Before the Slaughter: How I Met My Meat

My future ribeye fixed me with his obsidian eyes from his pasture of clover on a farm in Upstate New York. In fact, a couple of my ribeyes did so: a filet mignon and a few dozen future burgers, too. My meals were, as yet, unrealized. For now, they were this cow—the one with tag #38 on his ear.

Passively, creepily, my steaks gazed at our group, three shadows against the sky along a dirt path in the middle of a field at Bettinger Bluff, a farm in Montgomery, NY. There I stood, intent on meeting, and perhaps, apologizing, to a cow we would be purchasing for the purpose of eating it. Next to me was my best friend Ben, who gave up living in Manhattan for a large house in the suburbs which was good because now he had space for a stand up freezer in which to keep this meat. Then there was Danny, the leathery skinned cow farmer, excavator, and all-round farm hand who would sell us the cow.

Danny wore a work-shirt that read, "Pirog Brothers Excavators." The owners of the farm were a set of identical twin Polish brothers—surname Pirog—who also worked as excavators and purveyors of top soil. "It's hard to make a living just cattle farming," Danny said. At any rate, the cows spoke Polish. He stepped onto the lowest wooden slat on the perimeter fence. "Ka vas!" he called to the cows. (That's Polish for "Hey you!") "Ka vas!"

Slowly, the seven steers in the enclosure whose turn it was to be slaughtered next looked up. They arranged themselves in an orderly row, like a police lineup, against the late summer sun. But they kept their distance. We eyeballed the biggest three, for those would be the cows shipped off to the USDA slaughterhouse up in Schenectady, NY. Danny aims to slaughter at least 1,000 to 1,300 pounds.

This was two weeks ago. Tomorrow they'll have their last meal (grass, with a side of grass) and leave their lifelong home, a verdant death row all along. After two weeks of hanging the carcasses on meat hooks like in Rocky—to release the panicky-hormones that flood the animal when it realizes its doom is impending—good ol' #38 will arrive back at the farm, in neatly butchered, cryo-packed bags, which Ben and I will then pick up, splitting between us the 300 pounds of meat.

The average American eats about a man's worth in cow a year, which roughly comes out to about 170 pounds. I probably eat double that because I am a restaurant critic who eats out professionally. At restaurants, meat continues to be the most common protein used to showcase a chef's technique. No one is "known for" their carrots. But despite how hot catchphrases like "locally sourced" and "grass-fed" have become, what one orders at a restaurant is meat, not cow. The animal is kept far afield. From nearly every point of view, this makes sense. Restaurateurs don't want diners to be reminded more than necessary about the source of their dinner. Diners, similarly, don't want to dwell on the implications of their skirt steak. So it works out. Except of course for the cow. I'm not suggesting and do not envision new steakhouse menus with sections like "Cow #910VF" (or worse, "Betsy") under which a long list of cuts from said cow are listed. That would be impractical and creepy.

But considering the cow wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. And that is something we never do. Among the many deleterious effects of Pat LaFrieda's rise, is that he serves as the morally abluting opaque wall beyond which no diner cares to see. "From Pat LaFrieda," conjures images of happy cows on rolling pastures. But Pat LaFrieda is merely a middle man. He does not raise cattle nor slaughter them. He simply husbands the meat to market. Some of that meat hails from feel-good family-owned ventures like the Creekstone Farms. Some of it is regular commodity beef from places like the Greater Omaha Packing Co. But these days, those two words—Pat LaFrieda—are like the talisman that keep moral quandaries at bay.

At any rate, I've seen cows before. Not like my mother, who grew up in Chicago, and believed with all her Roger Park heart that cows were the size of dogs. (She saw her first cow at age 19.) But I had also grown accustomed to evaluating my steak by its price, age, and sides. Hmmm, 40 oz. porterhouse for $104? I would ponder. Dry-aged 28 days? I'm in.

What I didn't do was ever make the connection, rewinding back through time like an Enya-video, from whence the steak came. Of course I know meat was cow but in the same way I know the globe is warming. Yes, it's true and it's horrible, but damn, doesn't the air feel nice going through your hair in a Mustang convertible out on that open road with the air conditioning blasting on high?

I had travelled up here—70 miles north of Manhattan to the Hudson Valley—to understand better my place in the process that turned a living thing into an eaten thing. Would I flagellate myself before this hoofed beast, fall to my knees among the manure and grass to beg forgiveness? I didn't see myself going in for pathetic gestures (unless it's to save my marriage). Might I apologize to the cow as, I suppose, a representative of all cows killed for Joshua David Stein through the journey of his life? To say I'm sorry to every carne asada taco, cheeseburger, or slab of brisket would be too unwieldy, after all. But no one had invested in this cow species-wide pardoning power. Mostly I was there to see how I felt, confronted with the one-on-oneness of my meat habit.

Oh, and also, who doesn't want to own 300 pounds of grass-fed cow, knowing it lived as well as cows can live?

Danny peered into a long pen, hemmed in on either side with weathered wooden slats. "I call this the Green Mile," said Danny. When he chooses his four or five head of cattle to be slaughtered per month, Danny drives them through the Green Mile into a waiting truck that will take them to be killed an hour and a half away at a small, family-run but USDA approved slaughterhouse. "Business is good for us," he said. "There's a worldwide beef shortage. Things are busy around here."

But that day was not the last day for any animal and there was just a massive red Simmental-Angus mix lying down, like a living leather sofa. In another enclosure, a black Angus bull nosed at a salt lick. Danny walked us through the basics of his herd. There are two bulls—later to be made into ground beef—and a herd of 140 breeders who, along with their children, are kept in an adjoining field. At about six to eight months old, the children are separated from their mothers. The male cows are castrated at birth, turning them into steers, while the heifers are spared to breed another year. "They'll be separated in a few months," said Danny. "You don't want to be here for that. It's mighty loud." Momentarily, I bum myself out, thinking of my own son being ripped away from me at eight months old, but Danny lets out a George Bush cackle and my sad reverie is interrupted. We hung out at the gate, watching the cows watch us. Some were bathing, some were braying. One—a baldy with a red tag on her ear—seemed to know what's up. She stared at us from the front of the herd, her eyes rimmed red. Then she forced the other cows back away from the gate. "She's a leader," said Danny.

He talked about how the cows live and what they eat a lot. They live solely on grass and on the hay kept under white plastic that flanks the dirt road into the fields like long marshmallows. Danny also talked about killing cows with such a matter-of-fact-ness it clears up some of my unease. Because the act of killing is never spoken about at restaurants or grocery stores, one gets the feeling that slaughter is shameful. But Danny's easy approach to it is a tonic. The steer I eat will be driven up early that morning. The trip is only an hour or so. "They've got to be killed by 10 AM," said Danny. "We've worked with these guys for years, they won't try to rip us off." (Many slaughterhouses, he said, skim a cut or two from the best cows, replacing it with inferior meat.) A few hours after he wakes up for the last time, cow #38 will die. He'll be terrified, for sure, Danny explained. "They know what's coming. There was a slaughterhouse that had a tiny window on the kill floor, just a few feet wide. And wouldn't you know it the cows tried to jump right through it!" he laughed.

Well, I thought, what percentage among us won't die in abject terror? Though cows might lose in method of execution, surely they know not the terror of contemplating extinction from this Earth as we do?

As the sun is getting low, the cows have grown bored with us. And I've grown bored with them too. There's no wellspring of feelings or pangs of guilt. I met my meat, cow-face to man-face and instead of turning me off to meat, it made me feel better. When I eat this ribeye, it won't have materialized from a menu, as if called into being by the utterance. It'll be like meeting an old friend, and eating him. As we turned to leave, I contemplated hollering out to the herd, "I'm sorry!" But, I'm not actually, and anyway, good old #38's head was buried in the clover.