Medium Raw

9 Meat

I believe that the great American hamburger is a thing of beauty, its simple charms noble, pristine. The basic recipe—ground beef, salt, and pepper, formed into a patty, grilled or seared on a griddle, then nestled between two halves of a bun, usually but not necessarily accompanied by lettuce, a tomato slice, and some ketchup—is, to my mind, unimprovable by man or God. A good burger can be made more complicated, even more interesting by the addition of other ingredients—like good cheese, or bacon…relish perhaps, but it will never be made better.

I like a blue cheese burger as much as the next guy—when I’m in the mood for blue cheese. But if it’s a burger I want, I stick to the classics: meat—and bun.

I believe this to be the best way to eat a hamburger.

I believe that the human animal evolved as it did—with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth—so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them; that we are designed to find and eat meat—and only became better as a species when we learned to cook it.

We are not, however, designed to eat shit—or fecal coli-form bacteria, as it’s slightly more obliquely referred to after an outbreak. Tens of thousands of people are made sick every year by the stuff. Some have died horribly.

Shit happens, right? Literally, it turns out. That’s pretty much what I thought anyway—until I read recent news accounts of a particularly destructive outbreak of the pathogen O157:H7. What I came away with was a sense of disbelief, outrage, and horror—not so much at the fact that a deadly strain of E. coli found its way into our food supply and made people sick but at the way other, presumably healthy burgers are made—the ones that didn’t make anybody sick. I was well aware—I mean, I assumed—that your frozen pre-made burger patty—the one intended for institutional or low-end, fast-food use; your slender and cheap, pre-packaged supermarket disk—was not of the best-quality cuts. But when I read in the New York Times that, as standard practice, when making their “American Chef ’s Selection Angus Beef Patties,” the food giant Cargill’s recipe for hamburger consisted of, among other things, “a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps” and that “the ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria” (italics my own), well…I was surprised.

By the end of the article, I came away with more faith in the people who process cocaine on jungle tarpaulins—or the anonymous but hardworking folks in their underwear and goggles who cut inner-city smack—than I had in the meat industry. I was no less carnivorous, but my faith had been seriously damaged. A central tenet of my belief system, that meat—even lesser-quality meat—was essentially a “good” thing, was shaken.

Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you’re making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter.

I don’t think that’s asking a lot—and I don’t ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you’re putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as “meat.”

Recall, please, that this is me talking. I’ve eaten the extremities of feculent Southern warthog, every variety of gut, ear, and snout of bush meat. I’ve eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I’ve eaten bat. In every case, they were at least identifiable as coming from an animal—closer (even at their worst) to “tastes like chicken” than space-age polymer.

An enormous percentage of burger meat in this country now contains scraps from the outer part of the animal that were once deemed sufficiently “safe” only for pet food. But now, thanks to a miracle process pioneered by a company that “warms the trimmings, removes the fat in a centrifuge and treats the remaining product with ammonia,” we don’t have to waste perfectly good “beef” on Fluffy or Boots.

“An amalgam of meat from different slaughterhouses” is how the Times describes what’s for dinner when you dig into “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties”—but what the fuck does that mean?

Meat-industry spokesmen, when rushed to television studios to counter the blowback from the latest incident of E. coli–related illness, usually respond with expressions of sympathy for the victims, assurances that our meat supply is safer than ever—and the kind of measured, reasonable noises that go over well when faced with hyperbolic arguments against meat in general. But they are very cautious when pressed on the specifics. When asked to describe the kind of scraps used in a particular brand of hamburger, they will invariably describe the trimmings as coming from premium cuts like sirloin, rib, and tenderloin. Which is, of course, technically true.

But what parts of those cuts? “Sirloin” and “rib” sections and “primal cuts” sound pretty good—but what we’re largely talking about here is the fatty, exposed outer edges that are far more likely to have come in contact with air, crap-smeared hides, other animals, and potential contaminants. The better question might be: Please tell me which of these scraps you would have been unable to use a few years ago—and exactly what do you have to do to them to make them what you would consider “safe”?

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination—until after it’s run through the grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources.

Meaning, the company who grinds all that shit together (before selling it to your school system) often can’t test it until after they mix it with meat they bought from other (sometimes as many as three or four) slaughterhouses. It’s the “Who, me?” strategy. The idea is simply that these slaughterhouses don’t want to know—’cause, if they find out something’s wrong, they might have to actually do something about it and be, like, accountable for this shit, recall all the product they sold to other vendors.

It’s like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you—just so she can’t point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap. To my way of thinking, before you slip into the hot tub at the Playboy mansion is probably when your companions would like you to be tested. Not after.

It should be pointed out, I guess, that McDonald’s and most other fast-food retailers test the finished products far more frequently than the people who sell the stuff to them—and much more aggressively than school systems. Which, while admirable (or at least judicious on their part), seems somehow wrong.

Meat-industry flacks point to the tiny percentage of their products that end up having to be recalled—or turn out to be problematic. But we eat a lot of beef in this country. However small that percentage, that’s still a lot of fucking hamburger.

I don’t want to sound like Eric Schlosser or anything. I’m hardly an advocate for better, cleaner, healthier, or more humane—but you know what? This Cargill outfit is the largest private company in America. A hundred and sixteen billion dollars in revenue a year. And they feel the need to save a few cents on their low-end burgers by buying shit processed in ammonia? Scraps that have to be whipped or extracted or winnowed out or rendered before they can put them into a patty mix? Mystery meat assembled from all over the world and put through one grinder—like one big, group grope in moist, body-temperature sheets—with strangers?

I believe that, as an American, I should be able to walk into any restaurant in America and order my hamburger—that most American of foods—medium fucking rare. I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria.

I believe I shouldn’t have to be advised to thoroughly clean and wash up immediately after preparing a hamburger.

I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious fucking medical waste.

I believe the words “meat” and “treated with ammonia” should never occur in the same paragraph—much less the same sentence. Unless you’re talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.

This is not Michael Pollan talking to you right now—or Eric Schlosser, whose zeal on this subject is well documented. I don’t, for instance, feel the same way about that other great American staple, the hot dog. With the hot dog, there was always a feeling of implied consent. We always knew—or assumed—that whatever it was inside that snappy tube, it might contain anything, from 100 percent kosher beef to dead zoo animals or parts of missing Gambino family. With a hot dog, especially New York’s famous “dirty-water hot dog,” there was a tacit agreement that you were on your own. They were pre-cooked, anyway, so how bad could it be?

The hamburger is different. It’s a more intimate relationship. Unlike the pre-cooked German import, the hot dog, the hamburger—or ground beef—has been embraced as an expression of our national identity. The backyard barbeque, Mom’s meatloaf—these are American traditions, rights of passage.

Is it too much to feel that it should be a basic right that one can cook and eat a hamburger without fear? To stand proud in my backyard (if I had a backyard), grilling a nice medium-rare fucking hamburger for my kid—without worrying that maybe I’m feeding her a shit sandwich? That I not feel the need to cross-examine my mother, should she have the temerity to offer my child meatloaf?

I shouldn’t have to ask for this—or demand it—or even talk about it. It’s my birthright as an American, God damn it. And anybody who fucks with my burger, who deviates from the time-honored bond that one has come to expect of one’s burger vendor—that what one is eating is inarguably “beef” (not necessarily the best beef, mind you, but definitely recognizable as something that was, before grinding, mostly red, reasonably fresh, presumably from a steer or cow, something that your average Doberman would find enticing)—anybody selling burgers that can’t even conform to that not particularly high standard is, in my opinion, unpatriotic and un-American, in the truest, most heartfelt sense of those words.

If you are literally serving shit to American children, or knowingly spinning a wheel where it is not unlikely that you will eventually serve shit—if that’s your business model? Then I got no problems with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I’ll hold the spoon.

In this way, me and the PETA folks and the vegetarians have something in common, an area of overlapping interests. They don’t want us to eat any meat. I’m beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat.

PETA doesn’t want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don’t want any animals to die—ever—and basically think that chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat.

Many people will tell you it is America’s distorted relationship with what, in grammar school, we used to know as the “food triangle”—a hierarchy of food that always led up to meat—that’s killing us slowly, clogging our airports and thoroughfares with the ever larger, ever slower-moving morbidly obese, huffing and puffing their way to an early grave. That our exploding health-care costs are increasingly attributable to what we eat (and how much) rather than, say, cigarettes—or even drugs. Which is fine, I guess, in a personal-choice kind of way if, as with heroin, you play and are then willing to pay.

I like to think of myself as leaning toward libertarianism—I am very uncomfortable when the government says that it has to step in and make that most fundamental of decisions for us: what we should or shouldn’t put in our mouths. In a perfect world, individuals would be free to take all the heroin they wanted—and stuff their faces with trans fats as much as they like—until it becomes a problem for their neighbors. Which it clearly has.

Our insatiable lust for cheap meat is, in fact, fucking us up. Our distorted expectations of the daily meal are undermining the basic underpinnings of our society in ways large and small. That we’re becoming a nation that (in the words of someone much smarter than I) is solely “in the business of selling cheeseburgers to each other” is pretty undeniable—if you add that we are, at even our most privileged end, in the business of lending money to people who sell cheeseburgers to each other.

The cruelty and ugliness of the factory farm—and the effects on our environment—are, of course, repellent to any reasonable person. But it’s the general lowering of standards inherent in our continuing insistence on cheap burgers—wherever they might come from and however bad they taste; the collective, post-ironic shrug we’ve come to give each other as we knowingly dig into something that tastes, at best, like cardboard and soured onion—that’s hurting us.

In the America not ruled by the imperative to buy and sell cheap ground meat, however, something has been happening to my beloved hamburger, something about which I have mixed emotions. The slow, creeping influence of the “boutique” burger, the “designer” burger.

Years ago—so many now that few of us even remember—there was a time when most Americans had similar expectations of coffee as they have traditionally had of the hamburger. That a decent, cheap—but not necessarily great—cup of coffee in a cardboard container or heavy Buffalo china receptacle was a birthright. Coffee, it was generally accepted, did, and should, cost about fifty cents to a dollar—often with unlimited refills. Then Starbucks came along, whose particular genius was not the dissemination of such concepts as “latte,” “half-caf,” and “mochaccino,” or new terms for sizes, like “venti.” Nor did their brilliance lie in the particularly good quality of their coffee.

Starbucks’s truly beautiful idea was the simple realization that Americans wanted to spend more money for a cup of coffee, that they’d feel much better about themselves if they spent five dollars for a cup of joe rather than buy that cheap drip stuff that shows such as Friends suggested only fat white trash in housecoats (or people who actually worked for a living) drank anymore—in their trailer parks or meth labs or wherever such people huddled for comfort.

And America wanted to drink its coffee (or, more accurately, linger over it) in places that looked very much like…Starbucks, where young, attractive people (like the cast of Friends) sipped their coffees and spent their time and no doubt engaged in witty banter between cranberry muffins. To a faint soundtrack featuring the nonthreatening musical stylings of Natalie Merchant. For five bucks a pop.

A while ago, the guy behind the counter (and he sure as shit wasn’t called a “barista”) asked you for five bucks for a cup of coffee—any coffee—he’d better expect an argument, at least. Now? You wouldn’t blink. The entire valuation of coffee has changed while we weren’t looking.

This, I suspect, is what’s already happened and will continue to happen with the hamburger. The fashion industry figured this out long ago. Relatively few people could afford a Gucci suit. But they could surely afford a T-shirt with GUCCI printed on it. What’s happening is that five years from now, all those people who could never afford to eat at, say, Craft, will surely be able to buy a Tom Colicchio Burger. And I’m guessing, by the way, that—unlike a Chinese-made T-shirt with a logo on it—it’ll be a pretty good burger.

Things keep going the way they’re going, and the “good” burger, the designer burger, the one you’d entrust your child to, the one you want your friends to see you eating—that’ll be $24, please.

You’d think the major meat-packers should have seen this coming—should have seen that saving 30 cents a pound is all fine and good—but not when, a few years down the line, they risk losing the market. A few more E. coli outbreaks in fast-food outlets or school systems, and you’re likely to see a tail-off. Few parents are going to let their little Ambers or Tiffanys eat the stuff that they’re talking about on CNN all the time—next to the pictures of dead children and diseased animals. It’s really only a matter of time until—through a combination of successful demonization, genuine health concerns, and changing eating habits—America will actually start eating fewer of those gray disks of alleged “meat.”

If recent history has taught us anything, though, it’s that Big Food is way ahead of us with their market research. In all likelihood, when and if America sours on the generic burger, they’ll be waiting for us on the other end with open arms. As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc., an overwhelmingly large percentage of “new,” “healthy,” and “organic” alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. “They got you comin’ and goin’” has never been truer. Like breaking a guy’s leg—so you can be there to sell him a crutch. “We’re here for you—when you get sick of, or too frightened of, our other product. Of course it’ll cost a little more. But then you expected that.”

Maybe an early warning sign, the beginning of a major shift in attitude came not from health concerns, or rising awareness, or the success of such excellent books as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but from whatever devious and cynical chef first came up with the concept of the “Kobe burger.”

He or she can hardly be blamed. The times when this seminal event occurred were surely ripe for it. New York City restaurants were clogged with loud, pin-striped, yet-to-be-indicted fuck-nuts hedge funders who relished the opportunity to showily throw a hundred dollars at a burger. Kobe, after all, was the “best” beef in the world, wasn’t it? It came from, like, Japan, from, like, special cows who get…massaged in beer and shit, don’t they? “I hear they even jack them off!!”

This was the story going around anyway, as high-fiving day traders from some by-now-defunct investment bank or brokerage house hurried, lemming-like, to order the “best burger ever.” Of course, chances are, the “Kobe beef” in that Kobe beef burger had never been anywhere near Japan. It was a distant relative at best—and even if the sublimely fatty product of pampered Wagyu cattle was used in the burger, it would have been (and remains) an utterly pointless, supremely wasteful, and even unpleasant exercise.

What makes a Wagyu steak so desirable is the unbelievably prodigious marbling of fat that runs through it—often as much as 50 percent. Its resulting tenderness and richness, and the subtle—repeat—subtle flavor. When grinding a hamburger, you can put in as much fat as you like—just reach in the fat can and drop it in the machine—so there’s no reason to pay a hundred bucks for a burger. A burger, presumably, already is about as tender as a piece of meat can be—and a taste as subtle as real Wagyu’s would, in any case, be lost were you to do something so insensitive as bury it between two buns and slather it with ketchup.

A six-ounce tataki of real Wagyu steak, seared rare and sliced thinly, is about all you want or can eat in a sitting. It’s that rich. It’ll flood your head with so much fat you’ll quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. Even an eight-ounce “Kobe burger” made from real Wagyu would be an exercise in futility—and pretty disgusting.

But no. The cream of big-city douchedom ordered these things in droves, bragging about it all the way. It quickly became clear to chefs and restaurateurs that there was a huge, previously untapped market out there for expensive hamburgers—that customers at a certain income level, clearly, were willing, even eager, to pay more. All you had to do was put a “brand” name next to the word “hamburger” and you could add value. That brand could be the name of a famous chef (many of whom wisely began to flock to the concept) or the name of a boutique producer (something that, like the word “Kobe,” implied specially raised, artisanal, humanely treated, organic, or sexually satisfied cattle). Chefs added “extras” like foie gras, truffles, braised oxtail, the exotic cheeses of many lands.

Restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow’s New York restaurant Kobe Club—a name that implied an establishment where sophisticated gentlemen of the world could gather, mingle with others in the know, share meat-related experiences with like-minded movers and shakers—was meant to be the apotheosis of this concept.

But Chodorow was a little late to the party—New Yorkers had moved on.

Instinctively suspicious of designer labels—as potentially being something they might like in New Jersey—and uneasy with the crassness of the whole Kobe Club concept, New York foodies looked elsewhere for a prestige patty. Perhaps Kobe suffered from its association with Chodorow, a man whom food writers find an irresistible target. It’s almost obligatory for food bloggers to mock his latest ventures—often before they are even open for business. Sneering at Chodorow is like making a mean crack about film director Brett Ratner if you’re a budding film critic. It immediately asserts one’s bona fides as a serious observer. (Chodorow, like Ratner, seems only too happy to oblige: see such absurd, bizarro pastiches of restaurants past as Rocco’s, the reality show–driven abomination; Caviar and Banana, a vaguely Brazilian follow-up; English Is Italian [he isn’t]; and his latest, a jumbo-size attempt to straddle the Asian fusion, sushi, and izakaya markets. Even veteran food critics can’t resist giving him a kick whenever the opportunity presents itself. The jokes write themselves.)

In post-Kobe New York, a new way to pay more for a burger was needed. And smearing foie gras or house-made relish on it was not going to be enough. A return to purist notions of the hamburger began to take hold—even an orthodoxy—in such forums where these things are earnestly considered and discussed. A virtuous burger, it was argued by aficionados, was the “original” recipe, a “roots” burger, unsullied by “foreign” or modern flavors, one whose meaty charm spoke for itself. Said burger should come from the very best mix of the very best parts of the very best quality beef from animals of verifiably excellent breeding. And it should be cooked “right” (whatever that implied).

Enter New York’s Minetta Tavern, where the Black Label Burger is of an exclusive blend prepared by Pat LaFrieda from grass-fed, free-range, organically raised Creekstone Farms beef. Seared simply and unapologetically on a griddle—where, we are assured, God intended us to cook our burgers—and served on a bun with a little onion confit, a slice of tomato, and a leaf of lettuce, everything new is old again. Only it’s 26 dollars now.

This is indeed one king-hell, motherfucker of a burger—one that would be seriously difficult to top in a blind taste-off of “experts.” Arguably, it’s worth the bucks, if you have that kind of money—and, face it, if you’re eating at the Minetta Tavern, you probably do.

But the speed with which accomplished and forward-thinking high-end chefs like Laurent Tourondel, Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Hubert Keller, Bobby Flay—and even Emeril—made their moves to exploit the new frontiers of the “hamburger concept” has been breathtaking. And all of them, let it be pointed out, indeed serve a damn good burger. It’s already the Next Big Thing—and is likely to stay the big thing for the conceivable future. If anything, it’s only the beginning—a trend that fits perfectly with the times, a relatively affordable (still) luxury item for a difficult economic environment, something that plays neatly into the national mood: the desire for comforting, reassuring food, the backlash against “fancy,” “silly,” or “hoity-toity”–sounding dishes, a growing sense of discomfort with the traditional food supply, and the reverse snobbery of foodie elites who enjoy nothing more than arguing over what might be the most “authentic” version of quotidian classics.

But what of the burger of lore? The adequate, presumably safe (we thought so, anyway) utility burger, draped and leaking clear grease across the bottom of an open bun, accompanied by an unripe tomato slice, a drying onion slice, and a leaf of iceberg that no one will ever eat…a limp wedge of obligatory dill pickle, a single slice of Kraft “cheese food,” half-melted and congealing even now, kitty-corner across the top? Will it disappear like the vivid, brightly colored Americana on Howard Johnson’s menus past? The ham steaks checkerboarded with grill marks and garnished with pineapple rings, and the thick-crusted chicken potpies of earlier decades?

Will more assurances be necessary to future customers before slightly more expensive patties can be sold?

“Now serving our Chaste Quaker Farms mélange of grain-fed Angus beef—minimally dosed with antibiotics and made only slightly uncomfortable during its final days in a dark, shit-smeared shed.”

Or will the default-quality burger—the classic “mystery meat” patty—continue to survive and flourish indefinitely? Simply more expensive by two dollars or so?

Surely the message for the Greek couple at the luncheonette down the road, sizzling up the same frozen patties on a Mel Fry–smeared griddle, like they always have, is that for some reason or another, the ass-hats down the street are paying eighteen bucks for a burger. We can definitely get away with jacking up our price by a dollar or two.

Maybe this whole burger thing is part of a larger shift—where all the everyday foods of everyday Americans are being slowly, one after the other, co-opted, upgraded, reinvented, and finally marked up.

Look around.

In the hottest restaurants of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, it’s the rich who are lining up to eagerly pay top dollar for the hooves, snouts, shanks, and tripe the poor used to have to eat.

You’d have to go to Mario Batali and slap down twenty dollars to find an order of chitterlings these days. You can look far and wide in Harlem without finding pig’s feet. But Daniel Boulud has them on the menu.

Regular pizza may be on the endangered list, “artisanal” pizza having already ghettoized the utility slice. Even the cupcake has become a boutique item…and the humble sausage is now the hottest single food item in New York City. Order a Heineken in Portland or San Francisco—or just about anywhere, these days—and be prepared to be sneered at by some locavore beer-nerd, all too happy to tell you about some hoppy, malty, microbrewed concoction, redolent of strawberries and patchouli, that they’re making in a cellar nearby. Unless, of course, you opt for post-ironic retro—in which case, that “silo” of PBR will come with a cover charge and an asphyxiating miasma of hipness.

David Chang sells “cereal milk” in sixteen-ounce bottles for five bucks. An infusion, as I understand it, of the metabolized essence of cereal, the extracted flavors of Captain Crunch with Crunchberries perhaps, the sweet, vaguely pinkish milk left in the bottom of the bowl after you’ve drunkenly spooned and chawed your way through the solids. Maybe this is the high-water mark of the phenomenon. And then again, maybe not.

When and if the good guys win, will we—after terrifying consumers about our food supply, fetishizing expensive ingredients, exploiting the hopes, aspirations, and insecurities of the middle class—have simply made it more expensive to eat the same old crap? More to the point, have I?

Am I helping, once again, to kill the things I love?