was for foreigners, not for us, even after our homegrown mad cows were discovered. Despite the accumulating numbers of mad cows here and abroad, the industry has swaggered through a wilderness of denial as boundless as that of the war in Iraq. "The key to understanding this administration's approach to regulation comes in three words: cost-benefit-analysis," sacred words to the spokesman from the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, who concluded, "It's the right approach to policy."

Meanwhile, even the flimsy stipulations of the feed bill went unenforced in the United States and Canada. Sixty percent of sampled feeds labeled "vegetable only" were found to contain animal proteins, and more than 80 percent of firms handling feed forbidden to ruminants failed to label it as such.

John Stauber, founder of Center for Media and Democracy, author of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You and other books about the public relations industry (pp. 264-266):

One of those issues involved Monsanto's selling genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (BGH) for dairy cattle in the 1990s, and it was then that he noticed "this tremendous collusion" between companies and government regulatory agencies. He saw how closely four companies -- Monsanto, American Cyanamid (now a division of Wyeth), Eli Lilly, and Upjohn -- worked with the FDA and USDA. He made two major Freedom of Information Act investigations of these agencies and "hit the jackpot." He found that the biggest single player in the dairy industry at the time was a tobacco company, Philip Morris/Kraft, and that the biggest dairy-industry players lined right up with the biggest biotechnology players. Together they got BGH milk on the market with no consumer labeling. The public didn't even hear about BGH until a couple of reporters from a Fox affiliate in Tampa Bay got fired when they wrote a story about it. Earlier, when he'd organized in Washington, D.C., a strategy session for a small invited group interested in fighting BGH, he got a call from a woman who said she was with the Maryland Citizens Consumer Council and was a mother concerned for her kids. Later he found she'd given a fake name and actually worked for the PR firm Burson-Marsteller. One of its major clients was Monsanto, for whom it had instituted a major lobbying campaign under the auspices of the Animal Health Institute, essentially an animal-drug lobby. When Stauber mentioned the planted "concerned mom" to someone in the media, he was told, "This is what big PR firms serving corporations do. They infiltrate, they spy, they smear. This is part of the services they offer." After he found that a PR firm called "Direct Impact" was owned by Burson-Marsteller and had pulled a dirty-tricks operation in New York City at a meeting of dairy farmers, he decided to start the Center for Media and Democracy.

BGH led Stauber to BSE. Around 1990, Stauber had gotten a call from a retired vet in Iowa who'd made the connection. Stauber had thought that because Monstanto was using synthetic BGH, instead of collecting it in the usual way from pituitaries of dead cows, mad cow disease was not relevant to Monsanto's drug. "You don't understand," the vet said. "If you're injecting cows with a drug this powerful, you have to feed them more fat and protein or the cows will take sick, and where does that fat and protein come from?"

"Cows?" John asked.

"Exactly," the vet answered. The use of BGH intensifies the "normal" feeding of rendered cows to cows. Stauber learned that the USDA had begun feeding slaughterhouse waste to cattle as a fat and protein supplement in a big way in the 1980s and had increased the volume every year since. The biggest surprise was a USDA internal memo he came across that said: "If we don't stop this practice of feeding cows to cows, BSE could emerge in the United States." Through the Freedom of Information Act, he found a 1991 USDA document that stated: "With BSE there are two issues where agriculture is vulnerable to media scrutiny. These are the practices of feeding rendered ruminant products to ruminants and risks to human health." What they were worried about was not human health but media scrutiny, how to spin it correctly.

(p. 272):

Ironically, the widespread problem of E. coli as a powerful new microbe was created by the intense feeding of corn to cattle. And it can be mitigated by feeding them something else. According to the research of microbiologist James Russell at Cornell University, a diet of too much grain and too little fiber has altered "the ruminal ecosystem" of feedlot cattle. When fed corn, the rumen becomes more acidic in order to digest the grain, and this is exactly the environment that E. coli bacteria likes. When the rumen contains grass rather than grain, the bacteria cannot multiply because the ruminal ecosystem is not acidic enough. Dr. Russell advocates simple procedures like adding sodium carbonate and alkali to manure and feeding cattle on hay for a few days before slaughter, which can produce an up to 80 percent drop in E. coli. But the industry is as addicted to drugs as it is to corn. In 2007 the FDA reported that it was almost compelled to approve the new antibiotic cefquinome, even though its superpotency might produce resistant strains of a bacterium that causes anthrax and severe diarrhea in humans.

And then there's ethanol (p. 278):

We've been "passing half of the corn crop in America through the guts of animals," Pollan says, and through cheap feed have been subsidizing all the big boys in the livestock industry. Cheap feed was an even larger windfall for poultry and pigs. Alan Guebert cites a recent study at Tufts University that shows livestock "feed prices were an estimated 21 percent below production costs for poultry and 26 percent below costs for the hog industry," which brought Tyson, ConAgra, and Smithfield savings of $19.75 billion and allowed them to integrate ever more closely. The economic logic of the "cattle cycle" is based entirely on corn so cheap that it costs less for the beef industry to buy it than for the farmer to grow it. When corn sold for around $2.25 a bushel, it cost around $3 a bushel to grow, but taxpayer subsidies made up the difference. Now the cycle is more like a cyclone, because suddenly corn that was selling for $2.11 a bushel in 2006 sold for $6.12 in May 2008.

Enter ethanol. With the ethanol explosion, corn planting is now the highest it's been since World War II, 25 percent of our cultivated acreage or 73.4 million acres, with projections of 152 bushels of corn per acre. In 2006 ethanol consumed 11 billion bushels, or 20 percent of the nation's corn crop; in the last two years, we've built 31 new ethanol plants and 78 are under construction for 2009. For the first time in sixty-three years, corn is in such demand that packers will be forced to produce 1 billion less pounds of meat in 2007 and Americans will eat 1.7 pounds less per person because they will have to pay more for it. Even so, taxpayers are now subsidizing ethanol through government tax benefits for new refineries to the tune of $7 billion a year. "I think when the consumer figures out that they pay for [ethanol] three times, it might not be so popular," said a Texas cattle feeder for Friona Industries. "They pay for it when they pay their taxes, they pay for it at the pump (with reduced performance and lower gas mileage), and they pay for it again at the grocery store."

Beef: It's What's for Dinner: Peter Luger Steak House, in Brooklyn (p. 289):

The Luger's menu is bare-boned because you're there single-mindedly for steak, not for lamb or salmon, which got added as concessions to the weaker sex. Cowboys don't have choice; it's one gun or two. Here it's Steak for One, Two, Three, or Four, with "Steak for Two" the best cut because it's a bone-in porterhouse with a large filet, so you just double that for Four. The only real choice is rare or, for the hopelessly overurbanized, medium rare. If you want well-done, eat at home. Significantly, creamed spinach is the only green stuff, made tolerable by cream and butter. The potatoes are made tolerable by chopped bacon and onion. But nothing distracts from the platter of meat brought straight from the old Garland broilers set to 500 degrees that guarantee this is something you couldn't easily manage on your home stove or grill. The steakhouse is not meant to simulate home cooking or backyard barbecue. It's a communal feast celebrating superabundance and topsy-turvy, as in Roman Saturnalia or the medieval Land of Cockaigne, where nuns go bottoms up, servants beat their masters, the world flips upside down, and skies rain cheeses and pies and everything your animal gut desires.

At Walmir Meat, with Jody Spiera Storch and Ray DeStefano (p. 291):

Finding real Prime, even when all the carcasses are stamped USDA Prime, turns out to be an exacting task. Jody goes beneath one of the carcasses to touch the exposed thirteenth rib with her finger. "See how silky this is? Good fat, good color." Beware of dark cutters, she warns. Sometimes she'll cut a thin slice off the surface to see if the color beneath will brighten when it's exposed to air, but if it doesn't, she rejects it. Some she rejects because the texture is "ropy" instead of silky or because there's so much outside fat on it that it's "wastey," for the fat will have to be discarded. She inspects the backbone; if the meat's been sliced away, it won't age properly, the flesh will deteriorate faster. The meat she selects she stamps twice with her grandmother's long-handled brass die, which marks "F4F" within a purple ovoid, the stamp of Forman's metal factory.

"The calves used to be very rich, very grainy, but now they rush them, they force-feed them, the grain is stringy, looks like valleys and crevasses, instead of pinpoint marbling," Ray says. "It's all speed feeding now. They've changed the rules on what it takes to be Prime,and it doesn't take that much today."

(p. 292):

Besides the quality of the meat, what sets the steakhouse apart from home cooking is the quantity of heat. Typically, steakhouse kitchens go for quick-searing in upright commercial broilers that use infrared or radiant heat. Infrared uses ceramic bricks and is hotter than radiant, but the bricks are more fragile than the cast-iron burners that radiant broilers use. BTUs for either broiler are in the range of 70,000 to 104,000 per deck, which generates a quick sear that can be followed by a finishing oven. Jody and Ray compare the best way to simulate the heat of restaurant grills on home broilers, which are rarely more than 25,000 BTUs tops. Jody suggests preheating the broiler for as long as half an hour, then putting the meat close to the flame, although that creates a real risk of fire. Ray's technique is to take some of the kidney fat, melt it down, brush it on the outside, and put the meat right up to the fire in a broiler pan. "I like it singed, nice and pink in the middle, all those juices locked in."

United Steaks of America (pp. 304-307):

If you think of a cow with a body like your own, you'll find all the parts, but in different proportions and often with several different names, which confuses identification. If you think of a cow's primary muscles as a very long series attached to a backbone from head to tail, it's obvious that the front and rear muscles, where the cow's legs are, will have worked the hardest. Therefore, the tenderest and fattiest meat will lie in between and along the back. Between the shoulder (chuck) and rump (round) are the rib section and the extended loin section. The loin muscles between the rib and hip bones are so extended that we divide that section in two: the short loin, right next to the ribs, and the sirloin, between short loin and round, constituting the back and side muscles directly above the animal's loins. To the rear are the large muscle groups that make up the rump, or round. The tenderloin is a long horizontal muscle that lies just under the larger muscle of the sirloin and extends into the short loin. If we can think of the animal's short loin as equivalent ot our own dorsal muscle along the backbone at our waistline, then the animal's flank is equivalent to our abdominal muscle in front. Just above our abdominal muscle is our diaphragm, which in a cow we call the plate. This stretches between the flank and the brisket, which in our body is equivalent to our chest. Looking at the diagram of a cow, we see the rib section above the plate, and the extended loin above the flank. Flank and plate are thin muscles that get more exercise than back muscles, but not as much as shoulder and rump. Conclusion: The poshest cuts will come from rib and loin, for the good reason that they are the tenderest.

As a fat-lover, if I had a single choice of steak I'd choose the rib eye (right next to the short loin), because it combines fat with chewiness, which creates what I perceive as juiciness and flavor and, okay, umami. Club steak (sometimes called Delmonico, after New York's famed nineteenth-century restaurant) is cut next to the rib end of the short loin, sometimes with bone in and sometimes without, but its "eye" is close in quality to the rib eye. Shell or strip steak (also called New York strip, Kansas City strip) is cut from the short loin without the backbone or any part of the tenderloin, and therefore is a classic steak for one person. Porterhouse is certainly my favorite cut when serving more than one person because it's the American Ur-steak in terms of size, drama, complexity, and communality. Cut from the rear end of the short loin, it's got everything you want: a big T-shaped bone (a cross section of the backbone with its long vertebra) that separates a large top-loin muscle from the smaller tenderloin. Both muscles are enclosed in a nice rim of fat that curves around a little tail of meat like a Cajun lagniappe, an extra dividend. You can get a porterhouse cut 2 to 3 inches thick, so that you can slice it on each side of the bone as if you're carving up a Thanksgiving turkey. It's a showpiece. A T-bone steak, cut with that same-shaped bone from the center of the short loin, has a smaller piece of tenderloin. The tenderloin is my least favorite among costly cuts because it has no fat and no chewiness -- often no more texture than a wet marshmallow -- but it's convenient for slicing into rounds because it has no bone. The chateaubriand ("the aristocrat," as a 1935 magazine called it) was popular in the nineteenth century as a double-thick steak cut from the center of the tenderloin. (The rest of the filet toward the thinner end provided filet steaks, and the Frenchified tournedos and filet mignons.) Steaks cut from the sirloin, while usually flavorful in a beefy way, often disappoint me in the eating because they are cut thinner than a short-loin steak, their sacroiliac bones are more complicated than the T-bone, and the muscle is leaner and often much chewier (in fact, often tough). For me they lack the flavor burst of fat. Sirloin steak is usually cut from the "top," but a relatively new cut called the tri-tip is a small muscle in the "bottom" of the loin muscle near the hip, and is considerably more tender. The tri-tip is a good buy.

By the time we get to sirloin, however, I want to start marinating the meat to make up for less fat by external means. A large part of that cow is still available for good-tasting steaks, but you have to work a little harder than just throwing the meat on the grill. Of these, round steaks cut from the top of the round are more tender than the eye of the round near the bottom because the top gets worked less than the muscles attached to hip and leg.

(pp. 308-310):

Once you've got your dry-aged beef, how to cook it? For me a steak that is not rare is not a steak, just as a well-done hamburger is an oxymoron that should be forbidden by law and punished by hanging. But how rare is rare? Muy, très, very, says I, what the French call bleu, or black-blue. [ . . . ] Remember that raw beef, whether fancied up into steak tartare or just gnawed off the bone, has been thought tasty since beef eating began, and it's only in these latter days of industrial decadence that raw commodity beef, especially that which is ground into a slurry at the processors, has been rendered unsafe.

But the glory of steak is the dramatic conflict between the raw and the cooked, between the outside -- crusty, "carmelized," richly browned -- and the inside tenderly pink as a baby's bottom. That's what makes every bite of a steak dramatic, as opposed to the one-dimensional slices of a beef roast. It's a contradiction like a Baked Alaska, and the trick is to get these opposite effects simultaneously from the same piece of meat. The first step is to make sure the meat is at room temperature before you start. Whether you've bought it fresh or frozen is of less importance than its temperature at the moment of cooking. (If frozen, be sure to thaw it in the refrigerator -- no quick hot-water bath -- in order to conserve its juices as much as possible in the thawing.) Next, make sure that the surface of the meat is dry. Pat it well with paper towels or a kitchen towel on both sides, or place it uncovered on a rack over a pan in the refrigerator for a day or two, turning it a couple of times, for extra dryness to guarantee a really crusty crust. Just before you cook it, press grains of sea salt and lots of freshly ground pepper into both sides. Or, press in a mixed-spice rub with Asian flavors like Szechuan peppercorns, anise, cloves, cinnamon, fennel; or with Mexican flavors like ground ancho, chipotle, cumin, coriander, oregano.

Now you're ready to cook. On an outside grill, you can get good high heat by piling the hot coals in the middle until they turn to gray ash. You can sear the meat a couple of minutes on each side, then, if the meat is thick and needs slower cooking for the interior, move the steak away from the hot center. [ . . . ]

The main thing is to remove the meat before it reaches the doneness you want, because it will continue cooking as it rests, and it should rest off the head for a good five minutes before slicing. As the muscle relaxes, juices retreat into the interior from the surface, where they've been drawn by the heat. Remember: There is no such thing as exact timing because every grill is going to be different and so is the person using it. Lobel's suggests for a one-inch steak a total of 10 minutes for rare, 15 for medium, 20 for medium well, but all yardsticks are rough because the ground is uneven. There's no substitute for your own experience and the way to get it is to do it. The risks are small. If you think th steak's done and a guest cringes in disgust at a raw interior, you can always toss the meat back on the grill. If a steak's done more than you like, well, you can always whip up a little steak sauce of butter or oil with a dash of Worcestershire and some chopped herbs and garlic -- anything to ease the pain.

Finally, there are a selection of recipes:

• Rib-Eye Steaks with Thai Basil and Mint Sauce
• Jim's "Pecos Bill" Sirloin
• Jim's Grilled Elote Garnish
• Chateaubriand with Béarnaise Sauce
• Swiss Steak
• Beef and Kidney Pie Old Scotch Style
• Beefsteak with Oyster Blanket
• Traditional Steak Diane
• Beefsteak English Style
• Texas Chicken-Fried Steak with Cream Gravy
• White Dog Café's Philly Cheese Steak
• Carne Asada
• Fajitas, or Grilled Skirt Steak
• Pico de Gallo con Aguacate
• Butterflied and Stuffed Flank Steak Sicilian Style
• Cendrillon's Beef Tapa
• Teriyaki
• Flank Steak in Oyster Sauce
• Snake River Farms American Style Kobe Beef -- Shabu Shabu
• Wagyu Steak Tartare

posted 2009-10-16