Steak - Mark Schatzker [119]
Carla appeared. The premise of the day hung heavy and unspoken in the air between us. “Do you want to give her some apples?” she asked. I grabbed a sack and walked over to Fleurance. In my other hand was the feed bucket, now filled with the final two cans of beer. She downed the brew in less than a second, pushing the bucket hard into my midsection as she tried to vacuum the remaining drops off the bottom. I took an apple out of the bag.
Humans have long believed that because we can express the experience of living in words, life for us is more richly observed and enjoyed. When a cow chews an apple, after all, it cannot frame the experience with concepts like sweet, sour, juicy, or peppery. Animals are stupefied by their own ignorance, or so we like to think. But of all the states of mind, none is simpler than pleasure. If you don’t believe me, watch a cow eat an apple. The way Fleurance was chewing, it was evident that the apple was, for her, a 99, an A-plus, a tart and crisp tour de force with notes of cinnamon, citrus tang, and apple blossom. Her immersion in apple pleasure was total. She crushed it against her upper palate in a state approaching trance as juice ran out the corners of her mouth.
Deliciousness is a matter of survival. Ripe fruit tastes sweet to cows, monkeys, and humans because sweetness equals sugar, which equals energy, which equals survival. Meat tastes delicious to humans because meat equals umami and fat, which equal protein and energy, which equal survival. Evolutionarily, taste precedes language by millions of years. Deliciousness is more fundamental than eloquence. Fleurance loved that apple. She did not diminish the experience by trying to find the words to describe it. In a few hours, she would be dead, but at that moment I envied her pure and unmediated sense of pleasure.
The deliveryman arrived. He backed his livestock trailer to the barn door, and when we opened it, Fleurance made no move toward it. The knot of anxiety in my stomach tightened. I stood at the front of the trailer and tempted her with an apple. Nothing. The deliveryman got behind her and gave her a push and Fleurance finally took a step toward the trailer. Another step, and then another, until she raised a hoof and stepped up onto the trailer without so much as a rise in pulse. Fleurance walked forward and took the apple. The gate was closed.
Fifteen minutes later at the abattoir, my spirits nose-dived. The owner, Scotty, who is the loud and friendly type, was in a jokey mood. “Look how skinny she is,” he said. “I’m going to have to sell you a bottle of barbecue sauce.”
I was obsessing about a phenomenon called cold-shortening, which occurs when a warm carcass is chilled too quickly. It’s the meat equivalent of a runner getting a cramp on a cold morning, as the cold causes the muscle to tense up and become tough and chewy. Cold-shortening is particularly common with grass-fed beef, because grass-fed cattle are often leaner and don’t have as thick a layer of back fat as grain-fed cattle, which insulates against cold-shortening.
My adrenaline and cortisol were really flowing now. Events were happening in fast-forward. I paid the deliveryman, who said that he wished all his cattle were as cooperative as Fleurance. I spent a few minutes—or maybe an hour, I don’t know—chatting with a guy who pulled up behind me with a bison in his trailer. There was a loaded rifle in the cab of his