Getting a taste of the bull market

BEEF: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World
By Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser Morrow, 238 pp., $25.95

As an exercise in culinary history, this slender volume is hardly groundbreaking. We've already seen a smorgasbord of books that explore our past via a single foodstuff. As a cautionary tale against capitalist gluttony, Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a far more persuasive and elegant work.

What "Beef" offers is a certain erudite, if scattershot, exuberance. Authors Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser seem determined to dish up every bovine allusion known to man, from Homer's "Cattle of the Sun" to the golden calf of the Exodus story to Hemingway's bloodstained matadors. They also find occasion to mention the Lascaux caves, Stephen Jay Gould, Irish epic poetry, Picasso's "Guernica," conquistador Beltran Nu??o de Guzm??n, Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and the fallacies of the cowboy mythos.

In pursuit of fellow cattle fanatics, the pair journey from the English countryside to the corridas of Spain to the villages of Kenya, where the Masai people prove especially smitten. ("When a calf is born, the owner personally licks the mucus from its face.")

In this sense, "Beef" sometimes comes off more as hagiography than history. We're told that "it was the bull that ignited the first sparks of religion" and that cow's milk "allowed our species to leap wholeheartedly into perpetual rutting." Likewise, the book's prose, while always lively, sometimes tips toward academic loftiness. "Myths are nothing if not syncretistic," we're told at one point, "accruing lumps from other tales until they ossify, like brittle shells, on paper."

The authors are most compelling when they offer a more humble perspective. Their recounting of bovine evolution is riveting stuff. So, too, their discussion of the traumatic break between farmers and herdsmen, which finds its most pointed expression in the biblical story of Cain and Abel. And they do a terrific job of explicating how economics has contributed to our cultural passion for cattle, at one point describing cow ownership as "a sort of Dark Ages mutual fund."

The authors take it for granted that it is humankind's place to exercise dominion over cattle. But their most ardent and convincing argument is that the imperial powers lost sight of "the ancient view of a whole animal that worked, and yielded milk, and died, after a productive life, for the good of the stewpot." Instead, cows "ceased to be animals [and] became commodities."

To this end, breeders began designing strains that fell into one of two categories: corpulent beeves so laden with grill-ready flesh they could barely move, and milkers whose raison d'etre resided in their bloated udders. While today's ethicists raise hay over cloning, it was this early genetic engineering that paved the way for industrial stockyards and slaughterhouses.

The modern meat industry, Rimas and Fraser insist, is unlikely to survive in the face of waning natural resources. The cheap burgers and chops that have come to represent American prosperity will go the way of the SUV, unless today's herdsmen learn to treat their charges as beings in a larger ecology rather than units of profit.

At times, the authors seem prepared to deliver a more fundamental indictment of developed-world overabundance. "One of the reasons for the rise of gourmet chic is that excessive pleasure in food . . . is seen as a stamp of refinement. Even of intelligence," they observe. "The very sin that, in the fifteenth century, damned Dante's friend Ciacco to an afterlife of rotting in feculent mud has become a mark of good breeding."

Unfortunately, their book is also studded with "culinary interludes" that amount to highbrow bovine porn. We're treated to a catalog of "noble cheeses" as well as recipes for everything from Yorkshire pudding to bull's tail stew. They rhapsodize about a ribeye steak: "As moist as a melon, its filaments cleave at the glimmer of a knife. Seared but not blackened, the middle is salmon pink darkening to a clean streak of lobster red, with a taste that's not too marrowy, but that's touched with nuts and greens; the fat runs clear." The authors blast Kobe beef as atrocious "by the standards of resource conservation" - then recommend a recipe for Kobe beef sashimi.

In this sense, reading "Beef" is a bit like devouring one of those glistening ribeyes. It's a pleasure going down, but you may feel pangs of guilt afterward. At one point, Rimas and Fraser offer two lengthy quotes from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," which exposed the gruesome practices of the country's meatpacking plants a century ago. Sinclair was heartbroken that his book didn't do more to deter the exploitation of workers. "I aimed at the public's heart," he noted, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The authors of "Beef" clearly know they should be aiming at readers' hearts when it comes to humanity's long and storied exploitation of cattle. But they can never quite restrain themselves from aiming at the stomach.

Steve Almond's new book of essays is "(Not That You Asked)."