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By Root 460 0

it was done, I cut a big hunk off, a hunk that turned out to be much larger than my windpipe. While chewing it, I debated whether the meat would make a better sandal or boot. My jaw wasn’t up to the task of pulping it, but for some reason I tried swallowing it anyway, and the meat lodged in the back of my throat like a golf ball in the mouth of a vacuum cleaner. I couldn’t breathe. Adrenaline burst, marking the onset of panic, and a cascade of thoughts followed. My daughter, not yet two, was there in the room with me, and I suddenly realized she would grow up having witnessed her father choking to death on steak while writing a book about it. I envisioned gleeful headlines on vegetarian Web sites about a steak lover’s ironic demise. The clarity was Zen-like, and I determined that my salvation lay in the steak’s incredible stringiness. I reached to the back of my mouth and clasped a ropy piece of fiber that hung off the meat like a tail, tugged on it, and, pop, the steak was out, allowing air to move into my lungs. I dangled the meat in front of my face like a tea bag on the end of its string, then tossed it into the garbage disposal and enjoyed the metallic gurgle of steak being shredded.

I went back to commodity beef. It was exponentially more tender than that grass-fed sirloin, but on the whole not really that tender. What it was, was consistent, and that consistency was astounding. All that fourteen-month-old corn-fed steak tasted the same. It tasted of nothing. This, I finally decided after one too many flavorless mouthfuls, is not steak. It is corn-fed mature veal.

One day it occurred to me: What if corn-fed steak tasted bland because the genetically modified corn cows are fed is bland? This, of course, raises another question: What does genetically modified feed corn taste like?

Back at my farmers’ market, I found a man with bushels of peaches ’n’ cream corn for sale. “Do you grow feed corn?” I asked. He didn’t, but his brother did, and the following week, as customers were picking over containers of heirloom tomatoes and potatoes still dusted with dark earth, I drove off with a bag of genetically modified feed corn. Shucking revealed a chunkier, yellower version of sweet corn whose kernels turned a rich, autumnal gold after ten minutes in boiling water. The corn itself was a chalky, pulpy, hard-to-swallow blob of gooey vegetable matter. It was the worst porridge imaginable, with only the merest corn flavor, in desperate need of raisins, nuts, and honey.

I felt sorry for the cattle that had to eat it. I wasn’t alone. Allen Williams confirmed that cattle didn’t much like it, either. If you give a cow two buckets, he said, one filled with modern super-starchy GMO feed corn and one filled with the kind of corn cattle were fed half a century ago, they will go for the old-time corn every time. It tastes better.

If I were a cow, the choice of food would be easy. Boiled GMO feed corn had nothing on the hay sauce I ate in Paris with Christophe Raoux. Hay is made out of grass; no wonder grass makes for more flavorful steak. If I wanted better steak, I was going to have to make it myself.

That’s when I started phoning farmers and asking if they had any cattle for sale.

I had an idea: apples. I wanted to feed apples to cows. In parts of Europe, farmers feed apples to pigs, and the resulting pork is apparently delicious. Apples contain lots of energy—it’s sugar, after all, that makes them so sweet. And while a bucket of apples doesn’t approach a bucket of corn in terms of energy density, apples do occur in nature. Aurochs ate fallen fruit in the primeval forests of Europe and Asia, and any apple grower will tell you how deer invade their orchards and gorge on whatever they can reach.

Apples were also an elegant solution to the bad grass problem. If the grass wasn’t sugary enough, the apples would make up for it. Apples meant I didn’t have to become an expert on the growth curves of ten different kinds of grass. Apples meant I could finish a cow on grass with a little help from the trees. And juice apples, it turned