Year of the Cow Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Flatiron Books ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Summer

  Acknowledgments

  I’m disproportionately blessed to be surrounded by such wonderful, talented, and charming people—without any number of whom, this book would not exist.

  First and foremost, I’d like to thank my wife, Summer, for saying yes to yet another ridiculous adventure. And my kids, Declan and Nora, for being such bundles of wonderful wrapped up into two compact packages.

  Enormous thanks to my fantastic agent, Laurie Fox at Linda Chester Literary Agency, for her endless patience and sage counsel.

  Huge appreciation goes to Frank DePalma and Darlene Chan for believing in this project before they had any reason to.

  My utmost gratitude to Bob Miller, Jasmine Faustino, Whitney Frick, and everyone at the brand-spanking-new Flatiron Books for taking me into the fold and letting me be a part of their very first offering.

  Deepest appreciation to Eben Copple for always giving me the lowdown on culinary matters both great and small. And, perhaps most vitally, for first showing me the power and joy of a beautiful meal, one night in college many years ago.

  Thank you to my parents, Ray and Judy Stone, for always encouraging me in whatever asinine insanity I happened to dream up that day.

  Thanks to Billy Mernit, Steve Mazur, Sarah Adina Smith, Barbara Stepansky, and the rest of the writers I’ve workshopped with for many high fives and well-deserved punches in the gut.

  Thanks to Chris Kerston, formerly of Chaffin Family Orchards, for taking so much time to show a city kid the ropes.

  Finally, to Ben Krout, Zac and Katie Alexander, Rich and Natalie Courtney, Uriah Bueller, Andy Loos, Jen Hooker, Allan Holt, Chris Martin, Roo Krout, Mike Odishoo, and anyone else I’ve broken bread with since this beast landed in the box in my backyard: Thank you so much for your kind words and encouragement, through good meals and bad. Let’s do it again sometime.

  “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

  —Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Prologue

  I work in television. I know television. I studied it in college, read about it in books, and spent a considerable chunk of my adult life deciphering the arcane machinations through which an image moves from life to lens to living rooms across America.

  However, for much of that time, I knew next to nothing about the food I ate. The little pieces of the world around me that eventually become my physical body. The stuff that, quite literally, becomes me.

  Meat, for example. Meat does not originate shrink-wrapped to Styrofoam in a supermarket. When we eat meat, an animal dies.

  This transaction with death is a Rorschach for the soul. How you feel about it says a lot about you—how you feel about animals, how you view your relationship with the natural world and humanity’s unique place within it. In today’s hyperpolarized environment, it possibly even speaks of where you come from and what your political beliefs are.

  Set apart from that discussion is the fact that many Americans don’t feel anything at all about their meat. For them, it may as well originate in their local supermarket. It’s like flypaper, Frosted Flakes, and fluorescent lighting. It just is.

  I grew up in Kansas in a family of hunters. Every autumn, my father and brother would take a deer, and it would feed us through the High Plains winter. I never participated in their hunts—just wasn’t my thing—but the origin of the contents of our freezer was never in question. Its head was literally on the wall.

  As life went on, however, I lost the connection that I once had to the source of my meals. I think it’s spectacularly irresponsible to assume that the rest of the ecosphere exists solely for the nourishment and comfort of humans. When an animal dies so that we can eat, that’s a big deal. That’s important.

  Yet as an adult, I was eating from the same Styrofoam trough as most of America.

  One spring day, I reflected on my prairie youth from the comfort of my West Coast home and asked myself a question: Am I doing this right—am I feeding my family in the best way that I possibly can?

  I like asking questions. I ask a lot of them. I tend to research more than is probably wise, and definitely more than is prudent. Ask me about dogs, midcentury jazz, or the martial arts of southern China and I will gleefully ruin your cocktail party.

  And so I found myself asking more and more questions about the food that kept me upright: What is good food? What makes it so? I talk a good locavore game, but walking it is tough. How can I feed my family in the most ethically and environmentally responsible way? And how can I get really damn good at it?

  So, naturally, I decided to buy a cow and cook the entire thing, little by little, over the course of a year.

  I’m a decent cook. You won’t find me in the kitchen of the French Laundry, but I don’t cook out of a box either. To paraphrase comic artist Jeph Jacques: Cooking is science for hungry people. I love science, and I love delicious things. Cooking is a skill I’ve honed simply by virtue of years of repetition and intermittent hunger. I’m no pro, but I know a thing or two about technique, watch a lot of Alton Brown, and have a lot of friends in the industry.

  Hell, I used to work in the industry, if you count getting yelled at by drunken cowboys in a pancake house at three in the morning while you’re bringing them waffles as working in the industry. But I digress.

  To rectify my food chain ignorance, I had to start somewhere. So I decided to focus my attention on beef, partly because it seems like such a quintessentially American food and partly as a salute to my childhood near the cattle trails of the High Plains. I asked myself, how is beef raised? What is the animal’s life like? Which beef option is the best for a consumer? Or is any? And how can I maximize both sides of the beef production/consumption equation? Finally, would I still be a carnivore at the end of this project?

  I was also morbidly curious about how my beef experiment would affect me physically. I’ve always been relatively fit, though not outrageously so. However, at the beginning of this project, I’m pretty sure that my friends started taking out life insurance policies on me. That can’t be a good sign. Frankly, though, my curiosity was dramatically greater than my fear. I was ready for adventure. A new project. The chance to shake up a daily routine that had become too, well … routine. The promise of great meals and great experiences shared with friends.

  I began to research.

  Most cattle raised in the United States are raised on grain. That is, the majority of their diet is corn, which is cheap and highly caloric and bulks up the cattle quickly. Envision, if you will, a herd of cattle romping gaily through a cornfield, nibbling all the while. Can’t imagine it? That’s because it doesn’t happen. In this scenario, the corn is shipped in to feedlots, combined with a protein source, ground into gruel, and fed to the cattle. Hence the term corn-fed—meaning “huge”—which is immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever seen the University of Nebraska football team.

  This grain-fed production
model also allows a lot of animals to be raised while remaining confined to a relatively small space; they don’t need to forage for food. Thanks to heavy corn subsidies, it’s also cheap.

  The other option for consumers is grass-fed beef. Here, the cattle graze on pasture, like in City Slickers or any other movie you’ve ever seen where a guy wears a nonironic bandanna. It takes longer for cattle to grow to market weight on a diet of grass—and ranchers need more room to do it because the animals need to wander around and eat the lawn. However, cattle raised this way are generally healthier than those raised on corn. As a result, they don’t need the heavy doses of antibiotics that corn-fed animals usually require. Antibiotics, as any kid will tell you, are not delicious.

  In addition, grass-fed beef are generally raised without growth hormones and steroids, which frequently help grain-fed beef reach their Herculean proportions. Personally, I prefer to avoid chowing down on ’roided-out Anger Cattle.

  There is also evidence that grass-fed beef has higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids (the good ones) and lower overall fat content. People who enjoy grass-fed beef tend to be passionate about it, trumpeting its more intense “beefy” flavor and sparking near-oenophilic discussions of terroir.

  I decided on grass-fed beef for my family. Better for the cow. Better for the environment. And better for us.

  My research quickly led me from the whys of grass-fed cattle to the wheres of grass-fed cattle. When buying an entire beast, the simplest and most cost-effective method is to go directly to the rancher. I discovered Eatwild.com, which is something like eHarmony for people seeking humanely raised produce and livestock. And from there, I discovered Chaffin Family Orchards—they like cooking, meeting new people, and long walks on the beach.

  The more questions I asked, however, the more I discovered lying in wait. How did we come to depend on feedlot beef, anyway? And what other changes were wrought by our disengagement from the mechanisms of our food supply?

  Most people aren’t farmers—less than a third of households even have gardens. For most of us, our only participation in the food supply is as consumers: We buy it. The decision to purchase an entire cow may seem batshit crazy for a city dweller like me, but it’s relatively common for someone in a more rural setting who’s closer to the guts of the food supply infrastructure. I think that Chris, my rancher, actually had to suppress a smile a few times while hearing me discuss this project. “I got kids,” some of his other customers reported. “Gimme three sides.”

  Buying an entire grass-fed steer led me to the investigation of ancestral foodways—the ways that people used to eat for hundreds or thousands of years. And these ancestral foodways led me to a novel place. Beyond Slow Food and locavore street cred. Beyond offal epiphanies and lazy afternoon braises.

  I realized that what I was really seeking through this project was a doorway to a more soulful life. I yearned for some sort of yeoman platonic ideal where I wasn’t penned in an office building through the entire Southern California summer, where the toil of my days would yield the feasts of my evenings, where I’d get home before dark and see my family before bedtime.

  What I came to understand is that this doorway doesn’t exist. It’s a road. And it’s long. And like so many other trips, the journey is just as important as the destination.

  And so one sunny Saturday afternoon, I set off. The project would grow well beyond a year, well beyond food, well beyond me, and well beyond anything I ever expected.

  1

  Meet the Meat

  One cow is approximately one Prius-full of meat.

  This is the latest fact I’ve learned in the past twenty-four hours. It’s also the most pressing, as the aforementioned cow has been frozen, packed into eight neat boxes, and stacked into the back of my jet-black Prius. I’m behind the wheel, hell-bent for leather, racing against the cold pouring off the boxes in palpable waves. Due south. Los Angeles by sundown.

  “Ben, do we have another blanket we can toss on top of the cow?”

  “Yep. On it.”

  Ben is my partner in a multitude of crimes. He’s a spark plug of a man with forearms like footballs, thanks to his work as a film grip. If you’re wondering what a film grip does, it’s largely this: Grips solve problems. Ben’s able to MacGyver his way out of nearly anything. He’s also one of my oldest friends. If you need help with a project, but you don’t know what you don’t know—you need Ben.

  Ben shifts in his seat and throws another blanket over the boxes in the back.

  Outside the car, it’s eighty-five degrees. Inside, it’s about sixty. Regardless, I crank the air conditioner to MAX COLD. Foot on the gas.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours earlier, Ben and I had headed in the opposite direction. Straight up the I-5, toward a small town about an hour and a half north of Sacramento. I needed to see a man about a cow.

  The decision to buy this particular animal was the result of months of research. I had decided that I didn’t know enough about where my food comes from and that I needed to address this ignorance head-on. Since, like many Americans, my go-to protein is beef, I started there.

  As we zip north, we pass another of my potential beef supplier options: the largest beef facility on the West Coast. Harris Ranch, located along the I-5, is a textbook example of what most people think of when they consider beef production. Feedlots sprawling like agricultural suburbs—their soil a darker black than the soil outside due to the hooves and dung of countless cattle. They process up to a quarter-million cattle annually—handling every aspect from feeding to slaughter, packaging, and shipping.

  Harris Ranch is a leading purveyor of corn-fed beef, the type to which most Americans are accustomed. If you’ve had a hamburger in a restaurant or bought beef at a supermarket and it wasn’t otherwise labeled, it was fed on some mixture of corn and other grains. Beef fed on cheap corn can reach market weight in a little over a year. The result: lots of beef at low prices.

  However, there are other costs. First, cattle aren’t really built to eat corn—they’re built to eat grass. The first of their four stomachs is called a rumen (hence, “ruminant”). It’s like a gigantic beer keg in the animal’s chest. The rumen holds beneficial bacteria that ferment the chewed grasses the cattle eat. These bacteria in turn become a major source of protein for the animal. That’s how cattle are able to derive protein from a protein-free grass—they’re eating the bacteria that feed on it.

  When cattle eat corn, fermentation in the rumen stops. The rumen becomes more acidic in order to break down this suboptimal food. Effects are manifold: First, cattle stomachs become more like our stomachs. As a result, any potentially harmful bacteria in the rumen adapt to their new environment and become in turn more able to make humans sick. Bacteria like E. coli.

  An acidic rumen can also give cattle something roughly analogous to bovine heartburn, called acidosis. This disease keeps them from eating, defeating the purpose of feeding them corn. As a result, heavy preventative doses of antibiotics are introduced to keep acidosis at bay. An estimated 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are administered to livestock.

  Remember the E. coli breeding in their rumen? The aforementioned antibiotics can make the bacteria antibiotic-resistant.

  Further, corn-fed beef lose their source of protein as the beneficial grass-digesting bacteria in their rumen vanish, requiring their diet to be supplemented with other forms of protein. In industrial times, that protein has come from the ground-up carcasses of other animals, including other cattle. This bovine cannibalism turned out to be a spectacular way to spread mad cow disease (aka bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE)—which is transmitted by contact with infected brain or spinal tissue. Consumption of mad cow–tainted beef has been linked with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans—a degenerative and fatal brain disorder, symptoms of which include rapidly progressing dementia, loss of muscular coordination, personality changes, impaired vision, and a raft of other neurological impairments.
Eating mad cow–tainted beef is a tremendously bad idea.

  Because of fears over mad cow disease, in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibited the use of ruminant protein in cattle feed. Now, cattle protein is frequently fed to poultry and poultry protein is fed back to cattle. It isn’t cannibalism, but cattle eating chickens isn’t exactly natural, either.

  Corn-fed beef also requires, well, corn, which is one of the most energy-intensive crops produced. Gigantic petroleum-dependent combines plant the corn and harvest it, petroleum-derived pesticides and fertilizers ensure a prodigious crop, and petroleum-driven vehicles transport it to feedlots. Some sources estimate that a single corn-fed beef steer is the product of 284 gallons of petroleum over the course of his life.

  When you hear people say that beef production is energy-intensive—this is why.

  I don’t fault beef producers such as Harris Ranch for trying to make a living. Like any agricultural pursuit, ranching is a wildly risky proposal. The debt to get started can be tremendous, the competition intense. Nobody—no matter how altruistic—wants to go bankrupt.

  Industrial beef producers are responding to market forces, and in a minuscule way I am a part of that market. With my food dollars, however, I’d like to vote for a different process.

  * * *

  Ben and I pull into Chaffin Family Orchards, a working ranch and farm just outside Oroville, California, after nine hours of driving. Chris Kerston, the ranch’s chief marketing guy, has agreed to show us around.

  The ranch looks like many small-scale farms. Though the landscape is picturesque, the farm buildings themselves are weather-beaten and worn—the effort put into building this place has clearly gone into function over aesthetics. A small house sits by an enormous barn. Dirty pickups crowd a gravel driveway. A road leads up a grassy slope to parts unknown.