Steak - Mark Schatzker [19]
As his accent attests, Williams grew up on a farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and he can reminisce as well as anyone about the way fruit used to taste. As a boy, he would walk down the road to visit his uncle—“all the houses up and down the road were all family”—to eat scuppernongs, an American species of grape. “I would stand under the vine and eat for hours and hours. I would go to the edge of the woods and eat muscadines—another kind of grape—that grew on the trees like trellises.” He told me about a tomato farmer in California, a man with tomato acreage that feeds thousands. The farmer grew technologically up-to-date commercial varieties that were big, plump, and red. But he kept none for himself. Instead, he had a separate garden where he grew old, slow-growing varieties. These tomatoes had flavor. These tomatoes were reserved as the family’s personal stash.
Williams’s disillusionment with food set in around the same time as his disillusionment with academic life. In the 1990s, he noticed that government funds had started drying up, and meat scientists began getting more and more of their money from large food and drug companies. “The research is bought and paid for,” Williams told me. “They’re taking agribusiness dollars and regurgitating back to agribusiness what agribusiness wants to hear about its products.”
By the mid-1990s, Williams was an associate professor, with publications in journals that meat scientists deem impressive—the Journal of Animal Science, for example, and the Journal of Heredity. A pharmaceutical company had developed a new pregnancy detection product for dairy cattle and was eager for it to be tested by universities in the hopes that positive results would lead to FDA approval. The company offered grant money, and Williams bit. When he performed his experiment, however, the results suggested the product did not work, and Williams wrote an abstract saying as much, and planned on presenting the results at an upcoming conference. The head of his department dropped by his office one day, sat Williams down, and told him to pull the abstract. “It was very matter-of-fact,” Williams recalled. His boss reminded Williams that the company had paid for the research and it was the firm’s data. Williams argued that the university was a public institution, funded by taxpayers, and that it was in the interest of science for the data to be made public. “My argument didn’t win,” he said. In 2001, he left academia.
“So how do you grow good steak?” I finally asked.
“Feed them grass.”
With that, Williams launched into an encomium to grass-fed beef that was as all-encompassing as his critique of grain-fed beef had been. Grass, he said slowly, deliberately, is the kind of food cattle would eat— and did eat—in a state of nature. Grass does not cause their livers to abscess, or their rumens to turn acidic. When a cow eats grain, the fat in its body becomes saturated—greasy and artery-clogging. When a cow eats grass, on the other hand, its fat is more like the fat you find in wild salmon, and is generally considered healthier. Grass-fed beef, furthermore, tastes the way beef is supposed to taste. “It should have a slightly sweet and sort of nutty flavor,” Williams told me. “But with a discernible beefy robustness.”
Grass covered the Flint Hills the way peel covers an orange. It had drawn Allen Williams north from his home in Mississippi just as it had attracted cowboys and cattlemen back when the Welshman from Pontypool named David Christopher Jones moved to Texas to raise cattle. Williams had cattle, and they were feeding on that sacred range. They were eating big and little bluestem, gamagrass, Indian grass, buffalo grass, crested wheatgrass, and needle grass.
Unfortunately, those cattle weren’t anywhere close to being fat. The grass was ready to be eaten, but the cattle were not. Like the California farmer’s private reserve of tomatoes, grass-fed cattle take longer to ripen. In cowboy parlance, they just don’t finish all that quickly.
My chances of