Northern Virginia Magazine: Beef (Heritage Breed and Humanely Raised). It’s What’s for Dinner

Several years ago my husband called me from Mendoza, Argentina and exclaimed, “I’ve just eaten the best beef I’ve ever had in my entire life!” The phone call was a bit muffled not because of the distance the phone signal was traveling, but because I could still hear him chewing on a mouthful of sinewy flesh with the delight of a small child stuffing himself on Easter morning with chocolate bunnies and jelly beans.

Well, yesterday I got the chance to make my own phone call about resplendent beef, albeit from a much closer locale in Upperville, Virginia where the Second Annual What’s the Beef? Tasting sponsored by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy occurred yesterday at Ayrshire Farm.

Would be tasters ran the gamut from fellow farmers, to press, to a professor from the University of Virginia, as well as a celebrity tasting panel including Nora Pouillon of Restaurant Nora, Jordan Wright (The Georgetowner) and Akiko Katayama (a food consultant who also moonlights as an Iron Chef judge). We all put our tongues to the test as everyone got the chance to assess ten different heritage breeds of beef.

The top two winners were the Ancient White Park and the furry-fringed Scottish Highland. Both displayed good flavor and texture but the Ancient White Park pulled ahead as the judges’ favorite due to a more resilient texture that provided a little more mouthfeel. The Scottish Highland’s mouthfeel was a tad flimsier, though it was my personal favorite of the ten. The beef this breed produced had a taste I classified as “retro” because it sparked memories of family cook outs in the backyard on special summer occasions; a base flavor of muted grass, which finished with a balsamic tang.

But more than the beef was on display at yesterday’s tasting. Tasters were as eager to know as much about the beef as the farms’ practices as a designated sustainable, humane-certified farm. The fact that they raise heritage breeds on the farm is not just mere preference for a specific color of animal or the wish to achieve a desired meat taste. The use of heritage breeds represents a reclaiming of sustainable farming methods. Whereas hybridized beef cattle on industrialized farms mature at twice the rate and are fed a diet of corn or grain-based feed filled with antibiotics, the heritage breeds at Ayrshire mature at a normal rate and eat a grass diet where they are finished with grain in the last 100 days before slaughter.

Heritage breeds also provide a genetically diversified gene pool that has been critically depleted in the scramble for factory farms to process ever increasing quantities of cows at a faster and faster clip.

For butchers like Tanya Cauthen of Belmont Butchery in Richmond, however, raising cattle for ease of processing is like telling a winemaker, “you can only grow Merlot grapes and you can only process them in this type of tank,” she says. And similar to wine, beef she continues displays subtle nuances that demonstrate terroir according to breed. “We need to raise awareness of the nuance [in different breeds].”

But why bother with humane practices at all if the ultimate destination for farm animals is the butcher’s block?

Adele Douglas is CEO of Humane Farm Animal Care and thinks the issue of humane farming practices has been “bubbling up” for a while as evidenced by books such as Fast Food Nation and films like Food Inc. that have endlessly chronicled the horrors of factory farming. “For however long [the animals] are here people want to know they can express their behaviors. Imagine living your life in an airplane seat,” a reference to some farm animals that are so cramped they can’t turn around in their own stalls.

Critics of humane farming say that the term is a misnomer and that killing any sentient being for food is not humane. On this issue Douglas’ organization is philosophy neutral but points to the reality at hand. “10 billion farm animals are killed in the United States each year. Our goal is to improve the lives of those animals.”

Yesterday at dinner I cut into a pork chop I purchased from the Home Farm, a retail establishment that sells Ayrshire Farm products. The taste? An uncommon earthiness almost like bacon and a buttery texture like lamb. For me the proof that sustainable and humane farming works was in the pudding, or pork rather.

–Amy Loeffler