Mark Morford...
is a beautiful man.
Red Meat Does A Body Good
Can you still eat the stuff without having your soul mauled by a giant industrial slaughterhouse? Why sure
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 1, 2006
Oh, I eat it all right. Not obese heaping daily Midwestern gobs of it and not even weekly macho 24-ounce slabs of it and certainly not even a hint of a globule of the freakishly brown heavily processed fat-laden hormone-injected ultratoxic mystery gunk you find at the 18 million fast-food joints in the nation, but yes, I do indeed occasionally eat beef.
Organic, almost always. Grass-fed, if at all possible. Humanely raised and kindly slaughtered and kissed by the sun and blessed by the sly and cooing angels of gustatory bliss because that's just how I like to deceive myself and I shall admit right here, I almost always enjoy it immensely.
It is, I have to say, a kind of confession. A thing to reveal, fraught and interesting and full of pregnant meanings. Because here's the thing: Eating red meat these days is not, in this part of the country anyway, something presumed or common or all that shouted out. It's a bit of a hot-button topic, even, revealing as all hell; it's got that slightly smoky, delicious taint of the politically incorrect to its fatty drippings.
This all leaps to mind, by the way, after enduring the gauntlet-like drive down the brutal I-5 corridor from San Francisco to SoCal this past Thanksgiving weekend, easily the most loathed and reviled and yet grudgingly beloved concrete conduit in the entire state. And meat is, apparently, a big part of it all.
You live here, you know the drive well: It's a veritable candy store wasteland of prisons and landfills and toxic waste sites and massive, politically corrupt aqueducts, huge industrial farms and enormous ranches and depressing tule fog and vast swaths of bland nothingness all around, and it's dotted all the way down with weird little forgotten farming/industrial towns you will never ever visit except perhaps to refuel and empty your bladder as you wonder how the hell they get all that garbage food out to those endless Jack in the Box and Carl's Jr. and creepy overlit Del Taco outlets in the middle of nowhere.
Oh yes, the meat. It is right there, writ large and reeking and utterly undeniable as you cruise down I-5 and I don't mean just in the staggering, gluttonous array of greasy junk-food joints. I mean right there, the actual source itself, that famous and semi-gourmet bastion of manure and methane and meat known as the Harris Ranch, just off the freeway by a town called Coalinga. What a thing.
You know the place. Or rather, you know the stench. It is 800 acres and a whopping 100,000 head of truly miserable-looking cattle, all bunched together in one very dejected herd, right alongside a half-mile stretch of freeway, and every other cow has its head bowed to the ground munching on what appears to be, in contrast to the sweet grassy fields spread out for miles around, grayish dirt.
You have a conscience, you have a soul, you have something resembling concern as to where your food comes from and what it goes through to reach your plate? You see this place, you smell its happy poisons, you cannot help but think. About meat. Just for a little bit. Its ramifications, effects, overt weirdness, your role in it all.
See, meat is, for the liberal progressive trying to cultivate something resembling a deeper conscience, a bit of a paradox, inside a conundrum, wrapped in a dilemma and grilled over fine mesquite on a sexy little $600 Eva Solo grill. To eat red meat with anything resembling joy in the most liberal and environmentally conscious and vegetarian-happy part of the nation is a bit like being from Salt Lake City and claiming you really love anal sex. In church. While sipping absinthe.
It also means at some point you have to stare down (or, as much of the increasingly obese nation does, choose to completely ignore) a myriad of loaded, hot-button issues the tasty stuff brings up: animal rights, health issues, the ethics of the abattoir, the brutal environmental costs, water and farming and land abuse and all those millions of pounds of ozone-eating methane gasses the cows expel like the Catholic Church pumps out misogyny.
Meat also slaps up some delicious value-based dichotomies and conflicts: It's got a bit of West Coast versus Midwest, California versus Texas, vegetarian versus carnivore, red versus blue, yuppie versus hippie versus NASCAR versus city versus rural versus Jetta biodeisel versus big Ford F-150. It's all right there, in my amazing Niman Ranch gourmet burger from San Francisco's Burgermeister, in my succulent grass-fed steak that I eat maybe three times a year, in the organic ground beef I buy every now and then at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Oh yes, I am aware. And here's the divine kicker: I am OK with it all.
Because even as you inhale the beautifully repellant fumes of the famed Harris Ranch (which, by the way, is only a mid-sized operation. Many industrial mega-feedlots in Texas and the Midwest top 400,000 head of cattle, veritable nuclear sites of manure and methane and hormone-thick feed), even as the stench of just about everything that's wrong with big agribiz and industrial meat production hits you in the face, you know there are meaty alternatives. Accessible, ethical, affordable and still tasty as hell.
You now know, for example, that due to glorious (but still slight) shifts in consciousness, you can now easily find small, local, humane family farms that treat their small herds of carefully raised cattle nothing at all like big brutal corn-fed feedlots, farms that will happily sell you prime cuts of amazing grass-finished beef that will melt your very tongue without completely mauling your morals.
You can read Michael Pollan's incredibly informative book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and learn more than you ever imagined about American dietary craziness, and then jump right over to Slate, where a meat-loving panel taste-tested many of the best cuts of beef available, from the most expensive marbled Wagyu (American Kobe) and Angus to the organic small-farm grass-fed beef (in this case, from a great little farm up in Idaho called Alderspring Ranch), and found that, sure enough, the Alderspring beef tasted the best. By far. Oh, and it was also the cheapest. And most ethical. Bonus: no massive industrial stench to block from the nostrils of your subconscious.
It is, of course, all about balance. About where you draw your meaty lines. Argue, on one extreme, that meat shouldn't even be a part of the enlightened human diet any longer (I know this one well), or take the other extreme and eat the stuff every day, in obesity-inducing, Earth-abusing all-American doses, without concern for hormones or health or global warming or (heaven forefend) the life of the animal itself. It is your choice.
Personally, I recommend somewhere near the middle, leaning slightly toward the former, careful and aware and yet still edibly joyous, maybe once a month or so, cooked medium well with melted blue cheese and avocado and coupled with a decent Pinot. Fabulous.
SFGate
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've realized that I'll have to wait on my Mass Meat Purchase(tm)till the spring to get what I want, but things like this remind me of why it's so very necessary.
"The Omnivore's Dilemma", by the way, is an amazing book.
~M
Red Meat Does A Body Good
Can you still eat the stuff without having your soul mauled by a giant industrial slaughterhouse? Why sure
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 1, 2006
Oh, I eat it all right. Not obese heaping daily Midwestern gobs of it and not even weekly macho 24-ounce slabs of it and certainly not even a hint of a globule of the freakishly brown heavily processed fat-laden hormone-injected ultratoxic mystery gunk you find at the 18 million fast-food joints in the nation, but yes, I do indeed occasionally eat beef.
Organic, almost always. Grass-fed, if at all possible. Humanely raised and kindly slaughtered and kissed by the sun and blessed by the sly and cooing angels of gustatory bliss because that's just how I like to deceive myself and I shall admit right here, I almost always enjoy it immensely.
It is, I have to say, a kind of confession. A thing to reveal, fraught and interesting and full of pregnant meanings. Because here's the thing: Eating red meat these days is not, in this part of the country anyway, something presumed or common or all that shouted out. It's a bit of a hot-button topic, even, revealing as all hell; it's got that slightly smoky, delicious taint of the politically incorrect to its fatty drippings.
This all leaps to mind, by the way, after enduring the gauntlet-like drive down the brutal I-5 corridor from San Francisco to SoCal this past Thanksgiving weekend, easily the most loathed and reviled and yet grudgingly beloved concrete conduit in the entire state. And meat is, apparently, a big part of it all.
You live here, you know the drive well: It's a veritable candy store wasteland of prisons and landfills and toxic waste sites and massive, politically corrupt aqueducts, huge industrial farms and enormous ranches and depressing tule fog and vast swaths of bland nothingness all around, and it's dotted all the way down with weird little forgotten farming/industrial towns you will never ever visit except perhaps to refuel and empty your bladder as you wonder how the hell they get all that garbage food out to those endless Jack in the Box and Carl's Jr. and creepy overlit Del Taco outlets in the middle of nowhere.
Oh yes, the meat. It is right there, writ large and reeking and utterly undeniable as you cruise down I-5 and I don't mean just in the staggering, gluttonous array of greasy junk-food joints. I mean right there, the actual source itself, that famous and semi-gourmet bastion of manure and methane and meat known as the Harris Ranch, just off the freeway by a town called Coalinga. What a thing.
You know the place. Or rather, you know the stench. It is 800 acres and a whopping 100,000 head of truly miserable-looking cattle, all bunched together in one very dejected herd, right alongside a half-mile stretch of freeway, and every other cow has its head bowed to the ground munching on what appears to be, in contrast to the sweet grassy fields spread out for miles around, grayish dirt.
You have a conscience, you have a soul, you have something resembling concern as to where your food comes from and what it goes through to reach your plate? You see this place, you smell its happy poisons, you cannot help but think. About meat. Just for a little bit. Its ramifications, effects, overt weirdness, your role in it all.
See, meat is, for the liberal progressive trying to cultivate something resembling a deeper conscience, a bit of a paradox, inside a conundrum, wrapped in a dilemma and grilled over fine mesquite on a sexy little $600 Eva Solo grill. To eat red meat with anything resembling joy in the most liberal and environmentally conscious and vegetarian-happy part of the nation is a bit like being from Salt Lake City and claiming you really love anal sex. In church. While sipping absinthe.
It also means at some point you have to stare down (or, as much of the increasingly obese nation does, choose to completely ignore) a myriad of loaded, hot-button issues the tasty stuff brings up: animal rights, health issues, the ethics of the abattoir, the brutal environmental costs, water and farming and land abuse and all those millions of pounds of ozone-eating methane gasses the cows expel like the Catholic Church pumps out misogyny.
Meat also slaps up some delicious value-based dichotomies and conflicts: It's got a bit of West Coast versus Midwest, California versus Texas, vegetarian versus carnivore, red versus blue, yuppie versus hippie versus NASCAR versus city versus rural versus Jetta biodeisel versus big Ford F-150. It's all right there, in my amazing Niman Ranch gourmet burger from San Francisco's Burgermeister, in my succulent grass-fed steak that I eat maybe three times a year, in the organic ground beef I buy every now and then at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Oh yes, I am aware. And here's the divine kicker: I am OK with it all.
Because even as you inhale the beautifully repellant fumes of the famed Harris Ranch (which, by the way, is only a mid-sized operation. Many industrial mega-feedlots in Texas and the Midwest top 400,000 head of cattle, veritable nuclear sites of manure and methane and hormone-thick feed), even as the stench of just about everything that's wrong with big agribiz and industrial meat production hits you in the face, you know there are meaty alternatives. Accessible, ethical, affordable and still tasty as hell.
You now know, for example, that due to glorious (but still slight) shifts in consciousness, you can now easily find small, local, humane family farms that treat their small herds of carefully raised cattle nothing at all like big brutal corn-fed feedlots, farms that will happily sell you prime cuts of amazing grass-finished beef that will melt your very tongue without completely mauling your morals.
You can read Michael Pollan's incredibly informative book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and learn more than you ever imagined about American dietary craziness, and then jump right over to Slate, where a meat-loving panel taste-tested many of the best cuts of beef available, from the most expensive marbled Wagyu (American Kobe) and Angus to the organic small-farm grass-fed beef (in this case, from a great little farm up in Idaho called Alderspring Ranch), and found that, sure enough, the Alderspring beef tasted the best. By far. Oh, and it was also the cheapest. And most ethical. Bonus: no massive industrial stench to block from the nostrils of your subconscious.
It is, of course, all about balance. About where you draw your meaty lines. Argue, on one extreme, that meat shouldn't even be a part of the enlightened human diet any longer (I know this one well), or take the other extreme and eat the stuff every day, in obesity-inducing, Earth-abusing all-American doses, without concern for hormones or health or global warming or (heaven forefend) the life of the animal itself. It is your choice.
Personally, I recommend somewhere near the middle, leaning slightly toward the former, careful and aware and yet still edibly joyous, maybe once a month or so, cooked medium well with melted blue cheese and avocado and coupled with a decent Pinot. Fabulous.
SFGate
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've realized that I'll have to wait on my Mass Meat Purchase(tm)till the spring to get what I want, but things like this remind me of why it's so very necessary.
"The Omnivore's Dilemma", by the way, is an amazing book.
~M