Beef

Table of Contents

Sect. 1 Audumla

1 From Horn to Hoof (The Ecological and Evolutionary Origins of the Cow: Prehistory-8000 B. C.) 3

2 The Food of the Gods (The Origin of Religion: 8OOO B. C.-400 B. C.) 43

3 The Brown Bull of Ulster (Wealth and Honor: 400 B. C.-A. D. 1500) 75

Sect. 2 The Cloven Hoof 103

4 Gene Pools and Paint Pots (The Birth of Modernity: The Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries) 105

5 Cattle Kings and Dairy Queens (The Industrialization of Food: The Nineteenth Century) 139

6 The $300 Sirloin (Cattle in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries) 175

Epilogue 209

Acknowledgments 213

Endnotes 215

Index 229



Chapter One

From Horn to Hoof

The Ecological and Evolutionary Origins of the Cow: Prehistory—8000 B.C.

The Thread in the Labyrinth

Picasso's Minotaur and the Spirit of Cattle

The Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair opened to a puff of tepid headlines and a yawn from the summer-slow picnickers on the Seine. And no surprise. A few weeks earlier, Paris had weathered the openings of the Nazi German and Soviet pavilions—Herculean mounds of concrete erected to dueling ideologies, between which the modest Spanish building was a mere bungalow rolled out in the name of a lowercase “republicanism.” Even the promised unveiling of a giant Picasso mural didn't stir up much more than froth in the café gossip.

That is, until people actually saw Guernica, as Picasso's painting is known. Its subject was an average atrocity by modern standards, but in 1937 it had the power to appall. Two months before the Paris exhibition, German bombers flying for the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War obliterated a civilian target far from the front lines. The massacre killed fifteen hundred people. Picasso had long ago proven he could make strong critics faint and send belle artistes dashing for their fractured mirrors, but he had never yet managed to horrify everybody. It took Guernica, and Guernica, to do that.

The painting wasn't horrible because it depicted war. It was horrible for depicting horror. A twenty-three-foot slash of newsprint-colored violence, it hung behind a workingfountain of red mercury. To Paris's lunching gentlemen and girls in frocks, this was something entirely new. Otto Dix and George Grosz had drawn the First World War's seas of corpses in the 1920s, but Guernica's subject wasn't dead soldiers. It was women, children, and beasts in the act of dismemberment—limbs and heads separating by means of high explosives (making it a perfect subject for cubism, for Picasso's famous splintered eye). Gray and sickly, like a bruise the size of a whale, Guernica is a particularly modern obscenity. It's now an icon of the age of broken glass, airplanes, and random blood pools. Of the age that is our own.

Inside the picture itself, among the blasted innocents, stand two animals. One is a skewered horse, screaming in the dumb, brute pain of dying. The other is a bull standing under a lightbulb, its horns bulging from an asymmetrical skull lump that echoes its scrotal bag. The bull is a fixed hulk, unmoved by the slaughter around it. It may even be complicit, since the horse looks like it's been gored. During an interview in 1944, Picasso said that the bull represented “dark forces,” while the horse stood for the Spanish people. Another time he insisted, exasperatedly, that “The bull is a bull and the horse is a horse. These are openly animals, massacred animals. That's all, so far as I am concerned!”1