Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (11 page)

On 59th Street,
at a fancy Italian joint and fortified with Negronis, you’re ready for a good meal—but you’re not ready for the little
cicchetti
that arrive unexpectedly at the table: little pillows of sea urchin roe sitting atop tiny slices of toasted bread. Wonderful enough, one would think, but the chef has done something that goes beyond mischievous, possibly into the realm of the unholy: melting onto each plump orange egg-sac is a gossamer-thin shaving of
lardo
, the lightly cured and herbed pork fat made in marble caverns in the mountains of Tuscany, slowly curling around its prey, soon to dissolve. You hurry to put it in your mouth, knowing it’s surely a sin against God—and are all the happier for it. It’s too much. Way too much. Beyond rich…beyond briny-sweet. Beyond decency. You call the waiter over and ask for more.

This prawn comes
from particularly deep waters, you are told by the man tending the coals. Special waters. He makes the charcoal himself—two different mixes. The grills are of his own design as well—gleaming, spotlessly clean metal squares, each raised and lowered to specifically selected heights by the turn of a wheel. He puts almost nothing on what he cooks. Sea salt. A spritz of Spanish olive oil from a pump bottle. He’s smiling as he places the prawn in front of you and you eat the tail first, stripping away the shell and taking it in two bites. But then comes the head, twisted free and waiting for you. You raise it to your mouth and suck out the soup of hot brains, squeezing it like a toothpaste tube. Silence for a moment, then, from outside, you hear the sheep bleating faintly in the hills. The man smiles, pleased you’ve properly appreciated his prawn. He has something else. He removes another small pile of burning coals from one of the wood-burning ovens and places it beneath one of his jury-rigged grills, lowers the grid all the way, fans the embers. He produces another device of his own making—a sauté pan that looks more like a strainer than any known cooking vessel—sprays it lightly with oil. He heats it for a few seconds over the glowing coal, then quickly—quickly, but delicately—drops in a handful of tiny, translucent baby eels, sprinkles them with a few granules of salt while he makes them leap once, twice in the pan. In seconds, they are off the fire and into a bowl. They are, you fully appreciate (at this time of year, anyway), the rarest of the rare of God’s edible creatures. Each linguine-thin eel has swum here all the way from the Sargasso Sea, upriver into northern Spain—to be caught live. The man has killed them only minutes ago, poisoning them with tobacco. During the two or three weeks you can get them (in the unlikely event you can get them at all), they sell for upwards of a thousand dollars a kilo. They are barely cooked. They don’t need to be—they shouldn’t be cooked more. Twirled on a fork and lifted to the mouth, they whisper secrets. This, you tell yourself, is a flavor one shouldn’t speak of.

Sichuan hotpot is
where you find out some very dark things about yourself. You look around at the others in the crowded, painfully bright dining room in Chengdu, wiping the backs of their necks with cold napkins, their faces red and contorted with pain. Some of them hold their stomachs. But they plow on, as you do, dipping chopsticks loaded with organ meats, fish balls, and vegetables into the giant woks of dark, sinister-looking oil. It’s like that Victorian brothel in London you’ve read about, the one that had a spanking machine—could paddle forty customers at a time. There’s that kind of consensual perversion going on here. As if we are, all of us—though strangers to one another—bound by an awful compulsion we share. The liquid boils and bubbles like witch’s brew opaque, reddish brown distillate of the mind-blowingly excessive amounts of dried Sichuan chilies bobbing and roiling up throughout. The oil is cooking down, reducing by the minute and growing yet more powerful. You drag a hunk of tripe through the oil; it disappears below the surface, where it shrinks, then hardens like an aroused nipple; and then you remove it from the hell-broth and into your mouth. The heat from the dried peppers nearly lifts your head off—but there is something else. Tiny black flower peppers, floating discreetly alongside their more aggressive cousins, have an eerie numbing effect, first on your tongue—and then your entire head. There’s the by now familiar floral dimension: you smell it everywhere in this part of China—it’s in the air…But now it comes on strong, comes to the rescue; like an ice cube applied to abused flesh, it counteracts the pain and burn of way more hot pepper than any man can or should reasonably bear. Sweating through your shirt, resisting the urge to double over in pain, you begin to understand.

Pain—followed by relief.

Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbness. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. You were, after many years on this planet and what you thought had been a full and rich life, pretty sure you didn’t go for such things. The film
9½ Weeks
left you unmoved. At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed—even if the person offering was a German supermodel in ass-less latex chaps.

Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad.

Pleasure was good.

Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused.

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.