Steak - Mark Schatzker [132]
From the point of view of flavor, at least, it didn’t matter. I knew what steaks tasted best: the ones raised on grass. Were those cows happy? I assumed yes. As so many people had told me, grass is a cow’s natural environment—which isn’t quite true, because evidence suggests that aurochs spent something like half their time in forests. But was it possible that cattle were actually happier in feedlots? Was a feedlot a kind of junk-food paradise where the cows that didn’t come down with bloat, acidosis, founder, and such were immeasurably pleasured as they gorged themselves on the cattle equivalent of doughnuts and potato chips?
The woman with the answer is Temple Grandin. She is one of the world’s highest-functioning autistics as well as one of the world’s foremost experts on the inner lives of animals. The two are connected. Because of Grandin’s autism, a condition of the brain, she thinks differently from neurologically “normal” people. “The problem with normal people,” she writes in her book Animals in Translation, “is they’re too cerebral.” They parse everything they see and hear into concepts, she says, and have a habit of making the world yield to the concepts in their heads. The non-autistic strike her as walking “abstractifiers.”
Grandin thinks in objects. Her mind is a whir of detail, an ongoing festival of free association. Animals think the way Grandin does—in images. If a cow was abused by a man wearing a white hat, for example, that cow would henceforth be afraid of white hats.
This similarity of mind has given Grandin an ability to step into the minds of animals. A slaughterhouse once came to her and asked why their cattle were all getting big bruises on their chests right before slaughter. No one at the plant could figure it out. Grandin stepped into the chute and walked through it as a cow would and discovered a sharp metal bar sticking out, into which the cattle were walking. She saw detail to which others were blind. She visited another slaughterhouse where workers were constantly using electric prods to get pigs to walk down a certain chute that they did not want to enter. “What is the pigs’ problem?” everyone wondered. Grandin got down on her hands and knees and headed down the chute, where she saw what the pigs saw but the plant managers could not: a wet floor. Light was glinting off it and spooking them.
Over the past few decades, Grandin has single-handedly revolutionized the way animals in North America’s food system are treated. She has designed better feedlots and slaughterhouses. She has reduced the use of electric cattle prods. She has developed a scoring system by which slaughterhouses can themselves be graded. Cattle in a Grandin-designed slaughterhouse never have any idea where they’re headed. They calmly follow their friends single file into a big building, and soon after their world abruptly fades to black. If there were a dial measuring all the fear, pain, and anxiety experienced by the animals North Americans eat, the dial would be much closer to zero now than in the past. The reason is Temple Grandin.
She was waiting for us at the front door of the Animal Sciences Building at Colorado State University, wearing a western-style shirt featuring a scene of horses standing in a snowy field done in airbrush and an ascot tied around her neck, looking something like central casting’s idea of a prairie grandmother. She took us down to a basement boardroom that was still cool and damp in the heat of July and, despite the institutional setting, smelled like a suburban basement in summertime.
Grandin was in the mood to talk steak. She is a big-time beef eater, and will consume steak as often as three or four times a week when she’s on the road and dining in restaurants. The night before, she had been stuck at an airport hotel in Dallas due to a missed connection, and she used the meal chit provided by the airline to order a tenderloin. (“Lean and good, but not as juicy as it should have been.”)
Temple Grandin believes the quality of