Steak - Mark Schatzker [103]
This nightmarish thought seems to have occurred to the Argentine government. They give the big feedlots something they do not give to the cattle ranchers: a subsidy. For every cow in de Achaval’s feedlot, the government gives him 6 kilograms of corn and 3 kilograms of soybeans every day. If his company wants to export any of its beef, it must keep its fridges at 65 percent capacity. That, it seems to me, is a nice way of ensuring that steak remains both abundant and cheap, something that ought to help the Peronists the next time there is an election.
De Achaval himself is a believer in the free market. The mere concept of subsidies, he says, disgusts him. He claims, furthermore, that the cost savings resulting from all that free corn and soybeans is not helping his company. If those subsidies were abandoned, he said, the price of feedlot beef would not be affected; it would just lower the price of the steers he buys from small Argentine cow-calf farmers. “It is a very simple equation,” he explained. “Purchase price plus cost of production equals selling price. When cost goes up, I turn around and kill the cow-calf guy.”
This all sounded a tad odd. Why was a for-profit company taking a government handout and passing the cost savings over to the small farmers who sell steers? Why would a multinational be effectively handing cash over to little Argentine cow-calf farmers? I was about to ask as much, but I caught myself. I was getting caught up in Argentina’s beef politics. I wasn’t a rancher. I didn’t run a meatpacking plant. All I wanted was a good steak. The real question about feedlot beef, it seemed to me, was, Did Argentines themselves actually like the stuff?
I put the question to de Achaval: “Would you say Argentine taste in beef has changed to be more accustomed to grain-fed beef?”
“Yes,” he said. “No doubt.”
“Is the taste for the old-style beef disappearing?”
De Achaval surprised me with what he said next. “I like the old-style asado,” he told me—a shockingly candid admission coming from a guy who works for Cactus Feeders and Tyson Foods. He went on: “But I am not the one who buys the asado. I need to produce asado for the guy on the third floor in apartment B that goes to a restaurant. He has a fork and knife, and for him it needs to be tender.”
It wasn’t about flavor, in other words. It was about tenderness, world grain markets, consistent inputs (corn) leading to a consistent output (feedlot steak), and lean manufacturing. There I was, a steak fanatic ten years too late to Argentina. I may as well have been interviewing Henry Ford about the best horse-drawn buggies.
Argentine steak is presently undergoing the same process that transformed American steak after World War II. It is becoming a commoditized, fungible, industrially produced widget. It is even happening to what little grass-fed beef still remains. The realization hit me in Parilla La Colonia, the best steak house in Santa Rosa, which has an old-time elegant interior with plaid tablecloths and linen napkins folded inside empty wineglasses. On an average Wednesday night in high summer, it was packed with Argentine men in shorts and flip-flops tucking into gigantic steaks and drinking bottles of good yet astonishingly cheap red wine.
The steak did not live up to the setting. It had yellowy fat, indicating that it was probably grass-fed, and was tender and juicy, but it suffered from the same problem as the others: fade-out. There was a rush of beefy flavor, but then the flavor died, leaving