Steak - Mark Schatzker [23]
I had another question: Is there other steak? Is steak universally fungible? Does the rest of the world think of steak as a widget? Is a Texas steak the same as steaks in other countries? What about the steak I ate on my honeymoon in Tuscany? Would I still consider it to be good? Or did the Italians mask it in some masterful sauce? People talk a lot about Japanese Kobe beef, the raising of which, they say, involves the Japanese massaging their cattle with rice wine and giving them cold beer to drink. Only a few people I know have actually eaten Kobe beef, and they are all in agreement that it is sublime. Is it? And what about France? People accuse the French of thinking they know everything, but when it comes to food, it isn’t so much an accusation as a statement of fact. What does a French steak taste like? And what about an Argentine steak? The best steak my brother ever ate was in Argentina, and when he talks about it, he enters a state verging on delirium.
Maybe my Pakistani cabdriver was wrong. Maybe the best steak in the world wasn’t in Texas. Maybe the best steak in the world was even now being fattened, cooked, or eaten in some other country, on some other continent. As Kansas prairie drifted by, acre after acre after acre, it seemed to be telling me this: The world is very big. There must be quite a lot of steak out there.
It couldn’t hurt to go out and have a look.
CHAPTER TWO
FRANCE
I n the beginning, there was no steak. For more than four billion years, the world got on just fine without it. Steak did not become a possibility until sixty-five million years ago, when a six-mile-wide chunk of rock hurtled past Jupiter and kept right on hurtling until it plunged into the Gulf of Mexico and, a fraction of a second later, butted heads in a most severe way with Earth’s crust. The subsequent boom was equivalent to three hundred million nuclear bombs going off all at the same time in the same place. It caused earthquakes and thousand-foot tsunamis. It sent rocky debris up in the air that hurtled down as fireballs and ignited unimaginable wildfires. It lifted a fog of hot dust and ash into the atmosphere and choked off the sun’s life-giving rays.
When the dust cleared, the dinosaurs were no more, but one life-form’s loss is another’s gustatory gain. By that point, carnivorism had already been raging for hundreds of millions of years, but the movement reached its all-time peak during the Cretaceous with the meat-loving dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex. The meat they ate came from other dinosaurs, mainly, and it probably tasted something like chicken. A few of them may have gobbled the odd mammal, but mammals had yet to distinguish themselves. The biggest one was no larger than a groundhog, and you don’t get much steak from a groundhog.
Not until fifty million years after the great impact did a mammal worthy of the grill first appear. It was the size of a dog, it had horns, and it may have tasted something like beef, or possibly deer, bison, lamb, or elk—its flavor is forever buried in the geological strata of evolution. This mammal had a special skill. It was capable of digesting a flowering plant that was new on the scene: grass. Back then, there was a lot of grass, but eating it was usually out of the question because the cell walls of grasses are made out of cellulose—wood, basically—which enjoys the twin distinctions of being the most abundant organic compound in the world and one of the most difficult to digest. If a human, dog, cat, or monkey eats grass, it comes out the other end looking a lot like it did on the way in, having yielded almost none of its energy.
The only living beings that are truly adept at breaking down cellulose are microbes, and these tiny organisms are the secret to the success of those dog-size grass-eating mammals, which invited microbes to live rent-free in their stomachs. They accomplished this by evolving four stomachs, the first of which is a dank cavern called a rumen, which you can think