Steak - Mark Schatzker [46]
We walked over to the stud farm’s small office, where a microscope stood on a table scattered with plastic vials. Cameron dipped a glass straw into the collection tube and smeared some semen on a glass slide. Not wanting to waste a drop, he put his lips around the dry end of the straw and gently blew the remaining semen back into the collection tube. Such is its preciousness. The glass slide was placed beneath a microscope, and he peered into the lens at swimming sperm. Motility scored a three-plus—the highest rating is five. The quantity, 4 milliliters, was similarly judged to be good, as was the color: rich and creamy, which is the most desired hue. Rich and creamy indicates lots of swimming sperm. Some bulls produce yellow semen. There is nothing wrong with yellow semen, but it is not prized the way rich, creamy semen is.
Pedigree semen comes from bulls that are considered exemplary specimens of their breed. The total number of cattle breeds in the world today is around a thousand, but at the early dawn of civilization—in the Middle East, about ten thousand years ago—the only cattle were the formerly wild aurochs that had recently been turned docile and obedient. As crop-growing, steak-eating humans spread over the globe and began dressing differently, talking differently, praying differently, and singing differently, their cattle, too, started to become different. Just as cultures became defined by geography—big rivers, tall mountains, deep seas—agriculture did, too. In northern Italy, the cattle were bright white with black noses. The ones farther east, toward the Adriatic Sea, were shorter and gray. In Switzerland, cattle were brown, medium sized, and such good milkers that the Swiss became famed cheesemakers. In southeastern England, they were red and furry. In southern France, some of them still looked like aurochs. As the land changed shape and color, the cattle changed shape and color, too.
For ten thousand years, nobody particularly cared. Like politics, all cattle were local. Then, about 250 years ago, an Englishman named Robert Bakewell started paying attention. Bakewell was a walking agricultural revolution, the kind of man who spent his waking moments thinking about better ways to irrigate fields, rotate crops, or deploy manure. One day, he took a considered look at the local cows and noticed that those with particularly long horns seemed to produce more meat than the others, even though they ate less grass. Bakewell picked out the meatiest ones he could find and separated them by sex. Rather than let mating occur randomly out in the fields, as humans had been doing for roughly ten millennia, Bakewell took the fattest bulls and put them with the fattest cows. Their fat, meaty offspring were bred—and inbred—with one another, until Bakewell one day found himself with truly fat, truly meaty cattle. His cows looked so different from all the others, in fact, that they seemed like a different animal altogether.
What Bakewell had created was the first distinct cattle breed. His cows eventually got their own name, and are still known as Dishley longhorns. Anyone hoping to eat a Dishley longhorn steak, unfortunately, is more than two centuries late, as one of Bakewell’s students—empowered by the techniques of his master—wasted no time in creating a newer, better, fatter, meatier breed than the Dishley longhorn. This one had shorter horns, so they called it the shorthorn, and thanks to it the Dishley longhorn went out of fashion almost as quickly as it came in.
For as long as is historically known, there have been cows in north-eastern Scotland