Raising steaks : the life and times of American beef

Provides a look at the history of the beef industry in the United States, including the land wars between the British and Spanish ranchers, the cowboys who roamed their prairies, and the industrial processing machines of the modern day. The cowboy and the machine -- Beefy boys -- Breaking the wild -- Playing cowboy -- The new range wars -- Circling the wagons -- Buffalo commons -- Greening beef -- Good breeding -- The smell of Greeley -- Slaughterhouse blues -- Riding point for the industry -- Mad cows and ethanol -- Beef : it's what's for dinner -- The united steaks of America

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

The New York Times - Michael Shae

There is a long tradition of books indicting the meat industry, stretching from Upton Sinclair's Jungle to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. Raising Steaks is not part of it, though dark thoughts loom like thunderclouds around its edges, threatening to ruin the cookout. But the storm never quite breaks over the cheerful stops on Fussell's itinerary through the American beef world, from Texas game farms and backwoods Vermont meat cutters (who do moose, too!) to rodeos and ranches of every size, from giant feedlots and slaughterhouses to conversations with quirky advocates of restoring the prairie and ranching in harmony with nature. Fussell approaches her subject with an uncommon capacity to suspend judgment, the better to collect as much information as possible. A travelogue makes for haphazard argument, but the raising of beef is a complicated matter.

Publisher priced dust jacket. no remainder marks. A fine copy of the book and the jacket that looks new.