Is it OK to pun off a pun? Don’t @ me.

A few weeks ago I watched an old episode of Penn and Teller’s show, Bullshit! (OK, I watched more than one episode… I was self-isolating due to Coronavirus at the time, which is my excuse for everything going forward.) On the show, I heard a familiar name — Andy Puzder; if that name sounds familiar to you, too, it’s because it should. Puzder used to be the CEO of CKE Restaurants, and CKE owns the Carl’s Jr. fast food chain, but it’s more likely that you heard of him when his name took a trip through your news and social media feeds due to his outspoken support for Donald Trump and his tone-deaf defense of using women in bikinis in his burger ads, both of which, rather predictably, became liabilities to his employer.

I don’t like Puzder, but it’s not because he supports the worst President and possibly worst person in US history — lots of people do that. And it’s not because he thought the height of the #metoo movement was a good time to rationalize selling hamburgers with videos of women dripping ketchup on their boobs. I’d have a hard time attacking those ads without attacking the women who starred in them, just as I’d have a hard time criticizing Andy Puzder’s anti-abortion activism while simultaneously telling the women in his burger ads what is and isn’t OK to do with their bodies.

My beef, as it were, with Puzder has nothing to do with his politics or his objectification of women. I don’t like Andy Puzder because he’s a liar. Specifically, on Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, Puzder looked right at the camera and said that Carl’s Jr. sells Angus burgers because Angus beef tastes the best.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m ignoring the big problems with this guy and focusing on something insignificant, a mere matter of personal taste. I’m nitpicking. I’m calling Puzder a liar over something that’s entirely subjective. Isn’t he entitled to his opinion? No, he’s not, and here’s why:

First, there is no reason whatsoever to think that Angus beef, that is, beef from Aberdeen Angus cattle, tastes better than beef of the same grade from any other breed of cattle, unless you have, in fact, tasted beef from many other breeds, and I’m assuming Puzder hasn’t done that.

Even if he had done extensive taste testing, thanks to America’s lax food labeling regulations, there is no requirement that Certified Angus Beef must actually come from Angus cattle; rather, it only has to come from cattle with ‘Angus characteristics’, the most important of which is a high amount of intramuscular fat, known as marbling.

And even if, despite its origin, the traits that qualify beef to be labeled Certified Angus Beef did in fact make it the best tasting beef, Carl’s Jr. doesn’t sell Certified Angus Beef, it sells plain old ‘Angus beef’, which is not a trademarked or otherwise regulated term. A business can sell literally any kind of beef as Angus, regardless of its origin or its quality.

But even if Carl’s Jr. was selling Certified Angus Beef, it would make no difference, because they only sell hamburgers, which are made from ground beef. Whether the meat that goes into the grinder is marbled or if additional fat is added to the mix, the end result is exactly the same. Marbling may or may not improve the flavor of a steak, but when it comes to hamburger, it’s completely irrelevant.

To put it more briefly, Angus beef isn’t the best, but even if it was, Carl’s Jr. doesn’t sell it anyway, and even if they did, its characteristics would be entirely negated by grinding it into hamburger. Puzder didn’t just lie, he told three lies in one.

In his defense, he’s a Republican — lying is kind of their thing. He’s also far from being the only businessman lying about Angus beef, and moreover, the American food industry as a whole is so rife with fraud that, were one to attempt to quantify it all, it would be far easier to list the rare instances in which companies aren’t lying about their products.

I want to focus on a Angus beef here, though, because it’s a term we’re all familiar with, and that most of us associate with higher quality and higher prices, despite it being nothing more than a cheap marketing gimmick, if not an outright fraud.

Aberdeen Angus cattle are ubiquitous in the American beef industry, for some good reasons, and for some really stupid ones. The positives, at least in the eyes of most producers, include their manageable size, quick maturing, easy calving, dominant polling, docile temperament, fine marbling, low subcutaneous fat, and cold hardiness. Most of all, producers like the popularity of the name, ‘Angus beef’, which allows them to sell their cattle at higher prices than other breeds. That popularity is owed in small part to a well deserved reputation of fullblood Aberdeen Angus cattle, but overwhelmingly to a damn good marketing campaign.

‘Real’ Angus beef in America is branded “Certified Angus Beef” (CAB); the company of the same name is responsible for inspecting and grading beef to determine whether or not it can carry the CAB brand name. Certified Angus Beef is owned by the American Angus Association, the breed association for Angus cattle in the United States and Canada.

It’s important to note here that the Aberdeen Angus is a Scottish breed, but Scottish cattle are not eligible to receive the CAB brand. American Angus cattle bear only a passing resemblance to their Scottish ancestors, and exceptionally few American ranchers are raising actual Aberdeen Angus. A few of the major differences: Aberdeen Angus are smaller overall, with shorter legs, and they’re physiologically adapted to an all-grass diet. Some Aberdeen Angus ranchers claim that their cattle would quickly die if they were ever subjected to the horrific conditions in feedlots that are the industry standard for CAB production.

Still, the American food industry is exceptionally good at misappropriating words and convincing consumers that terms with very specific, narrow definitions are actually far more open to interpretation. The CAB designation has been so effective as a marketing tool over the last four decades that the word ‘Angus’ has become synonymous in consumers’ minds with top quality beef, and as a result, ‘Angus’ has been slapped on all kinds of meat that isn’t CAB, doesn’t meet CAB standards, and in many cases, isn’t even Angus. There is no restriction on calling any beef Angus, even if the animal it came from has no Angus genetics at all. And in fact, it’s even possible to have CAB beef that isn’t actually Angus. Why? Because to be CAB, the beef only has to come from an animal that “exhibits Angus influence” and is at least 51% solid black in color, along with some other qualifications for the carcass and the meat itself. So even though Angus is a breed, to CAB it’s merely a list of physical characteristics.

CAB goes so far as to say that solid black fur is the greatest indicator of Angus genetics, which is, frankly, idiotic for two reasons: first, there are other breeds of cattle that come in solid black and have no relation to the Aberdeen Angus, and second, not all Aberdeen Angus are black — they can also be red.

That’s right, there are red Angus, and the only difference between a red Angus and a black Angus is the color of its fur. No one is arguing that fur color has any relationship to meat quality; CAB simply argues that fur color is an indicator of Angus genetics, when in reality, fur color is an indicator of only one, single gene, and there are about 22,000 genes in the cattle genome. The gene for black fur is dominant, thus many a red Angus has been born from a black parent (remember Punnett squares from high school bio?); CAB could just as easily have chosen red fur as its indicator of Angus genetics, or included both black and red animals, but that’s bad marketing. Since black is dominant, and therefor more prevalent, CAB says that Angus cattle have to be black.

If you know a little about the beef industry, you know that cross breeding is exceedingly common. Cross breeding is generally a good thing, but its prevalence demonstrates the fact that even to Angus ranchers, the ‘improved’ American Angus breed is lacking. Cross breeding results in heterosis, also known as hybrid vigor; ideally heterosis means hardier cattle, faster growth rates, and a decreased incidence of genetic disorders. So Angus ranchers cross their cattle with Brahmans (Brangus), Herefords (Black Baldy), Chianina (Chiangus), Simmental (Simangus), Romagnola (Romangus), Charolais (Charolangus), Wagyu (Wangus?) … and so on. To be fair, cross breeding is often a critical component of a management plan, but it can also go horribly awry.

Take the Chianina, a breed that’s rare in the a United States, with a supply that falls far short of its demand, and with a breed registry that allows high percentage Angus-Chianina crosses to still be registered as Chianina. In fact, the same animal can be registered as both a Chianina and an Angus. Chianina cattle are huge — the world’s largest — and they’re white. Angus are small and black. Still, somehow, there are more little black cattle being sold as Chianina than there are big white ones. It’s such a problem that the guy who founded the breed club, the guy who imported the original US foundation stock from Italy, sued his own club over it. The man who singlehandedly established the breed in America thinks (well, thought — he’s dead) they shouldn’t be considered Chianina if they were crossbred. Of course, the club fought back, because why listen to the person who’s responsible for your very existence? They eventually reached some kind of settlement that involved pure Chianina being listed separately in the breed registry, and probably some money changing hands. But it begs the question, if Chianina crossed with Angus shouldn’t be called Chianina, should they any more be called Angus?

The answer seems obvious, but it’s actually not, because in the livestock world, there are few animals that don’t have some cross breeding in their recent lineage, even when those animals are registered purebreds. In general, a cow is considered purebred is she is 7/8 ‘pure’, while a bull needs to be at least 15/16, though each breed club makes its own rules. (I’ll save a discussion on the relative meaninglessness of percentages for another time.) In spite of this, when most people see the term purebred, they take it to indicate 100% breed purity, when the term for that is actually a less familiar one: fullblood.

Putting aside all our doubts about purity and authenticity, the question remains as to whether Angus beef lives up to the hype, and the answer is a definite maybe, sometimes, if it’s real, and if we’re not talking about hamburgers. CAB is good beef if CAB’s characteristics are, in fact, what you like in a steak. Is CAB the best beef? I doubt any knowledgeable person would say so, other than the one trying to sell it to you. In blind taste tests, other breeds frequently beat CAB. Some breeds marble better, or just as well. And the traits that qualify an animal to become CAB aren’t necessarily what every consumer wants in a piece of meat. In my opinion, the ubiquity of Angus beef makes it practically generic. It’s the beef equivalent of the golden retriever, the Toyota Camry, or Jimmy Fallon — familiar, comfortable, and kind of boring.

To put it another way, I think of CAB kind of the same way I think of bacon. People are always hyping bacon. Hipsters are putting it on donuts and wrapping it around things and braiding it into gross-looking meat baskets, and at any given moment in time there’s some dildo making a dumb joke about how bacon makes everything better. I like bacon, too, but as cured meats go, I consider it entry-level. That’s not because I’m a snob, it’s because I’ve bothered to learn about and try other things, and I’ve found that I prefer some of them to bacon.

If I buy a steak at the grocery store, I don’t even look for CAB; I look for the specific traits I want in the individual piece of meat I’m considering buying, and those traits vary considerably across different cuts. There’s no reason to believe that the animal that produced the best porterhouse will also produce the best roast or the best ribeye. I’m also keenly aware that if it’s coming from my local grocery store, it’s going to be of low quality, wet-aged, and overpriced. It’ll taste great when I’m done cooking it, but the flavor won’t be very complex, and as a result, I’ll eat more of it than I would if it were the good stuff. That’s one of the biggest reasons I want to raise meat, not just for myself, but for my family, friends, and neighbors — when you eat better meat, you eat less meat, and as much as I’m not a proponent of eliminating meat from our diets, I do think we eat too much of it.

Another issue that can’t be ignored when it comes to Angus beef is food security; anytime we create a monoculture in our production system, we flirt with disaster. Take corn, for example: as farming becomes increasingly industrialized, it also becomes increasingly uniform, and even though there are hundreds of varieties of corn, only a few are being grown on any significant scale. So we have a monoculture in our worldwide corn crop, and that’s not a big deal until we find out that the particular type of corn everyone in the world is growing happens to be susceptible to some novel disease, and the entire world corn crop fails. If that happens, people may starve to death. The solution? Grow lots of kinds of corn, so that if one gets wiped out by some disease, some of the other varieties that are resistant to that disease can take its place, and no one has to starve.

Similar to the corn monoculture, Angus cattle dominate the beef market, and sure enough, a growing number of genetic diseases are being identified. Genetic diseases are exceedingly problematic if the overwhelming majority of the cattle in America have shared genetics; this is why we generally think of inbreeding as a bad thing, although it’s much less of a bad thing for cattle than it is for you. (Ew.) Still, it’s not far-fetched to think that an entire breed could be wiped out — it nearly happened before, when the Hereford breed almost became extinct in the United States, and the likelihood is strong that untold numbers of cattle have disappeared in this way from Europe over the centuries. On this front, it could be the lazy, broad distinction between what is and isn’t Angus that protects the ‘breed’ from disaster, though genetic issues persist. Conscientious ranchers are working to eliminate specific genetic diseases, but as the familiar ones are gradually bred out, new ones will arise — it’s simply the way genes work, and it can’t help that we’re able to artificially inseminate countless cows with genetic material from a single bull, for decades, even after that bull is long-dead.

The solution? To my way of thinking, it’s this: Raise something different, something rare, something interesting, something uniquely suited to your ranch and to the market you hope to serve. King Ranch in Texas created its own breeds, the Santa Gertrudis and the Santa Cruz, both ideally suited to the conditions on their ranch, but each aimed at different consumer tastes. Pureblood Chianina ranchers sell to an exclusive specialty market, in some cases a ranch’s entire supply of beef going to a single restaurant that serves bisteca ala fiorentina, a massive porterhouse steak cooked rare and served family style. The Queen of England has a preference for highland cattle; she owns her own herd, and supposedly it’s the only beef she’ll eat. Japan has created an entire subculture around Wagyu, a group of breeds, some of which, as it turns out, have Angus genetics; some American ranchers have tried to cash in on the ‘Kobe beef’ hype, raising “American Wagyu,” and most have produced a vastly inferior product that still sells to hipster gastropubs for more than CAB — a rant for a later date.

In the end, two things matter above all else, at least to me: the welfare of the cattle, and the quality of the meat. Fortunately, ethically raised and slaughtered animals make better meat than mistreated ones, and the specific methods employed in raising an animal for meat certainly play a bigger role in the quality of the final product than whether or not the animal had black fur. The breed of the cattle is only one factor that goes into how a steak turns out. Where did the animal live? What did it eat? What was its daily routine? How was it slaughtered, and at what age? How was the meat aged, and for how long? How was the final butchery done, and how was the meat cooked? And when you ate it, how did you slice it? What else did you eat with it? Where did you eat it? What were the people around you eating? These things all matter, whether it’s the difference between grain-fed and grass-fed, or the sensory impact of sitting next to a smoker or a plate of stinky fish. It’s my belief that steak is often best when eaten in isolation, without distractions, or at least in the company of a few, likeminded companions (who don’t order fish).

As for me, when I have the space and the resources to raise my own cattle, the breed(s) I choose will depend on a lot of factors, not the least of which will be the conditions on the ranch and what breeds are available to me and within my budget. I should have a lot of options, but I probably won’t be choosing Angus.