Steak - Mark Schatzker [26]
For the Kaingang of southern Brazil, meat is real food, and everything else is just a garnish. Bolivia’s Siriono people feel the same way. The Amazon’s Canela people have one word for meat hunger and another word for regular hunger. When the !Kung of Africa run out of meat, they sit around talking about how much they miss it, no matter how great the abundance of mongongo nuts. In the jungle villages of Peru, Sharanahua women will refuse to have sex with the men if they don’t bring home meat. Instead, they taunt them by wearing beads, putting on face paint, and cornering each man individually, tugging on his shirt or belt and singing, “We are sending you to the forest, bring us back meat.” For the Sharanahua, the hunt is an “economic structure in which meat is exchanged for sex,” according to the anthropologist Janet Siskind. She may as well have been talking about the Aché of eastern Paraguay, whose women cheat on their spouses with the hunters who’ve brought home the most meat. Prestige, it would seem, counts for a lot.
A human in the throes of meat hunger craves the hit of flavor and texture we are designed by evolution to relish. One of these flavors is umami, the so-called fifth basic taste, the mysterious sibling to sweet, salty, bitter, and sour that most people outside of Japan don’t understand. There is no word in the West to describe umami, so we use the Japanese word, which means “deliciousness,” though a more apt definition might be “meatiness.” Put simply, umami is the taste of protein. The problem is that it’s not quite that simple. Protein on its own has no taste. (Some proteins found in rare tropical plants do have a flavor—sweet.) But amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein, taste of umami, as do nucleotides, which are the structural units of DNA. (Strictly speaking, nucleotides don’t taste of umami so much as amplify that taste.)
One amino acid is notably good at triggering the umami taste receptor: glutamic acid, which was discovered in 1908 by a Japanese scientist searching for the ingredient that made seaweed broth so perfectly savory. All humans like the way it tastes. When a clear vegetable soup adulterated with glutamic acid is dropped on the tongue of a newborn baby, it causes an acceptance reaction: there is lip licking, smacking, and sucking. Sweetened water causes the same reaction, but bitter and sour water do not.
Glutamic acid does not occur only in seaweed. There is quite a bit of it in your brain, for example, where it functions as a neurotransmitter. There is also a huge amount of glutamic acid—not to mention many other types of amino acids—in live muscle and, hence, dead muscle, which is what meat is. If you take glutamic acid and turn it into a salt, you are left with a crystalline powder called monosodium glutamate, which is such a popular flavor enhancer that the world eats almost two tons of it every year.
A person afflicted by meat hunger also craves fat, which may turn out to be the sixth basic taste. (The research is pending.) Nothing adds mouthfeel to a piece of meat like fat. If there’s an evolutionary basis to the USDA’s fixation with marbling, it is that humans are programmed to crave and relish fat. Without fat, meat can be poisonous. When humans eat too much lean meat, they die.
This condition is called rabbit starvation and was experienced by nineteenth-century explorers in the Canadian arctic who attempted to live on wild rabbits, which are extremely lean. Explorers ate huge portions of rabbit meat, and yet, no matter how they stuffed themselves, they constantly fought a gnawing hunger. Seven days into their all-rabbit diet, they were eating three or four