As I walked out of the GrainWorld conference after the cattle market outlook last Tuesday, I pondered a problem that is stuck in the throat of the industry: beef’s declining popularity. A range of factors, from high prices of beef compared to chicken and pork to beef’s reputation as an unhealthy “red meat” is making beef stick in the esophagus of the eating public, and per capita beef consumption in the United States has fallen since the mid-1980s from almost 80 pounds per year to presently under 50 pounds per year.
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A few hours later these thoughts were perhaps still trotting around in the back of my mind because I decided to cook steak for the family for supper. As I raced around the house, trying to control the toddler (keeping my steak knife out of two-year-old’s eager hands) and attempting to not step on my busily crawling 11 month old, I sliced a big piece of just-barbequed steak, chewed it a few times, revelled in the taste, and swallowed it down. Jeez, there’s just no beating the taste of a good barbequed steak, I thought. Or, rather, I half-swallowed it as I thought that. Because most of the way down, my esophagus gagged on beef the way American consumers have been doing, and that big chunk of steak jammed. Completely. Utterly. Couldn’t even get any liquid to get down past it.
Uncomfortable feeling.
I thought it would pass in minutes, or an hour. But later in the evening I decided that I would go to the doctor the next day if it was still jammed the next morning. Every half hour I’d have to tip myself down to jettison all the saliva that was brimming up in my throat, unable to be swallowed. The next day came, everything was still jammed and, after visiting two hospitals, I ended up collapsing in an emergency room, being strapped onto a gurney and rushed through the triage area of the second hospital. As I looked up as they wheeled me along, with the ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights passing by and people looking down at me and barking out orders for medical stuff, I thought of the very first and very last scenes of Carlito’s Way, a 1990s movie in which Al Pacino plays a gangster who gets shot – hence the hospital ceiling tiles scenes. That’s what Carlito sees. I know it’s odd that in a state of physical distress I was thinking about Carlito’s Way, but there you have it – the mind is a crazy thing. Or at least mine is. Al Pacino’s about my height, so it’s an apropos reference, I suppose.
Anyhoo, a couple of bags of IV saline solution and a good anesthetized scoping out of my throat by a specialist brought up the chunk o’beef, and I spent a couple of days on the couch, feeling beaten up and rather sore any time I tried to swallow something solid. I must admit that eating another steak was about the furthest thing from my mind, even further than cheering for the U.S. hockey team, which I am delighted we heroic Canadians defeated last night. (Too bad we didn’t pull a sudden death goal in that little hockey game we had with the Yanks at Yorktown in the 1780s, methinks.)
And I haven’t consumed anything as tough and fibrous as a steak since my little incident last week. Those kinds of events tend to leave a lingering queasiness.
But I laughed to myself Saturday morning when I found myself sitting at the Costco cafeteria – eating a beef burger. A half pound beef burger. Apparently the trauma of the steak-jamming didn’t turn me off the flavour of beef. In fact, as I chewed – slowly and many, many times on each mouthful – I couldn’t help thinking, jeez, this beef tastes great! Certainly a lot better than all that friggin soup and shakes I’d been eating. And I was annoyed that my toddler daughter kept wanting more of my burger. That was my beef and I wanted it! I considered buying another half-pounder for us to share.
Because here’s the moral of this long and odd story: nothing tastes as good as beef when it comes to meat. Chicken – you’ve got to put a sauce on it, or spice the heck out of it, for it to have much flavour worth calling “flavour.” Pork’s great, but just doesn’t compare to beef’s ability to deliver a knockout punch of flavour with no requirement for spices, sauces, disguises of any nature. What other meat can you just slap on the grill by itself – ground or steak – and eat and feel satisfied? Perhaps lamb, my British sheep producing relatives will tell me, I know. But I wouldn’t agree.
And that’s why I don’t think the beef market’s going away any time soon. There has been a multi-decade slide in beef’s popularity. It is no longer the default meat everyone eats for supper every night. And chicken, with its lower cost, will bite at beef’s butt, and pork will move in on beef’s turf as people learn to cook pork better. But there’s no replacing the pure, sensuous experience of eating a steak. And no one will put the burger down for the count. Those two are food superheavyweights and they aren’t going to suffer a TKO, even if they get a little bloodied and bruised.
When will beef’s slide stop? You got me. But I don’t expect I’ll still be around when it happens. And that’s not because I plan to die prematurely from choking to death on an unchewed chunk of steak. From now on I will chew every mouthful 40 times. Or so. No, I think I won’t be around to see the demise of the beef market because I plan to live to 109 and I’m sure people will still be eating lots of beef in 2075.
