Steak - Mark Schatzker [94]
From the looks of it, I expected the meat to be tough. This was a cut, after all, that the rest of the world deems a braising cut, and it had seen its share of cooking. My knife sliced through it with little difficulty, however, and I put this first morsel of Argentine grass-fed steak in my mouth. Tender. Moist. A big flash of beefy flavor. I waited for the note to gloriously build, but it vanished. I ate another piece, and it happened again. If the flavor were graphed, it would show a spike followed by a flat line that tasted mildly sour, but also of beef fat. It tasted remarkably like Texas feedlot steak.
I walked up to the asador—the man in charge of grilling—and asked where the beef was from, expecting him to name some quaint town adrift in that ocean of grass where there are five hundred cattle for every man, woman, and child. He held up a steak with cherry red flesh and flaky white fat. “The beef,” he said, grinning, bursting with pride, “is pen-fed on corn.”
I was eating feedlot steak.
I knew something like this might happen. Before leaving for Argentina, I had read a number of reports—all of them alarmist and depressed-sounding—that contended that Argentina was abandoning its grazing beef industry for the American model: growing corn and erecting Texas-size feedlots. And this was all due to the fact—apparently, oddly—that Argentines loved steak so much.
In 2001, the debt-laden Argentine economy crashed. When it began recovering, the price of beef started climbing. Farmers were making good money selling Argentine beef to Europe, Russia, and Israel, but Argentines were finding their three-pound-per-week habit was getting hard on the wallet. The price of steak got so high that at one point Argentina’s president delicately suggested that his people might perhaps consider eating less beef, which, given the intensity of beef loyalty, was the political equivalent of asking eagles to give up flight. Sensing the darkening national mood, he realized the true source of all of his country’s problems: foreigners. They were the true ones, he decided, who were eating too much Argentine beef, and this revelation moved him to do something more overtly political: he cut beef exports.
In theory, this should have flooded Argentinian butcher shops with cheap beef. For a while, it did, and the price of beef dropped by a third. But the flood of cheap beef was soon cut off by now furious, not to mention poorer, ranchers and farmers, who were so angered by their government’s actions that they banded together and blockaded roads so that food-laden trucks from the countryside couldn’t deliver to cities. The first thing to disappear from store shelves was steak, followed by pork, lamb, and chicken and, much later, pasta. Argentines rich and poor so detested the sight of empty butcher shops and bare parillas that a distinctly Hispanic political phenomenon known as a cacerolazo erupted. People leaned out of windows, hung off balconies, and stood on street corners banging pots and pans together to voice their anger. They marched to public squares with their pots and pans and banged them some more.
The ranchers backed down, in part because it had never been their intention to starve their countrymen, but also because the only thing worse than selling beef at a loss was letting it rot. Butcher shops were filled again; quebracho was lit. The policy worked. Cheaper steak was grilled and eaten.
The ranchers weren’t done being angry, however. Thanks to the meddling government and an urban steak-loving populace who believed the countryside was overrun with fabulous wealth, their income was shrinking. Some were so strapped they decided to get out of the beef business altogether. Farmers who held the best land in Argentina, whose families had for centuries sneered at the very idea of crop farming, did what the law of supply and demand predicted: they cleared the cattle and planted crops. They laid down fertilizer by the ton and sowed corn and soybeans and wheat and anything else that was getting a good price on world markets.