Long ago, words like “organic,” “fresh,” “local” and “healthy” were hijacked by industry marketers. Today, producers and marketers who should and do know better — upscale producers like Creekstone Farms and upscale marketers like WholeFoods — have turned “natural” and “sustainable” into gobbledygook for the naive.
Alas, in our current Madmen age, labels are made to deceive, and high-end marketers and chefs are as vulnerable as the rest of us to “feel-good” labels from food producers.
Take beef, for example. Eric Brandt, of a mid-size family company in Brawley, Calif., called Brandt Beef, was the cover boy in April of Meating Place. This is the industry’s trade magazine, and they praised him for making “a great sales pitch to high-end chefs.” Some of the best chefs in NYC have succumbed.
His pitch hypes “natural” into “true natural.” But all he means by this is “no hormones, no antibiotics” for a specified period of time. Since that’s become a conventional industry practice for many producers, he adds “true,” which is false.
He uses feedlots and intensive grain diets, but there’s nothing natural about CAFOS and CORN. Nothing at all. And have you noticed how often nowadays corn-fed has been euphemized into “an all-vegetarian diet?”
Brandt’s pitch is particularly deceptive because he uses male Holstein calves (the dairy industry sells them cheap), which from day one have never touched mama’s milk from the udder. To read more about his “corn is true natural” defense, read Amy Westervelt’s story at The Faster Times.
Let the industry praise him for his booming boosterism, but let buyers — chefs and eaters — beware.
It’s been a busy year for Betty Fussell. A brief re-cap:
* In April, Betty wrote about her first deer hunt for the Lives page of The New York Times Magazine. At age 82, in the foothills of the Swan Mountains in Montana, Betty shot, killed and ate the heart of a young doe. Titled “Earning Her Food: Granny Gets Her Gun and Goes Hunting for the First Time,” the piece drew both praise (“Go, Granny, go!”) and criticism (“Shame on you, Granny”) from Times readers.
* In the March issue of Saveur magazine, spotlighting food in L.A., Betty joined a notorious gang of four, including MFK Fisher, Marion Cunningham and Julia Child. The women were featured under the caption, “Home Grown in L.A: Los Angeles and the Surrounding Region Have Produced Some of Our Most Influential Cooks.” Born in Riverside, Betty is the youngest of these notables by five years.
* In the 10th anniversary issue of Gastronomica (Jan/Feb 2010), Betty was one of 10 distinguished food voices asked to “speak out about food culture today.” Noting the shift from real food to food porn, she writes, “We don’t watch sexy Rachael or Bobby on the boob tube because we’re hungry for food.”
Book readings, panels and lectures so far in 2010 have taken Betty from Boston to Kentucky:
* In Boston she helped Boston University celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Culinary Arts Program with a lecture on American beef. Betty was invited as part of BU’s “MLA in Gastronomy Lecture Series in Food Studies.”
* In Kentucky she was a featured speaker with Gary Nabhan at the annual conference of the American Grassfed Association, held at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She also led a panel with Nabhan and John van Willingen that put “Meat on the Table: Past, Present and Local.”
* Back home in Manhattan, she joined Monica Bhide, Kathleen Flinn and Mimi Sheraton for a panel at the Roger Smith Food Writers’ Conference on food memoir, “Turning Your Life and Food into a Best Seller.”
* At the Astor Center in Manhattan, she joined Slow Food U’s panel on “Green Beef,” run by Michael Crupain of TheDairyShow.com. After previewing his show on the subject of grass-fed beef from pasture to plate (watch for it this summer), Michael led a lively discussion among audience and panel members: Dan Gibson, owner of Grazing Angus Acres, Jake Dickson of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in the Chelsea Market and Josephine Proul, executive chef of Local 111 restaurant in Philmont, N.Y.
* Later this spring, Betty’s pursuit of food paths will take her on a culinary trip to Mexico City, Queretaro, Guanajuato and Morelia, led by the grande dame of Mexican cuisine, Patricia Quintana.
For a hawk’s-eye view of what’s happening in Green Beef, check out Will Harris on a new DVD called “CUD.”
Produced by Southern Foodways Alliance and Whole Foods, the documentary title says it all, but you gotta pronounce it the way Will does, “COULD.”
Will’s accent is thick as red clover in May at White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga., where I visited him a couple of weeks ago. Not an easy place to get to — nor to leave. His great-granddaddy brought cows to this spot near the Florida border in 1866, and his family’s grazed them here ever since.
To get here you fly to Atlanta, drive south for three hours, and watch Piedmont turn into Coastal Plains. Cows love it. And Will loves cows.
Also wildlife. I find him in his office feeding pieces of raw beef heart to an injured red-tail hawk. His office is part of his new processing plant, where he turns his cows into steaks.
Recently I ate some of those at the James Beard House around the corner from me in Manhattan. They’d been cooked by chef Linton Hopkins from Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. This is why the story “CUD” tells is important. Small-scale processing supplies the missing link in that ever-greening path from farm to table.
Will bet his 1,000-acre farm on the plant, which enables him to sell to the Southern Region of Whole Foods, from Miami, Fla., to Princeton N.J. Small scale means control. Where industrial processors slaughter 5,000 cows an hour, Will does 5,000 a year. Control means not just the mantra of local, organic, humane, safe, sustainable — but the certifiable reality of each of these words.
It’s organic all the way. Zero waste means wash-water is cleaned and piped into the fields. Carcass waste (innards, bones, fat) becomes fertilizer by way of a giant Digester. He’s added chickens to the organicizing process and will soon add the larva of Black Soldier Flies to feed the chicks which feed the grass.
Grass is not just an edible carpet for cows but also for the horses grazing by his house, across the road from the plant, and next to the house he grew up in where his mama lives still. His three daughters will continue the 144 years of this farm’s local sustainable history because they understand their daddy’s vision.
“I began to feel that sending off my calves to the feedlot,” Will says, “was like sending my daughters to a whore-house.”
Watch a short version of “CUD” below, and for a glimpse of real green, visit Will’s website: www.whiteoakpastures.com.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
When I was in Paris last June, for the first time in years, I was surprised to find a long-loved friend on the menu of every bistro I went to — Steak Tartare. I’d forgotten how long it’d been missing from the menus of cafes and restaurants across America. In fact, it had been missing from my own kitchen. One forkful, however, and I remembered how passionate our friendship once had been.
My guess is that raw beef disappeared from the menus of America around 2003, about the time the Mad Cow scare came in. For decades, Steak Tartare had been a fabled item at places like the “The 21 Club,” but that was before raw fish became chic and raw beef and raw eggs taboo. Of course the E.coli tainted hamburgers of The Jack-in-the-Box chain in the mid-90s did nothing to reassure a nervous public, nor did last year’s recall of several hundred million pounds of ground beef from a California Meat Packing Company.
But does that mean we should Eat Beef No More? Of course not. It does mean that we should choose our beef carefully — choose it for quality, which puts top priority on flavor and wholesomeness. Industry’s runaway commodification of all our factory-raised foods, but most egregiously meat and poultry, has tried to con the public into equating Cheap with Good. That is dead wrong. Cheap is as cheap does, and cheap comes from mass production, which is the opposite of raising calves and cows properly — without hormones or antibiotics, feeding them properly on grass, processing them properly on a scale that is humane, manageable and safe.
Quality meat guarantees that the meat you buy is fresh meat, not fiddled with chemically to prolong its shelf life. In other words, we must distinguish between artisan beef and commodity beef. Common sense tells us that we must expect to pay more for real food than faux food. The French have always been smart about that.
Thank god artisan beef has returned to this country as part of the greening movement. At last, we have other places to buy meat than in behemoth supermarkets. At last, we are restoring heritage breeds, not just breeds that put on weight fast and are sent to market as obese teenagers. At last, we are replacing a forced-fed grain diet with a ruminant’s natural one of grass. At last, we’re letting cows put on flesh in their own sweet time, not according to the slaughter-house schedule. At last, we can restore Steak Tartare to our menus by choosing our beef carefully from a source that we trust, whether we buy it already ground or grind the cut ourselves.
One of the most luscious meats in the world comes from the increasingly popular breed called Wagyu (sometimes called Kobe because that’s the port this Japanese breed of beef was originally shipped from). This breed (even when it’s crossbred with Angus and other American breeds) is so highly marbled that it makes our USDA scale of select, choice and prime seem primitive. Some call it white beef because a Wagyu steak looks like a slab of white speckled with red. I call it beef butter because it is a thing unto itself, like foie gras.
To make a Tartare of ground Wagyu is to eat beef butter highly seasoned by spices yet smoothed by the richness of mayonnaise. By choosing a source you can trust, you can banish fear and guarantee pleasure, knowing you’re going to get maximum bang for whatever bucks you pay.
Wagyu Steak Tartare
From Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef by Betty Fussell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).
With a sharp knife, chop the meat as fine as you can and then chop again. (A processor will turn this beef to mush.) Next chop the anchovies, onion, capers, and parsley until they are uniform in size. In a large bowl beat the egg yolk with the mustard, Worcestershire, and cognac. Gradually beat in the olive oil until the mixture thickens. Add pepper and Tabasco. Add the meat and chopped ingredients and mix well but very gently with your hands to keep the meat light and air-filled. Form gently into four to six patties and top each with a toast point set upright. Yield: 4 servings.
A few online sources: snakeriverfarms.com, preferredmeats.com, lobels.com, debragga.com, heritagefoods.com, ranchfoodsdirect, com, lacensebeef.com, lasatergrasslandsbeef.com, eatwild.com.
I’ve just heard from my friends Nicolette and Bill Niman that I’ve made an inadvertent but egregious error in my text of Raising Steaks that I want to correct immediately because it raises an important issue in the raising of livestock.
After visiting Bill’s breathtakingly beautiful ranch in Bolinas, CA, a a few years ago, I’d gone on to visit the small Purple Sage Feedlot he’d used for his cattle in Caldwell, ID. This was run by a knowledgeable and caring couple, Rob and Michelle Stokes, who now work with the many kinds of livestock the Nimans now raise exclusively on the pastures at Bolinas.
Back then, Rob had explained to me that the two common feeds standard in the cattle industry were feather meal and distiller grains. But I made a big mistake when I quoted Rob as saying “The two common feeds we use …”(page 114).
I’d never heard of feather meal, so Rob explained that it is made from hydrolyzed chicken feathers and is used because this protein content degrades slowly in a cow’s rumen and thereby helps utilize the animal’s entire gastrointestinal tract. What’s wrong with feather meal is that chicken feathers are an animal byproduct and at that time I didn’t realize the importance of this issue in matters of beef safety, not to mention matters of animal welfare in general.
After I learned a lot more in the course of writing this book about the relation of cattle feed to cattle diseases like E.coli and Mad Cow, I should have realized something was wrong with my notes if I had Rob saying he used this byproduct as a common feed. I quoted him wrongly and I’m particularly sorry because the Nimans, and the Stokes, have always strongly opposed feeding feather meal to animals.
Bill Niman first created his company out of concern for the health and wellbeing of livestock raised for meat and as an alternative to the increasingly scary methods used by the meat industry. Nicolette Hahn spent her lawyer’s career working on the impact of industrial food systems on our environment, as you can read in her new book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (see my earlier post).
That they are living that life as a married couple, with the Stokes living nearby, well — even though Bill has recently lost his own corporatized company, it still seems like a Technicolor ending with goats romping in the grass and Heidi running to her grandpa with some fresh cheese. We count on the Nimans and Stokes of this world to provide alternatives to that buffalo stampede of the entire industrialized food chain over the cliff.
Cooking Up a Storm: "Egg"-cellent with Betty Fussell
Click Here to Listen! Cooking up a Storm
Betty Fussell stops by the Clocktower to pay a visit to Marja Samsom and conduct experiments in dessert alchemy. This episode highlights the egg-based dessert... [read more]
Long ago, words like “organic,” “fresh,” “local” and “healthy” were hijacked by industry marketers. Today, producers and marketers who should and do know better — upscale producers like Creekstone Farms and upscale marketers like WholeFoods — have turned “natural” and “sustainable” into gobbledygook for the naive.
