Review: A History of Beef, Times Two

by Betty Fussell

Just came upon a review from the Oct. 22, 2008 Time magazine, “A History of Beef, Times Two,” in which Gilbert Cruz compares Raising Steaks to Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, by Andrew Rimas & Evan D.G.Fraser (William Morrow).

I was pleased that the reviewer’s verdict was to “skim” Beef but “read” Raising Steaks. For read, I’d say, “Chew on it,” particularly since he praised both books for reminding us “that as tasty as burgers and steak may be, there’s a price to be paid — in oil, land and treasure.”

Check Out Write ‘Em Cowboy for Good Cookin’

by Betty Fussell

My pal Cowboy Jim Hodges, way down there in Texas, has got a new website — Write ‘Em Cowboy! — and if you want to see Emeril on a horse, this is where to go (yes, that’s Jim and Emeril on the left. Jim has a complete slideshow on his site).

This is not the kind of range Emeril is used to. Jim knows how to cook outdoors on a campfire, so check out his recipes under “Cowboy Cookin” if you’ve got a campfire and a horse.

Interviews with Friends and Mimosas Are Best

by Betty Fussell

I recently did a radio interview with Patrick Martins of Heritage Foods and Shanna Pacifico, chef at Back Forty, which aired live Aug. 9 on Heritage Radio Network.

Patrick broadcasts live on Sundays under the rubric “The Main Course” at Roberta’s Pizza, an oasis in the abandoned industrialism of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Patrick, Shanna and I chewed the fat while drinking a pitcher of freshly squeezed Mimosas and eating a brunch of polenta with poached eggs. Under the circumstances, it was real easy to talk.

Heritage Foods inaugurated a new beef program this year, the “Beef Cattle Share Program,” where you can buy online 1/8th of a grass-fed cow that will arrive at your doorstep cut into various prime steaks, stew cubes and ground for hamburger. While it’s not local (this year the program’s cattle were raised in California), it’s quality grass-fed beef, humanely raised, and it’s one way to cut costs by buying the cow on the hoof.

Tsunami Julia

by Betty Fussell

Hurricane Bill was nothing to Tsunami Julia. Julia washed over America this summer like a perfect media storm, the kind usually caused by a Sci-Fi Blockbuster. How soon will we have little action dolls in aprons and cleavers, or interactive TV games for kiddies played out with skillets and ice picks?

Actually, we already do and it’s called Iron Chef. But who could have predicted that real life Julia Child, that big-jawed giant of 6’2”, would morph into one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses and become an instant Hollywood star?

We all know the power of imagery but hold on — we’ve been warned by the late Michael Jackson that we ought to ask, What do we see when we look in the mirror? We also ought to ask, Who hung the mirror?

Julie & Julia set up a funhouse mirror. Now every little blogger in the country, who like real life Julie Powell (of the Julie/Julia Project) dreams by night of fame and fortune, will drown by day in oceans of butter while images of Meryl dance in her head. As she whips up one more Sabayon Mousseline and lets out her jeans, she’ll fantasize not just her big-screen career but her big-book career as a best-selling author.

The unlikely fact that Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking hit the #1 spot on The New York Times’ Bestseller List in August, after a delay of a mere 50 years, gives the fantasy some teeth.

So what’s wrong with this picture and why shouldn’t we cheer on a Julia resurgence? Because a nation deserves the fantasies it lives by, and ours have become as dangerous as Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. The bookend to the escapist fantasy of Julie & Julia is the documentary Food, Inc., which made a few ripples but not a tsunami.

How could it be otherwise? It’s not a fluffy romance about making it. It’s a monster movie about making everything Big. Who wants to see the ugliness of an industrial food chain that thrives by making people fat? Who wants to look at fat people at all? Or at billions of beheaded chickens or at characters named Diabetes and E.col. 0157? Puhleeze, give me James Bond 007.

A Stonyfields Farm truck delivering at WalMart / Food Inc.

For millions of people, the realities of the Recession are depressing enough without a bunch of talking heads undermining our faith in the American belief that cheap is good. In a culture queasy with fear, we don’t want to know where something as basic as food comes from. One of Food, Inc.’s stars, Michael Pollan, got famous by doing just that when his book In Defense of Food became a best seller last year. He made clear that what we’re eating everyday as food — fast, cheap, synthetic — is not real.

But to get really famous, Pollan would have to become a big-screen action hero played by Bruce Willis in rimless glasses. The message of today’s multiplex media is not information but escape. Neither the tsunami about Julia nor the little wave about industrial food is really about food. Both movies are about what we see in the mirror and what we want to see, and how we confuse those two images all the time.

Holding a mirror up to the nature of the American food scene is just too much for millions of us to stomach. We’d so much rather feed our hunger with images of Julia/Meryl’s joy. And while we’re watching, how about sharing that bag of Jumbo Popcorn — don’t hold the ersatz butter.

(cross-posted at Huffington Post)

Does Rich Mean Fat or Flavor?

Photo by Rolando Jones

by Betty Fussell

In his recent review of Peter Hoffman’s Savoy Restaurant in New York City, Frank Bruni of The New York Times complains that the grass-fed beef that the Chef serves “doesn’t have the richness of the best grain-fed beef” and so isn’t worth the price.

Give me a break. Grain-fed means fat, both inside the muscle and out. Grain is not about flavor. The best grain-fed beef is aged post-mortem to give it the flavor it lacks from the feed. Grass-fed beef is a different sort of beast entirely, not only in what the steers are fed but in how we expect greened beef to taste. Taste is in the head before it’s on the tongue.

We don’t expect a wild duck to taste like a farm-raised White Pekin, nor a duck breast of any kind to taste like foie gras. Those French words mean “fat liver,” and it’s the unnatural amount of fat that gives that liver its superb buttery texture. I’ve always thought of it as duck butter. Since I love ordinary dairy-cow butter, I also love duck butter.

I also love beef butter. That’s what you get from highly marbled Wagyu/Kobe beef, whether purebred or crossed with Angus. Wagyu/Kobe costs a super amount of money because it is superfat. This is one reason why Bruni, along with most Americans and certainly the American beef industry, equates “richness” with high fat and high prices.

But if “richness” means flavor and intensity instead of fat, a whole new world opens. Fat can be a carrier of flavor but in itself its sensuous quality is texture not flavor. True flavor profiles, on the other hand, are as complicated with meats as they are with wines. One of the criticisms of the grain-fed beef industry about grass-feed beef is that it tastes “gamey.” Unfortunately, most of us Americans have lost the taste of what true game is — “wild” — because wild game cannot be legally sold in most states.

The application of USDA rules are so complicated on this issue that it does bear inspection (see Michaela York’s “Where Are the Wild Things?” in the May 2009 issue of Food Arts). The result is that for decades Americans who neither hunt nor have friends who hunt do not know what the taste of any wild thing is.

Most game sold as “wild” in restaurants is farm-raised (and grain-fed). Genuinely wild game feeds on all kinds of grasses and forage plants. The “richness” of wild game, which is notably lean rather than fat, depends not just on breed but on its intense flavors from all that foraging. While any game or beef flavor is deepened by aging, the flavors of grass-fed cattle are closer to the flavor spectrum of game than that of any corn-fed beast.

But why narrow our flavor range with beef by setting up a price/pleasure index that says high pleasure means high fat means high cost? Contrary to Wally Simpson, you can be too rich and too thin: too rich in mere fat and too thin in real flavor. Restaurant reviewers are no exception to the need to retrain the conditioned American palate.

A trip to Argentina (except for the governor of South Carolina) might be in order to discover the richness of exclusively grass-fed beef that the Argentines have delighted in from the first cow on the pampas. Or maybe a side trip to Australia and New Zealand. We don’t have to be parochial about our corn-fed idea that fat is the only thing that counts.

How Mavericks Became Zombies

by Betty Fussell

Names matter, as the marketer of any brand name knows well. But let’s separate living brands from dead ones. Dead ones are zombie brands that pretend to be live ones, that suggest the practices of the originating company but conceal the changes executed by new owners who hide behind the old familiar name. Are we still saving the rainforests when we eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? Not since it was bought by Unilever.

From the current marketing of brands you’d never know that the word “branding” comes from the practice of burning a mark with a hot iron into a hide, bovine or human, to claim ownership. It might be a cow, it might be a slave. A burned-in brand was supposed to mean “my property.”

That equation did not suit Samuel Augustus Maverick, who had both slaves and cows in the 19th century, when he acquired most of West Texas. His attitude was, “If I own it, I don’t need to brand it.”

During the time of cattle drives and roundups, before industrialization ended all the fun, the rule of the range was that any calf which became separated from its mother belonged to the first person to brand it. As we know, that allowed rogues, rustlers and cattle barons leeway to discover a remarkable number of unbranded calves (who became known as “mavericks”) and of already branded ones that they could alter the mark of right quick.

Outside the cattle world, “maverick” came to mean someone who didn’t play by the rules — an outsider, a loner, a cowboy like James Garner in the original Maverick of 1957. Today a genuine maverick company in the conglomerated food industry is one that keeps ownership of its good name. That is increasingly hard to do.

The gaps between brand name and ownership widen even as I write. Since the power of a brand depends entirely on a consumer’s associations with a particular name, it behooves the big boys to keep quiet when they buy up the little boys.

I learned this decades ago when Kraft Foods bought up a little hippie group in Colorado, which sold “natural herb tea” under the name “Celestial Seasonings.” The name and the packaging — especially the idyll of peace, love, dove evoked by a girl on a swing in a nature wonderland of butterflies and swans — have remained the same as the owners changed and changed again. News flash: The current owner has just announced on CelestialSeasonings.com a change of packaging at last: “A New Look Outside … the Same Celestial Magic Inside!” Nature’s still there but the girl is gone.

I did not learn enough, however, to keep from being gulled when I agreed for a brief time to be a spokesperson for Entenmann’s Baked Goods. Only near the end of my tour did I discover that the local Brooklyn bakery had been bought out by Warner-Lambert and then General Foods, a subsidiary of Philip Morris. I should have suspected something was afoot when Entenmann’s was advertising its doughnuts as good for you because they were “fat-free.”

Caveat emptor, buyer beware, still warns against being fooled by deceptions like zombie brands. Take two examples in the meat world: Coleman’s beef and Niman’s pork. Coleman’s Natural Beef is owned by Meyer Natural Angus, Niman Ranch by Hilco. Both companies are in the commodity biz, but the brand marketing is all about the standards of excellence of the original owners.

This deception harms small independent companies like Heritage Foods and Ranch Foods Direct that have to compete with zombie brands. Even Shakespeare warned against trusting those who would brandish their names to conceal their true identities and motives. Two of his most dangerous villains, Iago and Shylock, each defended himself by declaring the virtue of “my good name.”

Here are a few websites that help track the corporate parent companies of  “organic natural” brands that began as “mavericks” in the industrial chain: Nutrition Wonderland, Endgame.org and the Organic Consumers Association. Of course the parents may be owned or controlled by other parents, like Hains-Celestial Group by Heinz. Corporate family trees are designed to discourage consumer trackers.

“My Kitchen Wars” and Other Battles

by Betty Fussell

I never really thought of the Freudian possibilities of the fork until I saw the cover design by Bison Press of their new paperback edition of My Kitchen Wars.

That little female figurine with that big big fork, suggestively positioned for attack, not only made me laugh aloud but condensed into an image the lucidity of Laura Shapiro’s introduction: “Her coming-of-age takes place in the kitchen, a historically feminine environment reconceived as a site for armed combat.”

And to think that I just saw a one-woman show performed by Brigid Moynahan, the daughter of one of my oldest friends from the 1950s, called Doll Wars (Why Mom Wouldn’t Buy Me a Barbie), in which she uses her mother’s refusal to buy her a Barbie Doll as a symbol for the generational conflict between women trying to figure out who they are and want to be.

Forks at the ready, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters do not go easy into that on-going battle.

Here’s an excerpt from My Kitchen Wars.

Don’t Cry for Cows, All Ye Vegans

by Betty Fussell

Cry instead for the carrot,  weep for the orange, sorrow for the rice, sob for the water we ingest by the gallon. But let’s not pretend we made the rules to which we are always, of course, the exception.

Let other forms of life — rooty things, leafy things, flittery things, creepy crawly things, finny things, feathered things, hooved things, clawed things — play the game by nature’s rules. We’re above all that. We’re human. We’re intelligent. We make our own rules. We decide what and who gets eaten. We feel smug about our choice.

Let’s leave smugness to those who will eat nothing with an eye in it, nothing that has blood in it, nothing that is “sentient” — whether clam, crayfish, carp, cow, chicken or child. But sentient? Capable of feeling and perception? Defined by whom? By us, of course, in our cosmic club of  PLU. PLUs think a stone has no life in it because it is not sentient in the way we are.

Read Czeslaw Milosz on the life of a stone, read Shakespeare for heaven’s sake. Who are we to determine the order of the universe by the measure of what we perceive to be human consciousness, human feelings and human perceptions? Who do we think we are?

Do we think we are kings of the mountain, pinnacles of the evolutionary chain, because we think and feel in our big-brained way to do smart things like kill and eat each other? Do we think all created things aspire to be us, if only they’d been born lucky — like us? Do we think our end will be different from any other form of being in the great cycles of life and death, mutability and permanence, light and darkness?

Before we cry for those we’ve adopted as “us” — the cow, pig, chicken, goat, fish, partridge, deer, buffalo, all of those with eyes in their heads — let’s cry for Adam and the human condition. It is those who fear death, and the end of human sentience, who fear forms of being different from their own. They fear and refuse to acknowledge the fact that all men and women live, like everything else, to die.

We did not create ourselves. We are not exempt from the rule that life feeds on life — whether in the form of cow, orange, rice or water. If you can’t stomach that, don’t rationalize it as virtue. In such a big universe, smugness is about the size of a mini-quark.

Dining My Way Through Jazz Fest

Oysters at Bourbon House

by Betty Fussell

Judy Walker, food editor of  The Times-Picayune, posted a nice write-up of my recent New Orleans visit, which included a lecture May 2 at the Southern Food & Beverage Museum.

During Jazz Fest week, I had dinner at Bourbon House with owners Dickie Brennan and his partner, Steve Petius, and lunch with John Folse, Michaela York, and Danling Gao Gideon (of Chef John Folse & Company) at the Old Gumbo Pot, where Leah Chase at age 16 had her first job in a restaurant (see Chase’s Gumbo Z’herbes).

Poppy Tooker (founder of Crescent City Farmers Market) showed me the ropes for a full day at the Jazz Fest (beer & vodka do mix), and Liz Williams, founder of SOFAB, took me to dinner with Daphne Derven (New Orleans Food & Farm Network) at Gallatoire’s. NOLA is a mini food-cosmos all its own.

Blogging for Beef

by Betty Fussell

A funny thing happened on my way to a beef tasting: I fell into a blog. Or rather into the rabbit hole of Blogville, flickring and twittering. As startled as Alice, I found in an apartment right in my own neighborhood a well-lit gang of young impassioned foodies, each equipped with cell-phone cameras, video cameras, mics. Yikes.

Chief blogger was a handsome private chef, Mark Tafoya, who with Jennifer Iannolo had set up a Food Blogger Playdate for some of their blogging pals. Like Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen, who was introducing us to black garlic; Anu Karwa of Swirl Events, who was vocalizing the wine; and Grace Piper of Fearless Cooking, who brought an awesome turnip puree. You can see the whole thing for yourself below:

I came with play-pal Carrie Oliver of the Artisan Beef Institute (also see her blog on artisan beef), who I introduced earlier on my blog. And it was Carrie who provided the main event —a tasting of five different beef steaks, some grass finished, some grain finished, some aged longer than others, but all of them from different breeds.

There was a Holstein-Frisian, a pure-bred Angus, an American Kobe (meaning Wagyu crossed with Angus), a Charolais, a Belted Galloway. What with the different breeds and feeds and places they came from (call it terroir if you must), they were a bit hard to compare but exciting to taste. All those subtle differences of flavor and texture. My tasting notes say such unhelpful things as “tastes of buttercups,” “caramelized nuts,” “Parmesan cheese,” “maple syrup.” Oh well. The language of wine tastings is just as idiotic.

What I really discovered is how food blogging has brought in a resurgence of older forms of communal food sharing, where dishes and information are shared as openly, joyfully and proudly as at an old-time church supper. We oohed and ahhed over Grace’s turnip dish and immediately took notes on how to do it at home. The bloggers are returning home cooking to our homes at the same time they’re enlarging our way of getting new, unheard-of ingredients from everywhere — like that black fermented garlic. Earthy Delights advertises it on Jaden’s blog and Jaden served it with chopped tomatoes as bruscetta.

And just as I’m finding my footing in the blog, I find the sky blackened by tweets. The New York Times alerted me to Maureen Evans’ recipes in tweet lingo sent out to the universe from her home in Northern Ireland. I hope her 140-character “tweets recipes” are going to obliterate with a touch of the keyboard the claims of greedy publishers over this last half century to any recipes they’ve published as THEIR property, instead of as shorthand notations of how-to, which by federal law cannot be copyrighted. In case you missed it, here’s one of Evans’ most triumphant notations:

Strudel Pastry: cut 2T butter/1c flour/mash tater. Knead w 2t yeast/2T h2o; rise 1h. On flour cloth gently pull 17×25”;trim-1:/butter well.

Next time I have a potato, I’ll try out her strudel because it seems perfectly clear in all its essentials. And that’s all you need in a recipe. A tweet for steak might read:

Thick Beef Steak: s&p both sides; sear on h grill 5m; turn; rmove&rest 10 m. Srv w butter+herbs.

That took a mere 97 characters. No wonder Tweety Bird has always been one of my favorite characters. I wonder if I could video blog her eating a steak?