Disclaimer: The well documented historical information chronicled in the book In Meat We Trust does not rightly belong in the Meat Misinformation category on the Pork & Beef Express. However, I’m placing my review of this book in that category so it will eventually stand in stark contrast to what some meat industry outsiders attempt to pass-off as “gospel” to the meat undereducated among us. Just as In Meat We Trust points out, persons inclined to attack mainstream food sources have the time to do so primarily because our modern agriculture infrastructure reliably supplies nourishment to them every day of every year. Likely such people believe that farming and the overall food industry are basic/simple enterprises; therefore they know how to correctly reshape things to best suite their Utopian views. They apparently wholeheartedly believe in their plans for everyone, but have no concept of the enormity and complexity of the infrastructure involved in economically feeding the modern world.
The book was very well researched and so interesting to me that I read all 270 pages of it within 2 days; then reread it within a week. It also contains an additional 98 pages of notes, bibliography or index. In Meat We Trust is most definitely a serious historical, no agenda work that I would recommend to anyone who eats.
Probably because I tend to take things literally, I took exception to this book’s sub-title: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America. Carnivore- An animal or plant that requires a staple diet consisting mainly or exclusively of animal tissue through predation or scavenging. Omnivore- An animal that feeds on both plants and animals to survive. Americans do have a comparatively high per-capita meat consumption rate, but not the highest, Luxembourg is higher. Further, Australia and New Zealand are not very far behind the U.S. Just as herbivores such as cattle and sheep are naturally drawn to eat nutrient rich seed grains, I contend that high-functioning omnivorous human populations collectively make rational decisions about how much nutrient dense meat they will consume. The 3 main considerations in making such decisions are: costs, convenience and eating enjoyment (palatability). There are trade-offs between these factors, but even fast-food and other “value-added” heavily processed meat products have to taste at least OK in order to become repeat sellers.
When settlers first came to America they found plenty of fish and game available for the taking, but taking it took hunting time, effort to carry meat back to where they lived and the eating satisfaction was seldom as good as meat from European domesticated livestock that had been selectively bred to produce palatable meat. Remember, meat and draft livestock species had been selected millennia earlier as being worth domesticating and caring for. Back then, it was a common practice to let livestock roam free and forage near settlements. Young tender animals would be rounded up and harvested during the late Fall; when cold weather conditions helped preserve the surplus of meat. Thinning the herd at the end of plant growing season also helped overwinter the breeding stock and young growing animals.
In Meat We Trust more than adequately covers meat’s costs and convenience factors, but largely neglected to discuss the human desire to have enjoyable meat eating experiences, whenever the cost and/or convenience factors are not prohibitively high. As American agriculture grew we were blessed with both high eating quality livestock breeds and the fertile land to produced a surplus of high energy grain which could be used to fatten young & tender livestock. So, if given a cost/convenience/high eating equality equation similar to America’s it’s likely that any population anywhere in the world would opt to consume quite a bit of nutrient dense meat; which most humans naturally crave.
I especially liked reading the “rest of the story” about how U.S. Meat Inspection came into existence in 1906, but was disappointed that the 1916 first steps toward Federal Government voluntary, fee-for-service, Quality & Yield carcass grading were not mentioned in the book.
Highly marbled pork and beef carcasses carry a lot of fat trimmings that are expensive to put on a meat animal, and it’s a shame to waste all that good flavor. Starting in the early 1960’s the U.S. began importing cargo ship loads of frozen, boneless beef blocks from countries comprised of large amounts of marginal grass lands. Grass-finished beef from Australia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, and some other countries is still shipped to the U.S. in large quantities to blended in with U.S. fat cattle trimmings in pre-cooked institutional and retail frozen products. Enhancing grass-finished beef with grain-finished fat trimmings imparts the palatability characteristics of flavor and juiciness that American consumers expect. Currently the U.S. imports about as many tons of beef as it exports each year. If U.S. school-lunch programs and giant fast-food hamburger chains would stop insisting on using 100% domestic beef, it’s unlikely that there would be any demand for Low-Temperature-Rendered beef (AKA Finely Textured Lean Beef). All unprocessed fat trimmings could then be blended in with imported grass-finished beef. Another option is to turn grain-poor countries on-to our more palatable ground beef by way of sending frozen blocks of fat beef trimmings back on the cargo ships that bring us boneless beef blocks.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the last paragraph, white grain fat (eye-appeal) is costly to put on young barely mature meat animals. So, when the attack on animal fat started in the 1960’s beef producers were more than happy to try and help consumers go lean. Farmers and ranchers began using large European Continental cattle to cross with the existing high marbling, medium frame size British beef breeds. That practice produced more pounds of lean beef. Most consumers like the look of leaner beef, but often have trouble cooking it to eat the way they were accustomed to. Steak’s surface area increased to the point where portion control cutting, at an average steak thickness, was often difficult to impossible. With desired eating qualities and portion size no longer available in the mainstream market on a consistent basis as they had been in the past, and since animal fat was denounced as bad, beef consumption declined for 25 years. However, in 1978 the Certified Angus Beef brand (CAB) started up as a traditional American high-quality beef hold-out. It didn’t matter that some of the beef carcasses certified as meeting the specification were not Angus; what mattered was that consumers could once again buy a steak that was hard for them to mess up when they cooked it. CAB eventually resulted in the current Angus craze that put an end to the mainstream market bigger-is-better lean cattle trend.
I loved the meat history covered in In Meat We Trust, but would also like to see it revised someday to include more about the eating quality factors involved in why we Americans eat so much red meat.
Another bit of history I would like to see included is that the U.S. has a lot of pasture land along the Appalachian Mountain range that is often used for cow-calf farming operations. These cattle are born near the population centers of the Northeast, but not the beef patch (Texas panhandle, Nebraska, Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado) where the mega feedlots and fat cattle harvest plants are. As a result, quite a few of the cattle shipped west as feeders are later shipped back east as meat. The corn-belt starts in Ohio, but as In Meat We Trust points out big beef was banished to more remote areas of the country by fair-weather eco-friendly people (not in my backyard).