I’ve been writing about our recent trip to Croatia here, but I also had a piece in The Bulwark recently inspired in part by the trip—specifically, by a meal at a steakhouse in the historic city of Split. The original headline was “Have Your Steak and Eat It Too.” Yes I wrote the headline; I couldn’t resist.

Here’s the steak we ordered: a Croatian Simmental dry-aged bone-in ribeye (and a bottle of Croatian red wine, not pictured!)

The steak was excellent. But what caught my attention was that it was rather lean, compared, say, to a USDA Prime steak that will usually be dry-aged in an American steakhouse. Simmental is a leaner breed, generally, and it’s not very common in the U.S. This got me thinking about how we define what “good beef” is. I wrote:

The whole USDA grading system for beef is not really about quality per se, but marbling. Or rather, marbling is considered the major component of quality. Beef is graded based mostly on the amount of marbling present in the ribeye. You’ll read how “fat is flavor,” how a less marbled steak won’t be as tender and juicy. Yes, this lean ribeye had some chew to it, but it was still tender. It had none of the tough dryness that a cheap American steak will often have. (The other thing this means is that a Prime-graded steer is special mostly for its premium steak cuts, the muscles that don’t do a lot of work. The tougher and more worked top round or eye round, for example, are still Prime, but those cuts aren’t really much different from any other grade.)

Now I said beef is graded “mostly” with the amount of marbling in the ribeye. The other factor is the age of the steer at the time of slaughter. In fact, the four USDA grades of beef you’re likely to see in stores—Prime, Choice, Select, and Standard—all require that the animal be less than 42 months old. That’s three and a half years old. Another source claims it’s impossible to qualify for any of the four top grades under 30 months.

I ended up delving into a bunch of articles talking about beef from older animals as well as from dairy cows, neither of which are eligible for USDA grading and are generally used, at best, for ground beef, and at worst, for dog food.

But there are chefs out there who prize this beef, and even consider it to be better than what we conventionally consider good beef to be. There’s also a company, Mindful Meats, that sources this meat from farmers for much more than they’d usually get, and markets it as a sort of specialty.

A few years ago, one expensive restaurant in Washington, D.C. even served a dairy cow tomahawk ribeye. The catch? The meat can be tough, especially if it’s not prepared carefully. That’s the tradeoff for the purported far richer flavor.

In an American context, this can look like boutique foodie-ism. But it’s the kind of resourcefulness that was typical of things like farming and household management up until pretty recently. So much of what we think of as the mainstay of the American middle class—beef, cars, detached houses—is unimaginable luxury for most people in most places. I don’t want to take it away from anyone, but it’s heartening to see hints of more gratitude and humility for what we enjoy.

I detour with a look at the notion of the “end of beef,” courtesy of the New York Times, which I find silly. But I conclude:

Maybe the real end of beef is the beginning of a more conscious approach to eating, of making use of resources more carefully instead of using brute force to make things add up. You can see this in architecture—the ubiquity of air conditioning, for example, leading to buildings poorly adapted to their climates in its absence. And perhaps you can see it in the ruthlessly efficient and heavily siloed supply chains that turn old steers and cows into dog food.

I had no idea my steakhouse dinner would turn into this. But, as I like to say, writers don’t really get vacations. Read the whole thing over at The Bulwark!

Related Reading:

The Glory of Tomato Paste

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

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