Steak - Mark Schatzker [128]
Williams’s family had been farming on South Carolina’s Piedmont Plateau since 1842, when, in the early 1980s, they got into the feedlot business and eventually owned two feedlots of about fifteen thousand head. They didn’t want the short, fat British cattle—Angus, Herefords, shorthorns, Galloways—that American cattle ranchers traditionally raised. Like everyone else feeding corn to cattle, they wanted taller cattle that grew quickly and got fat on corn. They wanted yield. By the time Williams was in graduate school, he was helping create those cattle.
He was working at what’s known as a bull test station, where pedigree bulls were placed in a feedlotlike environment and fed incredible volumes of flaked corn in the hopes that they would gain a fantastic amount of weight. Bulls that got the fattest the fastest produced semen that would, in turn, sire offspring that also got fat fast on corn. Advertisements for such semen promised “high average daily gains,” and it sold for big money.
Producing that semen wasn’t easy. Some of the bulls were so obese their scrotums got fat, which raised the temperature of their testicles and shut down sperm production. And that was if they even survived the f attening period. Bulls would come down with the all the sundry feedlot illnesses—acidosis, ketosis, founder, lameness, respiratory disease, foot rot, bloat—but because each bull was worth thousands of dollars, “mortality” wasn’t an asset impairment anyone wanted to see on his balance sheet. So Williams and his fellow grad students performed veterinary triage twenty-four hours a day. “It was like critical care in a hospital,” Williams remembers. “You didn’t want any of them to die. But even with twenty-four/seven monitoring, some still died.” Williams always carried a bloat tube, and he became an expert at inserting it down a bull’s throat and into its rumen and finding the pockets of gas. “You’d know it when you hit it because there was this whoosh of air coming out, and boy, did it smell.”
It was all justified in the name of “improvement”: the weak were being selected out. In genetics classes, Williams had learned about the perils of single-trait breeding. But they were selecting for only a single trait: high average daily gains on flaked corn. It was evolution in fast-forward. What thousands of meat scientists, grad students, and cattle breeders accomplished was to change the way the American beef cattle process feed. Thanks to their grand effort—which is still moving decisively ahead—America’s cattle inched a few notches over on the evolutionary map. Compared to the cattle of fifty or a hundred years ago, they are now a little more like pigs, which aren’t good at eating grass. They’ve gotten better at converting corn to beef. Their muscle fibers are bigger, leaner, and less tender than they used to be.
The “utter ridiculousness” of what was going on at bull test stations all across America finally struck Williams one cold winter night in 1989. He was on the meat science faculty at Louisiana Tech University, where he ran the school’s bull test station. A grad student phoned him in the middle of the night with bad news: a bull had come down with a bad case of bloat and looked as if it wasn’t going to make it. Williams drove to the station as fast as the law permitted and found a bull lying on its side in pouring rain, breathing fast, its head in the mud. He and his students got down and kneeled in a cold slurry of mud and manure and tried to lift the bull upright, but it wouldn’t budge. They were soaked with rain and covered in filth, the temperature was a few degrees above freezing, and a prized bull was about to die. A thought occurred to Williams: What the hell are we doing?
The following year, Williams decided to keep the bulls on pasture and feed them less corn. They still got sick, but not as sick. The year after, he fed them even less corn. In time, grass became a bigger