When we bite into a steak's charred crust and pink interior, we bite into contradictions that have branded our nation from the start. We taste the competing fantasies of British
pastoralists and Spanish ranchers that erupted in land wars between a wet-weather East and a desert West. We savor the ideas of wilderness and progress that clashed when we replaced
buffalo with cattle, and then cowboys with industrial machines. We witness rugged individualism and corporate technology collide when we breed, feed, slaughter, package, and
distribute the animals we turn into meat. And we participate—like the cattlemen, chefs, feedlot operators, and scientists Fussell talks with—in the mythology that inspires cowboys to
become technocrats and presidents to play cowboy.
A celebration and an elegy for a uniquely American Dream, Raising Steaks takes an "unflinching look at the ethical and environmental implications of modern meat
... yet leaves us with a powerful hankering for a thick T-bone grilled rare"--Michael Pollan
