Wed. Nov. 12

 I’m an omnivore with the mindset of a vegan. Sometimes, at least. Like when I’m not at the Capital Grille having a juicy steak. This makes me something of a walking/thinking/eating contradiction or, if you prefer, hypocrite. I thought the Smiths’ “Meat is Murder” was a mighty powerful and persuasive song. I haven’t read Upton Sinclair’s stockyard expose of 1906, “The Jungle,” but I know what’s in it, and go “Eech.” I love the Pretenders and respect Chrissie Hynde’s long-held endorsement of veganism and pleather. I saw a Penn & Teller bit some years back, “Pets or Meat?,” where they deftly and disturbingly divvied up human use of the animal kingdom, using balloons twisted into animal shapes to do so. I’ve dined with longtime vegan, artist Peter Max, and he’s ordered terrifically tasty vegan meals for me. And, he’s a very fit 71. But I still eat steak (like my dad did) and I still wear a black leather jacket (like the Ramones did). And now comes "Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World,” co-written by Andrew Rimas and Dr. Evan D.G. Fraser. It’s a fascinating book – entertaining, edifying, disturbing, surprising. Rimas reads from the book and takes questions at Brookline Booksmith Wednesday Nov. 12 at 7. The reading at the Booksmith is free. We had a recent chat about what he and Fraser wrote.

“I’ve always been very much a carnivore,” says Rimas, “and enjoyed all sorts of meat product, particularly a good steak. But I’ve also been interested very much in cultural history and that led me my pursuit of this subject. I read books where history was put through a lens” – as Mark Kurlansky did with “Cod” and “Salt” – “and I’m interested in how it can reflect something broader.”

Inspiration for the book struck as Rimas was on a flight from Frankfurt to Boston. The airline attendant asked him if he wanted pasta or beef. He opted for beef. Not the best cut of beef known to man. And Rimas thought: “How did we get to this spot? Beef is so ubiquitous, what chain of events brought me to this? That opened up so many other questions - dairy in diet and pervasiveness of the beef industry. I started thinking of this from a historian’s perspective: When did we start using cattle in our culture? I showed the idea to a friend at Leeds [Fraser] a professor of agriculture. He asked to join the project and bring the agriculture and science to it. Where are we now? How did we get into this real predicament, the sustainability of our cattle industry? The fundamental question the book tries to answer: How has human civilization been affected by this animal? The answer is tremendously, in ways I found surprising. And are we going to keep going the way we are? The answer is, no, we won’t. It’s happening now, with grocery prices going up across the board, beef and dairy in particular. It’s wasteful of resource. We squander a lot of water, corn and oil on it. The shift is happening in terms of dollars. The trend is inexorable, water supplies and oil supplies going down, global warming. We’re at the end of the era of cheap meat that started in 1950s and we’re coming to a crisis point.”

“Beef” considers cows from prehistoric times up to today. It also takes some interesting, divergent paths, including best cuts of meat and trips to, well, the bullfighting arena, which Rimas visited when he and his wife lived in Spain for two years. “We didn’t want to write an encyclopedia of cows, a straightforward linear ABCs of cattle,” he says. “It has a chronological structure, but we didn’t want it to be a history book. It became natural to do it as a travelogue. I take a lot of enjoyment in food, and food is why most people are interested in cattle. We acknowledge it to bring the culinary aspects to the front.”

As to bullfights, Rimas and Fraser explain a lot to the uninitiated - upon which I was. I just saw bullfights  – without ever having seen one, mind you - as a bloody, barbaric anachronism. As to Rimas, he says, “I had developed strong opinions before I wrote the book. It struck me as rather grotesque, but I said ‘Who am I to judge? It’s not my culture. I don’t understand it.’ When I first went, it really blew me away in terms of what I was seeing. It wasn’t a sport; that was readily apparent. The only way to conceive of it was an emotional reaction to art. I became a fan of bullfights. I went to a lot of them. I understand why people are repulsed by it, and to appreciate it you do need a certain amount of education and [knowing] its background. My first bullfight, I was barely breathing, I was so shocked by the first ten minutes.” He thought it terrible, but full of grandeur, too. “It was a beautiful bullfight, with extraordinary grace and talent.” Rimas notes a four-year-old bull’s life and death in the ring, may well be preferable to a much shorter stockyard life, ended with a shot to the head.

What kind of animal is a cow, anyway? “A farmer put it to me like this,” says Rimas. “They’re herd animals, and their behavior makes sense for heavy grazing mammals, very good at digesting grass. It’s what they do, grouping in large numbers and reproducing and turning wastelands into a useful resource: themselves.”

Biggest surprise while doing the research? “Probably the biggest surprise was how prevalent the taste for beef has been in our culture from a very early period,” says Rimas. “Our taste for cows led to our fetishizing them, using them for ideas of religion and art. They were a part of our consciousness going back to an extremely early period. Human beings value them so much they’ll fight over them, create terrible wars. They were the great form of wealth.”

Favorite cut of meat? “I’m a real sucker for a beautiful rib eye.”
 
Rimas, an editor at the Improper Bostonian, is currently on book leave. He and Fraser are working on a history of how we got to today’s food crisis. Its working title is “Empires of Food.”

279 Harvard St., Brookline, 617-566-6660 www.brooklinebooksmith.com