Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
This starts out being what it is labeled as, a history of American beef, but it quickly becomes a story of the American
ranch, romanticizing the small producer while transitioning from history to modern stories. From there, it becomes a confused piece of anti-corporate activism, as conflicting stories and mutually exclusive political positions are meant to align against large-scale beef production.
The opening is the most chauvanistically American book you may ever read. It is beef-based nationalism, where a thick, rare steak is not just a meal! It is a sign of American dominance over nature and over the other nations of the world. The Japanese with their carefully massaged Kobe beef, the French with their
petit filet mignon, the British with their civilized roasts; these are the effete peoples who fall before red-blooded Americans who eat red meat dripping with red blood. Grunt!
It is chauvanism of all kinds. "Throwing a beefsteak" is a very male political and social event, with much meat and no silverware. All the steak and sausage you can eat, just grab the steak by the bone and start gnawing. Thick bread is used in place of plates, all the better to soak up juices; use your oversized shot glass for whiskey, along with literal buckets of beer. Then women got the vote, joined the festivities, and ruined it all with tablecloths and vegetables.
American history via beef is presented by displaying contradictions. American culture loves industrial progress and the small family farm. Americans want the best steaks and the cheapest ground beef. Americans have a history of individual freedom and a history of racial slavery. The different views, claims, and historical forces are left to stand on their own early on, without much commentary or attempt at resolution. Here is a cowboy culture adopted almost entirely from Mexico, after which "coloreds" and "wetbacks" were barred from rodeos. Make of it what you will. There is a great page listing the American cowboy terms and the Spanish words from which they were Anglicized. The Spanish brought over the first cows, and the history of Mexico and what would become the American southwest is a series of dispossessions and massacres. "Out West" is that mix of Spanish and British imperialism that somehow added up to a feeling of freedom.
(If you know your Coase Theorem, there is a neat bit about Spanish law, which required farmers to fence their crops if they wanted to keep cattle out, and British law, which required herders to fence their cattle to keep them out of crops, and what happens when these two traditions meet. Which was
exactly Coase's example in the foundational article.)
The political economy of the West is presented as a series of regulatory interventions and captures. The East is the Other, a European society embodied in Washington; it passes laws, parceling land with no local expertise and making odd rules about fencing and water. The government feels compelled to act, but that does not make it competent to act. Federal land management comes to consume most of the West, and over time factions like railroads, corporations, major landowners, and environmentalists seize control of it to exert their will on the ranchers. The plight of the small rancher exists throughout: if you are raising cattle in Wyoming, you do not have time to lobby Washington.
Exiting the historical section, note that the structure scrambles chronology. Events appear as convenient, leaping between decades and countries. One early paragraph lists three events in one sentence in the following order: 1842, 1891, and 1871-73. This is not helpful if you are trying to get the flow of history and how things developed over time. All the signposts are there, telling you the dates and the places, but you will probably lose track of which side of the Rio Grande you are on and what country Texas is part of at the moment. Manhattan, Chicago, and Abilene have their times as the slaughterhouse capital, but which is it at this part of the narrative?
Leaving the past, the book settles on the small farmer in the present. Industrial feedlots are seen but mostly avoided. The book instead dwells on terms like "green," "sustainable," and "grass-fed." We see ranchers with 100 head of cattle and slaughterhouses that work by hand. The big producers are another sort of Other.
Again, the competing claims are presented without analysis. Bison meet is healthier. Marbling is essential to steaks. Tenderness is essential to steaks. Meat color is essential to steaks. Fat color is essential (finish on corn to get it white, not yellow). Finishing on corn is helpful, essential, or a wasteful practice. The soil is a partner, an essential input, the primary product of which beef is just a byproduct. This, that, or the other is or is not
really environmentally friendly and/or socially conscious. And so on, with only a few notes that this next rancher disagrees with the guy from last chapter.
(Contradictions are noted when it is a large corporation, an industry advocacy group, or the industry as a whole. Big Business is Bad. There is even one explicit statement that the assorted practices, notably vertical integration, are not necessarily bad when a small producer does them but are when a large producer does. That claim is left to lie where it falls, with explanation or apology, as much as any claim about the importance of beef fat color.)
This also leads us further from beef. We learn about herding bison and deer, including a single deer that produces millions of dollars worth of sperm each year. We visit ranches that host hunts, set historical pieces that go through the motions daily for tourists, and ranches that own no cows, instead managing cows for absentee urban cowboy wannabes.
This focus on the small producer reminds me of
Candyfreak, which does the same for candy.
Candyfreak, besides being better written, is also more honest and personal in its tour of small producers. They are explicitly on the fringe, even when they are at center stage. Here, most numbers are presented far from context, although there is the occasional reminder that the practice in question applies to 1% of American beef. It is hardly "The Life and Times of American Beef" when you avoid the industrial feedlots where so many beef cows live and die.
In that way, the morality of the book comes through, becoming increasingly explicit later on. At the start, the message comes from what is presented or not, what is in context or not, and the stray adjective that condones or condemns. Shall we mock the Anglo notion of "improving" land, or the un-refined consumer who wants hamburgers? We could languidly discuss "flights" of beef that mimick wine-tasting, discussing artisinally crafted steak that comes from a certain soil with certain food. Or shall we move on to how industrial feedlots are "ruining" beef, cows, and America?
In this way, the carnivorous amorality of the early chapters segues through a half-voiced finickiness and into full-throated anti-corporate advocacy. What exactly the book is
for remains shaky, given the contradictions shown and the problems in enacting most reforms, but it is certainly
against the large producer as Other. There is a sketch of an argument in a mass of anecdotes with emotive overtones.
The turn to green ranching is potentially interesting, but the book does not mate meat and agricultural activism well. Given the early chapters, the increasing focus on sustainable ranching seems like an unnecessarily lengthy digression, until it becomes apparent that the beef-focused introduction was the digression. Is it an attempt to lure in the manly BEEF!-eater, who can then be introduced to activism sympathetically? "Real men want real steak, and real steak is grass-fed"? Is it genuine interest in the overlapping topics? A failure of editing?
The ending brings it back around to meat and eating it, spending time in (small scale!) butcher shops and restaurants. This returns to the opening, with thoughts on what makes a great steak. It even ends on recipes. It makes me wonder whether the beef is a cover for the activism, or the activism is the anguished cry of a foodie who just wants a good steak.
There are few audiences that are going to want this total package. I could recommend the early red meat chapters. I could recommend the middle chapters on sustainable animal husbandry, although not necessarily to the same audience. I cannot recommend the later chapters that start presenting advocates as objective researchers and corporations as malefactors.
To comment on the advocacy, as noted earlier, the regulatory capture is pretty thorough. Exactly the reforms that seem desired have been implemented, then hobbled and eliminated. A repeatedly noted problem is that producers are forbidden from certain types of testing and labeling, which is trivially stupid from an outside perspective but a predictable outcome when you realize that large corporations that benefit from reduced testing (at least until some epidemic wipes out demand) have a strong hand in writing the rules. The political chapters are a case study in public choice economics, except for the implication that the solution to bad government is more government. If the same interests are influencing the system, you do not get much different results from putting The Right People in charge.
Amazon link
