Beef Knuckle: Would a Cut By Any Other Name Smell As Sour?

So, last week we cut our teeth on shoptalk. I spent three hours with the man named Tom in a walk-in stocked with recently delivered hanging-weight meat. Tom, a former vegetarian, runs the meat program for all four restaurants. As he deftly carved up the side of a cow, I asked questions, and he let loose a deluge of information informed by his experience as a butcher. It was before my time, but the 1984 Wendy's commercial with the crotchety, beef-obsessed old lady rang in my head.

"Where's the beef?" Well, here it was, all around me.

I learned that there are only four pieces of skirt steak, one of the most commonly used cuts of meat, on a single steer. I learned that there's only one two-pound hanger steak on an entire cow. And I learned that sirloin tips used to be called beef knuckle before the industry changed the name to make it more marketable. In Tom's collection of books on meat, which range from a 1919 vocational manual to Pork & Sons, the change in nomenclature occurs in the mid-80s. I found this brochure from Beef Innovations Group, which avows "A product's name can enhance its appeal." Tom and I agreed Beef Knuckle would make a good name for a frat boy, but not so much for an appetizing entree.

Mostly, I learned how very little I know about meat. I'm not alone in my ignorance. After talking with Tom, I'd say I know more than most Americans about the meat they chew. I'm thinking again of the adage, "Where's the beef?" And, as it turns out, the question is so…well, dated. The beef? It's everywhere.

Beef is a major player in our American cultural landscape. And that means it's in the political brew. On January 7, 2008, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton went on the ABC News morning show just before the New Hampshire primary. Echoing Walter Mondale's sharp criticism of Gary Hart in the primaries of 1984, she said of Obama's campaign:

"You know, all of a sudden you start to ask yourself – wait a minute, I mean, what is the substance here? What, as famously was said years ago, 'where's the beef?' You know, where is the reality? And I think that's a fair question…Voters are going to start asking themselves the tough questions that I think all of us have to ask."

Clinton could have just as well still been talking about beef. Unpacking the sound bite reveals a startling irony. Do we really equate beef with reality and substance? Because it seems that reality and substance have long been divorced from the American consumption of meat. So much so, that a better question for 2008 might be "What is the beef?" As the ingredients in our food become unrecognizable, knowing what's for dinner is no easy feat.

Mark Bittman's Wednesday article "Putting Meat Back In Its Place" hits a worthwhile chord – eating less beef seems like a good thing to do today. But his advice falls short. The "tough questions" go beyond how much meat to eat. How were the animals treated? How did they live, and how did they die? The tough questions involve asking where our meat comes from, seeing – as Anna pointed out in a previous post – the international ramifications of our meat industry, and, simply, learning what meat is. After all, how many people know what part of the animal their favorite cut of meat is from?

These questions beg for answers. In a time when Americans eat an average of 1/2 pound of meat a day, I think you'll find, as I did, that there are many more hours to spend in the walk-in.

NEXT WEEK: Tom pointed me in the direction of a tome called Larousse Gastronomique on the shelves behind the bar at Marlow & Sons. Expect musings on the ancient, quasi-mystical history of butchery. -Leah Campell

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More Like Marlow's Two Babes

Sean and Dave get Poetical on the Information Superhighway!

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I feel confused...

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008: New York Post Page 35



Wednesday, June 11th, 2008: New York Post Page 47

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Today In The News

On my way to work today I bought the Daily News? For its front page as pictured here. Sifting its foully ink drenched pages I began to question my decision. Obviously a hilarious, effective, and important headline to anyone living in a fast food city such as New York, as well as directly pertinent to the industry and political platform (local food, know your farmer, seasonal etc.)we often perch on. I still felt a tiny wave of discomfort or unease. And I realized it had nothing to do with the proximity my brain waves were to the ultra-saturated gossip page. I started this morning, moving slowly through the hell wave that is our climate today, wondering about how I ingest information.

In my inbox when I sat down this morning was an article on South Korea's Prime Minister and Cabinet resigning in hopes to quell riots over US Beef being allowed to be imported after a 5 year stay due to fear of Mad Cow disease. The issues here run deeper, wallowing in what seems to add up to a deep rooted mistrust of the three-month old presidency of Lee Myung BakThis. The article was from the Times Online listed under the category of World News. Fair enough. Again an article aligned in some way with my concerns with the world, to make a possibly unfairly sweeping statement.

So I recognize a thread here. One from the World News section of the Times Online to the front page of the Daily News. For more investigation I moved my attention to the New York Times Online today. Here I found an even more complex system of shoots and ladders.

In the Nation Section (and I'm aware as I write this that the New York Times Online is tricky, moving an article from one section to another it might pertain to, creating a Rubik's Cube of qualified information) an article on how the aforementioned tomato crisis will most likely pull in an extra 275 million in next years budget for the failing FDA. In Well, a health blog, Tara Parker-Pope discusses the dangers of lawnmowers, without ever mentioning the environmental ramifications of a perfectly manicured and pedestrian lawn. In the BUSINESS section is an article on farmers (mostly of corn and soy etc.) expecting a harrowing harvest due to water logged land. In the Magazine/Home and Garden section a somewhat tritely in depth article on a hipster in London who "guerrilla gardens" for what seems to boil down to street cred.

Quote:Yet aside from a few tomatoes and some Swiss chard, which he says "tasted dirty," Reynolds has never grown any food. Nor is he too tied to gardening as an ecological act, a way of restoring nature's order; he gladly plants invasive species if they're aesthetically appropriate to the setting.

Also in Home and Garden a timely little piece about growing your own tomatoes and an interesting, if surface, instructional on how to live off the grid in your early retirement home without sacrificing your microwave. Thank you Sun. In Regional you will find out how Economic Development Corporation owes 45million dollars in water bills. In Business and World a mention of Mad Cow and the South Korean unrest, in Technology a treatise on plants and the possibility they recognize their relatives and are nicer to them. Similar to us? I'm not sure. Also a question mark on climate control, class and infectious disease in Dot Earth/Science.

Perhaps the most poignant article today is also found in Science. The dubious future of our friends the horseshoe crab, who like most ocean inhabitants are fighting for survival.

Quote:The loss of the horseshoe crab would be tragic, researchers said, not only because the creatures are fascinating and cute and predate the dinosaurs by 200 million years, but also because so many contemporary life forms depend on them. Their annual spawns draw hundreds of species of migratory birds, predatory fish, reptiles, amphibians and various other alimentary canals eager to brunch on the freshly deposited Limulus eggs. "Horseshoe crab eggs are like filet mignon around here," Dr. Mattei said. "They're a very popular item on the menu."

At first the scattering of environmental issues bugged me. Why do I have to scour the paper or the internet for what I find interesting and vital when someone else can check the golf scores in about .5 seconds. Maybe not a totally apt metaphor but you see what I mean? Then something else happened. Looking at the information I had gathered from each section it started to mean something more. I began to recognize that just as I find our earth tangibly present in most moments of every day, be it the 98 degree weather, lunch or the pop art littering the cover of the Daily News, so does the newspaper or rather the information stream. It might be quite impossible to limit these articles to one section or "streamline" them everyday because they are everywhere, in everything, informing the air around us. Our land, farm or asphalt, is our lens, our sphere, our metaphor as well as our sometimes scarred reality.

Much like the horseshoe crab, what we stand upon depends on us just as much, if not more, than we depend on it.

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