Steak - Mark Schatzker [14]
The study describes the Beef Loyals as follows: “They were average in age, income, education and household size. They were not particularly concerned with diet and health issues. Their food preferences were not driven by budget concerns. They had positive attitudes about beef and considerably fewer positive attitudes about chicken.” The Beef Loyals, unsurprisingly, enjoyed clod steaks more than the Budget and Variety Rotators. (They are nothing if not loyal.) Philadelphians thought fried clod steaks tasted better than grilled clod steaks. But in Chicago, respondents felt just the opposite, preferring grilled to fried. In both cities, flavor was considered more important than tenderness or juiciness.
Beef Loyals of the world, there is good news. Achieving marbled beef is easy: what you need is corn. You need steamed, flaked corn, and you need a lot of it. None other than the chair of the Texas Tech Meat Science Department told me so. He happens to have the same name as the thirteen-year-old who won the high school meat-judging competition I witnessed—Markus Miller—because that boy is his son. I sat in his office, next to shelves filled with published findings on the science of meat, where he put it thus: corn equals marbling, and marbling equals flavor.
Few things in life reduce to such a simple formula, but steak is one of them.
American cattle didn’t always eat corn. When the Spanish first moved their Mexican herds up into Texas, they grazed on grass. When British settlers arrived, they pastured their animals in meadows and forests. The first American cattle to eat corn did so in eighteenth-century Appalachia, and they ate the whole plant—leaves, cob, everything.
According to Markus Miller Sr., American beef has never tasted as good as it tastes right now. It started improving after World War II, when a meat scientist at Texas Tech named Ralph Durham helped develop bovine meals that included enormous quantities of starchy corn. (A meat pioneer to the max, Durham also invented a method of injecting melted beef fat into steak to “create” marbling.) Before World War II, roughly one in twenty steaks came from a grain-fed cow. Today, just about all of them do.
In the modern industrial system, steak has effectively become a widget. The industry refers to its own product—unironically—as “commodity beef.” Beef is a commodity in the same way that corn, gravel, rubber, soybeans, uranium, Brent crude, copper, and palm oil are commodities. It is mass-produced, uniform, and predictable. USDA-graded live cattle are traded as “cattle futures” on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A cattle future lets you buy live beef at a particular price at a future date; a single contract consists of 40,000 pounds of live cattle. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange trades roughly 45,000 contracts a day, which amounts to roughly 1.8 billion pounds of live beef. Some of the people making trades are pure speculators, men and women who make or lose entire fortunes on cattle without once inhaling the smell of manure. Some are big chain restaurants looking to hedge a commodity whose price could go up.
A big steak house chain might buy cattle futures as a hedge against a possible rise in the price of beef, then sell the contract to a meatpacker like Swift or Tyson. A week later, that steak house chain could phone up the very same meatpacker and buy thousands of pounds of beef. In all likelihood, that beef would not come from the same cattle whose futures the steak house had so recently owned. There is no way of knowing. Live cattle futures are traded anonymously in a pit or online. Buyers don’t know sellers, and sellers don’t know buyers. But it hardly matters. Feedlots churn out identical fleets of cattle, and the packers churn out boxes