Steak - Mark Schatzker [24]
A half million years ago, a new ruminant appeared in the grazing lands of Asia and Europe, and it was enormous. It stood six feet at the shoulders and weighed 1,800 pounds. The males were black with a gray stripe running down their spines called an eelstripe. On their massive heads, they carried a set of horns—crescent shaped, forward pointing, and turned up at the ends. In a dead sprint, a big, angry male could reach thirty-five miles per hour, horns first, followed by a ton of galloping bone, hide, and muscle.
This was a fact that a hungry Paleolithic human, cowering in the bushes and staring at a herd of 1,800-pound beasts, could not help but have been mindful of. Even so, Paleolithic humans hunted and ate these fearsome creatures, which are called aurochs. They chased them, ambushed them, trapped them, or lured them into pits and then speared them. Around ten thousand years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, humans tamed the aurochs, herding them and goading the mothers into sharing their milk. There is a word for tame, milk-sharing aurochs: cattle.
Humans now owned herds of plump cattle, but they kept on hunting their wild forebears, and over the millennia, aurochs’ numbers dwindled. They achieved a kind of mythical status among Europe’s hunting-obsessed aristocrats and were tracked to the remotest corners of the continent, where they could still be found and killed. Finally, in the year 1620, on a game reserve in Poland, the sole remaining aurochs bull died. Seven years later, the last female joined him. The wild aurochs, forever extinguished, was cursed by a characteristic that proved to be its undoing: it was delicious.
Despite the veggie-friendly urgings of lentil-eating university coeds and the grumblings of bearded vegans who lurk at the edges of cocktail parties, there is zero doubt that humans are designed to eat meat. Our digestion is too speedy, for one thing. It takes about thirty-five hours for a meal to pass through a gorilla, whose long digestive tract is designed to break down fibrous plants. A human, on the other hand, passes food in around twenty hours, which, digestively speaking, is only enough time to handle ripe fruit, certain vegetables—and meat.
Meat contains a great deal of protein, which humans require just to stay alive—to make new muscles, hormones, cells, hair, skin, eyelashes, fingernails, and so forth. Proteins themselves are constructed from amino acids. There are many different amino acids, but eight are considered essential for humans—not eating them causes problems ranging from lethargy and emaciation to impaired wound healing, reduced intelligence, and death. All eight essential amino acids can be found in plants, but almost never in the right balance. Wheat, for example, lacks the amino acid lysine. Legumes lack tryptophan, and pulses (beans) lack methionine. Steak, on the other hand, features all eight essential amino acids, as do chicken, pork, eggs, cheese, lamb, goat, rabbit, and so on.
Meat also contains the vitamin B12, for which there is no known vegetable source. (Vegans must take supplements to obtain it.) Vitamin B12 is required for the splitting of cells and the formation of blood. Without it, a human will show symptoms ranging from itchy tongue and migraine headaches to facial pain, mouth sores, memory loss, cognitive impairment, and spinal cord degeneration, which results in death. Primitive humans, it’s worth remembering, couldn’t take vitamin B12 supplements any more than they could peruse the produce aisle. They ate what they could pick or catch, and that often meant meat. From