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Beef encounters with a world transformed by milk and meat
Beef fed the world and became the backbone of capitalism. Chris Benfield examines a new book on the culture of cattle.
Taking a theme and spinning off it has been the mainstay of reality tv and books in recent years. Clocks, nutmegs, eels, salt, crows... they've all had their moment in the sun.
It's surprising, perhaps, that nobody has done cattle before. The authors of Beef: How Milk, Meat and Muscle Shaped the World make a good case for their subject.
It was cow milk which started the first human population explosion, they say. It was cow manure which started cultivation of soil. It was oxen which provided the first horsepower, so to speak. And it was beef breeding which laid the foundations of capitalism. Did we know that the Latin for cattle is pecu as in pecuniary?
Evan Fraser is a 35-year-old Canadian who recently turned down his turn to run the family farm in Ontario in favour of a regular wage lecturing and researching on sustainable farming at Leeds University. Andrew Rimas is a writer he has known since they were boys in Ottawa. Between them, they write well and appear to know a great deal about butchery and cookery. They've been talking across the world about
mutual interest in beef for some years.
This is how they sum up the state of play: "We pay less for rump steak, Brie, ice-cream or low-fat yogurt, than we've done at any point in history, and we eat more of it. We've swapped the spectre of malnutrition for the wheezing ills of obesity, heart disease and diabetes."
The rough theme of the book is that the industrialisation of cattle has gradually whittled away at our awareness of what they and their dairy products should taste like.
The Charolais, one of the big-bottomed breeds from across the Channel which has been systematically bred into the original British stock to give more cash per pound, is simply "flavourless" according to cattleman and butcher Tim Wilson, founder of the Ginger Pig business and one of the
Yorkshire sources the writers consulted.
We have descended, it is claimed, to the point where American beef, finished in sheds on the sweetest cuts of corn, brought in by conveyor belt, is considered the best – and that change in tastes now threatens the environment, as well as the health of the livestock and our own hearts. The same goes for a dairy industry supplied, in the writers' eyes, by caricatures of cows, producing vast quantities of thin milk and mountains of manure.
"The cattle industry is not sustainable in its present form," they sum up. "The first step in making it better would be to put cows back on grass."
These arguments are not new. But in the course of them, the authors make some entertaining diversions – into Minotaurs and Masai culture, Bradford pies and bull-fighting, for example. There are quite a lot of useful by-the-ways, too, like a lyrically-written guide to choosing steak, and recipes for everything from hamburgers to bull's-tail stew.
There is a nice page about how a 1906 book called The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's expos of life in the Chicago meat processing industry, started a scare about dead human workers getting mixed up in the corned beef – and led to the foundation of the food inspection business.
Our authors comment: "Sinclair had hoped for workplace reforms and a humane socialist future. Instead he got the Food & Drug Administration. As he said, 'I aimed at the public's heart and hit it in the stomach'."
It's a book which will make farmers and consumers shout alternately with rage and recognition – although at different points, probably.
Beef by Evan DG Fraser and Andrew Rimas is published by Mainstream Publishing and the recommended price is 12.99.
To order it from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on
0800 0153232 or visit www.yorkshirepostbookshop.
co.uk. Postage is 2.75.
CATTLE: SOME FACTS TO CHEW ON
The authors say: "In large parts of America, a Stetson is equivalent to a monk's tonsure – it's a badge of belief. Instead of believing in the holy apostolic church, wearers believe in 'individualism', steel guitars and nostalgia for the open prairie."
Former Bradford butcher Colin Beaumont is quoted in support of an argument that Foot and Mouth disease in 2001 was
the fatal last blow for the butcher as High Street icon ...
"Supermarket chains weathered the blow by buying from across the country or from Europe, while the disease ruined local operations. 'Must have been close on a hundred butchers in Bradford,' said Beaumont. 'Now, I can't think of one in the town centre'."
The book recommends a return to hardier breeds ...
"Aberdeen Angus beef cattle and Holstein-Friesian dairy cows, swollen with flesh and milk, respectively, give the best economic return.They're the biggest kids in the class. But they're milquetoasts. They take too many sick days and fall apart at the first crackle of a heatwave. In the arid 21st century, Friesians will curdle like saucepans of boiling cream."
And it offers food for thought, as well as for Sunday lunch ...
"One of the reasons for the rise of gourmet chic is excessive pleasure in food – what Thomas Aquinas called ardenter (eagerness) and studiose (daintiness) is seen as a stamp of refinement. The very sin that, in the 15th century, damned Dante's friend Ciacco to an afterlife of rotting in feculent mud, has become a mark of good breeding."
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