Steak - Mark Schatzker [20]
Our story goes back to the mid 1800s, when millions of Longhorn roamed freely throughout Texas. With the taste of beef becoming a newfound favorite in the North, Texas ranchers prospered as never before. Each winter the Longhorn were driven to the Texas Gulf Coast to graze on the rich coastal saltgrass. And when they headed for market, they followed the legendary Salt Grass Trail, known far and wide for the best beef in the whole Lone Star State.
After consecutive days of eating steak, the prospect of grazing on salt grass—fibrous, colon-cleansing salt grass—seemed appetizing. But the prospect of beef that was, as Williams put it, sweet and nutty but with a discernible beefiness sounded even better. I pictured a herd of longhorns on a salt marsh, the sun shining, a breeze blowing through their fuzzy ears. They would lift their great horned heads upward and chew, gazing out into the gulf, listening to the sound of surf crashing on the shore. I was salivating.
The man who answered the phone at Saltgrass Steak House could not say precisely what salt marsh the cattle were grazed on, so I asked to speak to someone who did know the answer. Another man soon got on the line and told me that Saltgrass Steak House used feedlot beef.
I wasn’t totally out of luck, however, because 250 miles south in northeast Texas was a man named Ted Slanker growing cattle on historically significant grass. He was situated almost on the banks of the Red River, the very same river that stars, with John Wayne, in the movie Red River.
I drove to Slanker’s farm, which is near the town of Paris, Texas, parked the car, and waited for him under a spreading oak tree. A red-and-white bull stood on the other side of an electrified fence, the wire no thicker than string. I couldn’t help but notice the size of the bull’s testicles, and in keeping with their magnitude, he didn’t take the slightest interest in me. His nose was glued to the ground, tearing off clump after clump of green grass, not even pausing to chew. The air smelled clean and herbal. Birds were singing. A chicken goose-stepped across the gravel path in front of me, hunting insects.
Slanker came into view, seated behind the wheel of an electric golf cart that was bobbing up the gravel drive, its wheels sloshing through small puddles. He pulled up wearing a blue shirt, rubber boots, and a baseball hat, and invited me into the golf cart for a tour of the farm.
Slanker got right to the point. “Grain,” he said, “is the atomic bomb of the American food system. There is no worse food you can eat than grain.” As Ted Slanker sees it, the human race’s fall from paradise can be traced to a particular time and place: ten thousand years ago in the Middle East, when it figured out how to grow grain. Up until that point, all the food that had sustained humans came in the form of green leaves or animals that ate green leaves. “See all this green stuff growing,” Slanker said, gesturing to a grass-covered field. “That’s the foundation food for animal life. . . . The first sustainable life-form,” he told me, “was a one-celled green plant in the oceans. The first animal to come along to eat this one-celled plant would have picked up certain fatty acids from the plant and put them in its own membrane. These are called essential fatty acids, and they’re critical for cell function. Animals have been eating plants for probably a billion years. That’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it’s going to be,” he said with a tone of grand finality.
It is a life-and-death issue. A green leaf, Slanker said, is alive. A seed head is dead. A seed head is an inert package of starch intended to feed a sprouting blade of grass. Grain farming, as he sees it, is