Steak - Mark Schatzker [27]
As much as humans crave and relish meat, we are not as skilled at digesting it as true carnivores, such as cats. If cats had explored the Canadian arctic, they could have eaten as many lean rabbits as they desired because cats have livers that are designed to handle lots of lean meat. Humans do not. If more than 40 percent of our dietary energy comes from protein, our livers begin to buckle under the load, and toxins accumulate in the blood.
The calories in meat that matter come from fat. A gram of fat contains nine calories—more than double what a gram of protein or carbohydrates packs. No one is more aware of this than hunter-gatherers, who obsess over the quantity of fat in their food even more than the most neurotic, body-obsessed Pilates instructor. When they take down big game, they eat the fat around the organs, they render the fatty marrow out of the bones, and they eat the fat-rich brain. Unlike true carnivores, humans don’t prey on the sick, the old, or the weak, because the sick, the old, and the weak are lean. Humans pick out the healthiest members of the herd—the biggest, fattest animals—as the wall of any hunting lodge will attest. When faced with the decision to choose prey, a lion or wolf chooses the diseased, the weak, and the scrawny, but a human is looking for specimens in their robust prime.
We like to believe that hunter-gatherers, ever attuned to and respectful of the pulse of the land, use every last bit of the carcass. This is often not true, and in cases of extreme leanness, they might not use any of it. The Pitjandjara people of Australia, to use one among many examples, will abandon an entire kangaroo carcass if no fat is found in the tail.
In the early 1800s, the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out on an epic voyage overland to the Pacific Ocean, and their journals feature a veritable subplot recording their encounters with fat. When an animal is killed, the level of fattiness is invariably noted. They find fat catfish, fat bears, and fat deer. One particularly fat buck, which was killed on Tuesday, July 31, 1804, had an entire inch of fat on its ribs. If anything, however, this obsessive reporting of fattiness is a testament to its scarcity. Some bison were so skinny, they didn’t bother shooting them at all. Others proved to be so painfully lean that they harvested only the tongue and marrow and left the rest for scavengers, whose livers were up to handling that much protein.
Plains Indians killed their fair share of bison, sometimes by stampeding whole herds of them over cliff faces. Despite the pleasant mythology to the contrary, they, too, did not always consume the entire carcass. (Fossil evidence of not using an entire bison carcass dates to before European contact.) Bison meat composed up to 85 percent of the food they ate. It nourished them so fully that during the mid-1800s, Plains Indians were the tallest people on earth—almost a full inch taller than the comparatively undernourished white Americans at the time. Above all other cuts, they prized the bison hump, which is full of fat. White Americans prized it, too, once upon a time. During the nineteenth century, they served buffalo hump as a Christmas roast.
Humans have been hunting aurochs for as long as we’ve been human, but it took the French to make them fashionable. Modern humans, with our high foreheads, smooth brow ridges, pointy chins, and delicate frames, appeared for the first time about 200,000 years ago. But it would take another 170,000 years before humans set down a permanent reminder of the fundamental difference between the animals and us, when Stone Age people living in Europe began making paints out of earth, stone, and charcoal and drawing pictures on cave walls. What