Steak

Steak

          Beefsteak is deeply embedded in cultures all over the world, reverberating throughout those parts of our minds relating to pleasure, sensuality, self-esteem, and identity. In English-speaking countries, and now others, it sets the standard of success: if you’re eating steak you must be doing all right. Steak inspires cult-like emotions, and how a person likes steak to be cut and cooked (or not cooked) can be the basis of passionate conflict and snobbery, as can opposition to consuming it at all.

          Ummm, just chomp down and suck that blood back through your dentition. The concept of blood runs deeply through steak’s mystique. Steak snobbery requires chefs to heat it a bit, rather than actually cook it, so that true steak lovers can imagine it still quivering from the kill. People who like steak medium-to-well are beneath contempt.

          Pictures of men displaying our dominant culture’s ideal male body shape are called beefcake. Cartoon dogs have cartoon dream bubbles of cartoon t-bone steaks above their heads.

          Imagine Texas without steak.

          Increasing global prosperity, although foolishly unequal, has resulted in the growth of the affluent classes in many countries, and with this has brought an increasing demand for steak. The sheer bulk of the demand for sirloins, t-bones, rib-eyes, filet mignons, and porterhouses has had physical, ecological, and ethical consequences that are fucking disastrous.

          Okay.

          People who eat steak often tend to become beefy themselves, in a health-threatening way. In addition to perhaps a more florid complexion, heavy consumption of juicy, tender, delicious, sensuously red beefsteaks increases a person’s chances of coming a cropper from obesity, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and even cancer, especially for those who like ’em charcoal grilled. Charcoal beefs those statistics right up, as it were.

          The numbers don’t make room for small family farmers who occasionally send one of their cows to market when they need money, even though they might trade it for some magic beans. That huge global demand means factory farming, which inevitably becomes unsustainable as well as ugly. Large-scale beef cattle farming ties up ridiculous amounts of land and water resources and produces more greenhouse gasses than cars, as well as mountains of shit. It also seems to require the cruelty that factory-farmed beef cattle have to endure.

          Factory farming agribusiness is based on an unsustainable, self-destructive business model, anyway. Corporations require unlimited growth, but the amount of land and fresh water is finitely limited. Wait for the crash.

          But you probably know all that already.

          So there I was: standing before the 4Square’s meat fridge. I was considering the dilemmas involved in whether I should buy a reduced-for-quick-sale (‘cook or freeze within 24 hours’) 263-gram peppered steak, marked down from $24.99 to $3.

          The health thing wasn’t really a factor. It’d been a long time since I’d had a steak, and I don’t eat that many hamburgers. My overall diet’s varied, not leaning all that much in any one direction, and at 71 I wasn’t dead yet; 263 grams of pepper steak wasn’t gonna kill me, and if it did, well, I’ve had a full life.

          I reckoned that the 263-gram factor also meant that I wouldn’t be adding much pressure to the overall global market demand for beef, as New Zealand’s beef cattle usually produce about 300 kilos of food each. Not much of a percentage.

          New Zealand cattle, at least, are pasture-fed; we don’t use feedlots, which is an improvement in animal well-being, amongst other things, over what they do in most places overseas with large demand. I’ve also read that New Zealand beef slaughterhouses are arranged to minimise the fear and stress the animals experience before dying.

          And yes, although but a small and unsold slab, this was part of a loving animal that people killed. People and other species kill sentient beings everywhere, including each other. It’s a hell of a fucked-up world we live and die in. If I didn’t buy this 263 grams of that dead beast, furthermore, and nobody else did, 4Square would dump it, thereby desecrating in part the life the beast sacrificed, and nothing I could do could bring it back to life, anyway.

          I suppose things would’ve been much simpler if I had an ideology to answer all such questions for me, but I’m not favourably disposed toward ideologies in general.

          I grilled it, cut it into strips, and made steak-tomato-and-jalapeño sandwiches (not with beefsteak tomatoes, unfortunately) on buns spread with cold canned refried black beans, complemented with a $6.79 bottle of Aussie shiraz-or-merlot – at that price it’s hard for me to taste the difference. When you’re eating steak, you’re eating well, even as our culture and our species dive giggling into the maelstrom.