Steak - Mark Schatzker [21]
The result of eating grain, or eating animals that eat grain, is disease. “The minute a man deviates from green leaves, he’s going to have dysfunctional cells, a damaged immune system, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Every single body failing—they call them ‘chronic diseases’—can be traced to eating foods that don’t follow the green leaf, grain being the number one.
“Grains have a terrible fatty acid profile,” Slanker continued, in a tone that was more pulpit than soapbox, “and are universally contaminated with fungi. There are all these mental disorders these days—attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia, autism—and it’s because kids are grain-fed from conception.”
“What about arthritis?” I asked.
“Osteoarthritis is an autoimmune disorder—anything to do with immune dysfunction is tied to grain.”
“What about cancer?”
“Absolutely. That’s body failure.”
Slanker is also a raging Beef Loyal. He consumes ten to twelve pounds of beef every week, and often two pounds in a single day. His loyalty extends only to his own beef, however, which is raised on green leaves and usually sits on his plate next to a pile of green leaves in the form of salad. He won’t touch commodity beef and hasn’t touched it for ten years, before which he was “a typical grain-fed American.”
Judging by appearances, he is in fine health. The morning we spoke, he was sixty-three years of age, though if he’d told me he was forty-eight, I wouldn’t have questioned it. He is lean and fit, the skin on his face is clear and wrinkle-free, and he zooms around his farm with the energetic bearing of an army colonel. From time to time, his joints give him trouble, but only when he eats starchy, grain-based foods.
We had spent more than an hour talking about grain, and I was now convinced never to eat the stuff again. But I wasn’t in the mood for green leaves; I wanted steak. I wanted to eat Slanker’s grass-fed, sustainable, as-nature-intended steak. “How does it taste?” I asked.
This is not the kind of question a person should ever put to Ted Slanker. “Right there,” he answered, “you’re immediately off track. Flavor,” he told me, “is meaningless.”
I tried again. “What would you say is the best steak you’ve ever had?”
“That’s like asking, ‘What was the most memorable time you filled your car with gas?’ ” When people eat steak, he explained, they shouldn’t be thinking about flavor or juiciness, but should instead look at it the same way they approach buying fuel. “Maybe your car needs gas with eighty-seven octane? Maybe the air-to-gas ratio needs to be this or that? You should have the same concern about what you’re dumping in your own body, which is what carries your brain around.”
My ridiculous and unhealthy concern with flavor was nothing new to Ted Slanker; it was a mistake common among the grain-fed masses. “My daughter,” he said, “who’s coming on sixteen and thinks she’s thirty-five, doesn’t like seafood. I look at that as being childish and ignorant. Fish contains some fatty acids that go directly into the brain and are necessary for optimal brain function. You want to make sure there’s no shortage whatsoever.”
Slanker was not able to say whether or not I would like grass-fed beef—which, of course, was beside the point. “Some people,” he said, “love it on the first bite, and some people can’t stand it.” It all depended on conditioning. Like everyone else, I’d been accustomed to corn-fed beef, which to Slanker tastes “like cardboard and glue.” Some people think grass-fed beef tastes gamy, he said. Others say it’s fishy, an attribute that Slanker attributes to the high amount of omega-3 fatty acids, which you find a lot of in fish like mackerel and salmon. And others consider it delicious.
I wanted to buy a steak. Slanker handed me a one-and-a-half-pound