Steak - Mark Schatzker [17]
Bill O’Brien believes flaked corn to be a perfectly natural thing for cattle to eat. Allen Williams does not. I presented him with O’Brien’s study, the one put out by the International Center for the Study of Bovine Happiness, which concluded, “The proposition that grain is an unnatural and unintended foodstuff for cattle is proven plainly wrong.” Williams looked it over carefully. “These guys aren’t scientists,” he said. “They’re idiots. They are bloomin’ idiots.” You might say the study was abundantly marbled with experimental flaws. After enumerating those flaws—no university attached, no evidence of review of previous literature, sample sizes skewed, on it went—Williams made a more general point about corn: “It doesn’t exist in nature.” Before humans came along roughly ten thousand years ago, there was no such thing as grain. Humans coaxed grasses into growing abnormally big and starchy seed heads—rice, corn, wheat, and barley are all big, starchy seed heads—which they then harvested and ate and, eons later, steamed and flaked and fed to cattle. Before that, cattle would have only ever eaten the comparatively smaller seed heads that grow on wild grasses, and then only in mouthfuls that would have included lots of grass. He concluded the critique thus: “Where does nature provide a concrete trough full of flaked corn?”
Corn, it so happens, can actually kill cattle. It contains such a concentrated explosion of starch that, when fed in sufficient quantity, it can result in all sorts of mortal ailments. Corn can cause a cow’s liver to abscess, which can lead to death. Its rumen can become gassy and inflate like a balloon, ultimately pressing on the lungs to such a degree that the cow suffocates and dies. A cow’s rumen can become extremely acidic, a condition called acidosis. “In bad cases,” Williams said, “what you’ll notice is a very nasty anal discharge. There will be blood, and a loose, discolored discharge with a foul odor. The animal is passing the endometrial lining of its gut.”
Roughly 98 percent of cattle do live to see the day the truck from the packing plant pulls up because antibiotics are mixed in with the feed to keep livers and guts from failing. A certain number are fated to die, however. Feedlot nutritionists, Williams explained, actually want to see a small percentage get sick, as “that way, they know they’re pushing the feed ration to the edge.” The ones that aren’t dying are getting fat fast.
The survivors don’t taste particularly good. All those hormones don’t help, and neither do beta-agonists, both of which conspire to bulk up cattle and make beef cheaper. According to sensory evaluations, their meat is less palatable and tougher. Corn is also a problem, according to Williams. “It’s just bland, empty starch. It doesn’t produce a rounded flavor profile.”
Perhaps gravest for the steak eater is the fact that the cattle are stressed. “They’re on a ration that’s pushing them to the edge,” Williams said, “living in muddy conditions—if it isn’t muddy, it’s dusty—and living day after day in a confined pen. They can’t run or jump. Men on horseback called pen riders come into their pens and pick out the ones that have gotten sick or died. Every day, they see their buddies get dragged off. Their endocrine gland is producing cortisol, the stress hormone. They’re full of adrenaline. Lactic acid is building up in their muscles. Their guts are acidic. It all has an effect on flavor.”
I then posed what felt like either a very smart or a very stupid question. “Do cattle feel stress?”
“Of course they do,” Williams replied. “We know that they can feel fear, and they can feel anxiety. Cattle can sense fear and anxiety in other cattle. It’s stupid of us to say that they don’t.”
The rib eyes arrived. Like so much commodity steak, each bite started with a pleasant burst of warm fat that was followed by an abrupt