Steak - Mark Schatzker [16]
I was struck by a thought: Elk. Not only elk, but moose and deer, too. These animals are, just like cattle, ruminants. They predigest all their food in the first of four stomachs, called a rumen. I have eaten deer, moose, and elk several times, and they definitely have flavor. (Sometimes they have way too much flavor.) But I have yet to lay eyes on a deer, moose, or elk steak that marbles anywhere close to Choice, let alone Prime. There is only the faintest streaking of fat to be found in the loins of a wild ruminant. So why is their meat so flavorful? Elk, deer, and moose, furthermore, all taste different from one another. You can raise an elk in a pen next to a moose, feed both animals the same food out of the same bucket, and they will taste different. Something of their essence—whatever it is that makes a deer a deer or a moose a moose—can be detected and appreciated by the tongue. Cows, by comparison, seemed lacking in character. What was going on?
Two hundred miles north, I found a man who claimed to have the answer. Allen Williams is a former varsity meat judger for Clemson University as well as a former NCAA wrestler, and though he is decades removed from the ring, he appears every bit as compact and sure-footed as he must have been in college. He is also a PhD meat scientist, though he abandoned the ivory tower more than a decade ago, his exit fueled partly by disgust at what was happening to his profession.
Williams met me in Sedan, Kansas, one of the prettier versions of small-town America that sits plunk in the middle of the Flint Hills, where David Bergin’s great-grandfather’s cattle used to come to get fat. Little and big bluestem grasses still grow as thick as the fur on a dog in fields next to the highway. In the distance, the rising and dipping prairie looks to be upholstered in suede. I told Williams I’d been driving through Texas and Oklahoma, eating steak. “How was it?” he asked.
“Disappointing,” I said.
“I’m not surprised.”
Williams said he could tell me precisely what was wrong with the steak I’d been eating and suggested we go out and talk about it over steak. I hopped in his pickup truck and we drove back over the Oklahoma border and pulled in to a local steak house that, many years ago, had been demolished by a tornado—a legitimate risk for any long-lived Oklahoma business. We sat down in a low, comfy booth and ordered rib eyes. As they cooked, Williams told me about the steak I was about to put in my mouth.
“There is a ninety-nine-percent chance—perhaps even greater—that your steak was raised in the conventional manner,” Williams began, in a tone that wasn’t what you would call appetizing. “What we cannot know is the ranch it originated from,” he continued, “or how old it was. There is no traceability.” Here’s what we did know: it was probably born on a ranch, implanted with a growth hormone—most likely Ralgrow or Synovex—when it was two or three months old, taken rudely from its mother at seven or eight months and sold at an auction barn, and then removed to one of two places: a stocker operator, which is basically a big farm or ranch, where it would have eaten grass for the next few months; or a grow yard, which is like a feedlot for young cattle. (A grow yard is to a feedlot as juvy is to prison.) More hormones were injected. When the calf reached 750 to 850 pounds, at around twelve to sixteen months of age, it was taken