Author travels around the world in search of delicious beef only to discover what we already know here at GGM:  grassfed beef is superior in both flavor and nutritional value.

Author travels far and wide for the perfect steak

By Patrick Beach

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Now more than ever, meat is complicated and controversial. And at the top of the meat heap is the celebrated steak, the subject of journalist Mark Schatzker's tasty and entertaining "Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef." Why steak? As he puts it in the first paragraph, "No one ever celebrated a big sale by saying, 'How about chicken?'"

The book's arrival is timely. With Memorial Day just behind us and Father's Day looming, these are the days of grilling. But let's be honest: What carnivore hasn't come home from the store with a package of steaks aquiver with marble and promise and cooked them on a grill or a cast-iron skillet only to be disappointed? Where did the beef flavor go in the beef? As Schatzker, a writer always on the lookout for a funny line, puts it, steak has "become the culinary equivalent of the weather in England: occasionally beautiful, but on the whole depressing."

In his quest, he travels many tens of thousands of miles. He eats Limousin in France, Angus and Highland in Scotland, Chianina and Podolica in Italy. He eats a sauce made of hay — hay! — in France. He attends to Beef Sensory Evaluations with white-coated meat scientists at Texas Tech University. At home in Canada, he buys his own heifer, a fetching lass named Fleurance, helps raise it, watches as it is slaughtered and butchered, and eats it. He watches as semen is collected from a bull. He visits a Texas feedlot cattleman who swears that, given a choice, cattle will eat grain over grass and another who calls grain "the atomic bomb of the American food system." Read more...