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.
Event: James Beard Foundation Hosts Betty Fussell
Reserve a seat for Wednesday, Sept. 16, at The Beard House (167 West 12th Street). Discussion starts at 12 p.m. Call 212.627.2308 to reserve.
The event is part of Beard on Books, an ongoing monthly literary series featuring readings and discussions with some of the food world’s most celebrated authors. More information is available here.
Hardcore carnivore Betty Fussell details the history of the American beef industry and evaluates the challenges that it faces today in Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef. Approaching the industry from every angle, Fussell’s critique of the world of beef leaves no steak unturned: she visits independent butchers and large-scale producers, meets a diverse cast of workers who live and breathe cow, and learns about our federal system for grading cuts of meat.
Mindful of the industry’s problems while reverent of its scale and impact on our food culture, Raising Steaks is a thorough, objective, and passionate survey of a decidedly American tradition.
Our Lady of the Kitchen
by Betty Fussell
Everyone seemed to be riding the Julia wave as the media blitz for Julie & Julia swept the country this summer. I got a free ride because of my 1999 memoir, My Kitchen Wars (just out in a new paperback edition), which detailed what Julia meant to my generation of housewives in the 1960s. I was happy to be quoted, along with Nora Ephron, in the August issue of Vanity Fair by Laura Jacobs, who profiled Julia in “Our Lady of the Kitchen.”
Recalling Julia in the 60s, Nora Ephron told Jacobs, “It was an almost hilarious epidemic of cooking from that cookbook. … People would just pitch themselves into these things, and it was very much part of the fabric of all our lives in the early 60s.”
I’m cited as one of those “pitchers”: “We’d called Julia Child by her Christian name the moment Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared in 1961, because she seemed to be talking directly to us. …. To cook French, eat French, drink French was to become versant in the civilized tongues of Europe as opposed to America’s barbaric yawp.”
I got another happy freebie mention in a new novel that appeared in April, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission, set in Princeton in the 1990s, three decades after Julia had taken over the lives of women like me. Korelitz’s heroine has read up on women who’d written back stories of the academic scene, and I was happy to be linked to such notables as Rebecca Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem) and Eileen Simpson (Poets in Their Youth).
But I was even happier to be linked to Julia, even though her revolutionary shakeup of American food was perhaps all too transient in Princeton.
Korelitz writes of her heroine: “The wonderful Princeton purveyors she had read about in Betty Fussell’s gastronomic memoir, My Kitchen Wars — like the butcher who gamely ground pork and veal for clever, frustrated housewives in thrall to Julia Child — seemed to have perished, and all good restaurants, if any had existed, had evidently fled along with them.” (p.83)
Julia was a blessed person and she continues to shed her generosity of heart and mind on all of us she left behind.
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.
Recent Mentions: A Review of Raising Steaks and a Look at the Food Industrial Complex
Andrew Riely posted a review of Raising Steaks at his blog, Gulliver’s Nest, that was written for the June issue of Radcliffe Culinary Times. Here’s the intro:
When I began my graduate research on cattle ranching in Texas, I thought it amusing that most ranchers I spoke with talked a blue streak about their desire for independence and self-reliance, yet they all dressed, drove, and drank the same. Meanwhile, they eyed those few among them who challenged conventional ranching methods with deep suspicion.
Betty Fussell examines the same dynamic in her wonderful, sprawling Raising Steak, an investigation into the economics, culture, and gastronomy of American beef. How can a good steak symbolize rugged cowboy individualism when its producers are terribly afraid of sticking out from the herd?
The conundrum troubles few people, if the exploding popularity of steakhouses is any guide. Fussell gets right at steak’s raw patriotic appeal, writing, with typical strength and directness, “Real American men, women and children eat steak because it’s red with blood, blood that pumps flavor, iron, vitality, and sex into flaccid bodies. For women, steak is better than spinach. For men, it’s better than Viagra. With steak, it’s easy to get carried away.” I’ll say!
Plus: Looking at the numerous articles, books and even films released recently that take a closer look at industrial food production and the treatment of animals, Sarah Earle of the Concord Monitor questions our relationship to the food we eat. Raising Steaks, she writes, “joins a stampede of such literature barreling through the stockades that have separated the average American from his lunch since the dawn of the industrial farm.”
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.