Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Steve Hoelscher recounts how the men who taught him to slaughter made him drink some steer blood after his first kill, “as an initiation."

Vern Robinson’s Little Pistol Pete, a 16 month – old, 1250-pound, largely black Maine-Anjou/Angus steer, stands on the clean concrete slab under the burning blue sky of an August day that is just beginning to cool. His big dark eyes give no indication of whether or not he notices the barrel of the 22 aimed at his forehead from just a few feet away. His halter is tied to a handrail on the wall next to him; his owner, Randi Baker, a member of the Fallbrook Future Farmers of America (FFA), has stepped out of sight, and he has never before seen Steve Hoelscher, the man behind the gun, but none of this seem to trouble him.

He stands with a solid, bovine mixture of contentment and resignation until – BANG! –the bullet disappears into his skull and then his legs fold and he drops straight down and rolls on his side and kicks and gasps as the eight-inch butcher knife saws an opening in his neck. A few more great kicks at the air and his motion stops, but the blood will keep pouring from that hole for a long while yet. The blood is blood – red ; other reds do not describe it, it describes other reds. A girl washes the concrete with a hose while he bleeds out, and the blood feathers out in the water as they stream together toward a sewer grating, leaving long back clots that must be helped along by the direct spray of the horse.

Randi, a reticent 13-year-old girl, was “very fond of him. I couldn’t watch him get shot.” But she can watch him get shot.” But she can watch him be skinned and gutted. “She wants to be a corner,” says her mother Lynn, “so this kind of stuff interests her.” Randi is also able to say, without flinching. “We’re gonna eat half of him, and then we’re gonna sell the other half [to my grandparents].”

“He’s going to be good eating, that’s what we care about,” adds Lynn, who admits to crying at the death of all 13 of the steers she raised while growing up in 4H and FFA. “He’s fat in the right places and trim in the right places. If we could let him hang three weeks without too much damage, I’d like that.”

Lynn and Steve (who owns Hoelscher’s Ramona Meats with his wife Marie) get into a discussion about what size pen is best for a steer; Randi and her sister go to work hosing off the hide, which they want to save. What they have seen, what I am going to describe, is not pleasant. To some, it may be horrific, but Lynn, Steve, and Randi are not horrified. This is where beef come from; this is one way a steer is slaughtered. Pistol Pete’s fate is to be food, and from the look of him, excellent food.

For you, the beef lover, the person for whom the vision of a steer does a cartoon-style fade into the diagram of cuts you see on the wall at the butcher’s , Vern Robinson’s Little Pistol Pete (Vern for short) is an unattainable prize. His flesh will never grace your plate. But if you had attended the Del Mar Fair on July 4, and if you had a couple thousand dollars to spend, you could have purchased a steer very much like Vern at the fair’s livestock auction. According to this year’s auction book, a 900- to 1300- pounds steer will yield about 120 steaks, 35 to 500 roasts, and 90 pounds of ground beef, stew meat, briskets, ribs, shanks, and all the rest of it, for a total of 432 to 500 pounds of fresh red meat. An overwhelming amount, until you go to work on it with your imagination, breaking it down and stretching it out over months of carnivorous dinners, evenings full of the heavy glow in the stomach that comes after such indulgence.

The auction is held under a canvas tent shaped like the bottom half of a capital “A,” open sided and supported by beams, in front of the livestock barns. Though it is day, bright lights hang from the rafters alongside speakers that will help the auctioneers be heard over the constant din of animals, four-foot-wide fans, and about 2500 milling and chatting adults and kids. The fans keep the air moving, but after a few hours, the salty smell of warm people, the musty smell of warm animals, and the woody smell of the spongy sawdust underfoot will become impenetrable.

The auctioneers stand on a high podium in one corner immediately below them is a raised platform with ramps on either side, covered in green AstroTurf. White tablecloths with blue runners cover long tables extending away from the podium; bleachers line the back walls. Red, white, and blue, abound, in bows on the railings in ribbons on the livestock, and in the clothes of the crown. Denim is everywhere, as are straw cowboy hats. The ten is full of an easygoing, genial air and full of people, sitting and standing, knotting and dispersing. The boys and girls marshaling the animals on their parade past the podium – some outfitted in the white jeans, white button-down shirt, and Kelly green scarf and cap of the FFA – are unselfconscious when dealing with their charges.

An auctioneer has to be heard to be believed. “Dollar and a quarter give me half, formedore dev now seventy five ambebiddly by ambebiddly by dollar seventy medal gimme two pedeperdu gimme two pedeperdu and now the quarter bedroomorder bedroom order, two and a quarter give me haaalf, two and a half now seventy-five amonseventy-five, two-seventy five gimme three bubblyleelee three forumborbor three sold! At two seventy-five buyer number twenty for two seventy five.” That is a sample of the chant of Gordon Leibscher, a big man with a deep laugh and a white goatee. He wears a straw cowboy hat, a dark plaid shit, dark jeans, and boots. “Gordon” has been burned into the back of his wide leather belt. The patter take him 15 seconds, full of volume swells, speed changes, whatever it takes to get a crowd going.

And they do get going. When an auctioneer hits a nerve in a crowd, or whne a few people get caught up in a bidding war,, the bids accelerate, coming faster and faster, one on top of the other. People clap in rhythm to the chant of the auctioneer. Three Grand Champion rabbits — white, huddled, ear twitching with terror—go up to $900. The auctioneer hammers at the number, “Nine hun-DRED, nine hun-DRED, nine hun-DRED,” and when he gets it, a balloon of excitement bursts in the ranks. At another point, he reminds the crowd that “there are no friends at an auction” and chided an outbid bidder, “Don’t let him do that to you!” in an effort to spur competition.

“You work on them,” explains Gordon. “At a livestock auction, you never start at less than a dollar. I get up there, and I ask two dollars a pound; if nobody can bid it, then I drop back to a dollar or a dollar and a half. We drop back till it starts and then go from there in ten-cent increments. Try to make it fun for them. If people are having fun, they’ll spend money.” The Grand Champion beef, weighing 1231 pounds, starts at $3 a pound. At $5, people start howling. It sells for $5.20 a pound to Tip Top Meats, amid cheers.

The auctioneer is aided by three ring men, who stand on the edge of the animal podium and survey the crowd for bids. Most of them carry thin smooth pointers, a few wield gnarled canes. They stand with their feet planted, swiveling their hips to turn back and forth, arms extended, on palm turned up and twitching, urging the bidders higher. The tip of the pointer bounces, straining to be released by a bid, and when the numbered card goes up, the ring man’s arm jerks back at the elbow, the end of the cane making a wide arc until it points at the auctioneer, who then raises the price.

Once you have purchased your beef, a runner brings you your paperwork, and you decide what to do with your new acquisition. You may wish to donate it to the Junior Livestock Scholarship Fund. You may send it to the federal plant to be processed or the state plant or to a custom processor. You may resell to a packer, who will pay you 55 cents a pound. If you think your beef could use a few more weeks of feed, or if you just don’t have room in your freezer right now for all that meat, you can pick the animal up and take it home. And then, when the time comes for the slaughter, you can call a butcher like Steve Hoelscher.

The sign at the side of the road is printed in various fonts, like an old circus bill. “Hoelscher’s Ramona Meats, An Old-Time Butcher Shop, Featuring Buffalo, Venison, Antelope, Beef, Alligator, Rattlesnake.” This last is printed in letters that curve like a snake across the bottom of the board. The stove itself is part of a wood-paneled strip mall, shingles on the awning, green trim on the windows and pillars. Three U.S. flags fly in front of the store. Inside, one wall features animal hides for sale: raccoon, skunk, fox, and cow, as well as a stuffed coyotes, complete with moonlit sky backdrop, for $695. A Coke cooler and an ice-cream freezer occupy the space not taken up by meat counter and shelves of meat condiments. Jars of pickles and jerky stand on top of the counters. “We Put More Eat in Your Meat,” reads a sign on the back wall.

Steve, 43, is in back, getting ready to take hi primer-gray ’79 Ford F250 out on a slaughter. He is thin: high, wide cheekbones and a narrow jaw add to this impression. His large eyes look out from deep sockets, giving him a worried, almost haunted look, but he is not haunted by his work.

“Does all this [slaughtering and butchering] take a toll on you?” I ask.

“What are you talking about?” he asks in reply. “I’ve been doing this since I was 17.” He tells me he started out working with his father in a small Missouri grocer store. “At first, they just let me bag chickens. You have to be 18 to run the saw and the grinder. I learned to slaughter later.”

The truck, streaked and worn in places to the green beneath the primer, is large enough to carry the boom/winch used to raise the carcass during the slaughter, a great steel triangle with a pulley at the apex and a hooked cable over the pulley leading back to the winch. When in use, the boom rests at a 45-degree angle to the truck bed. A gun rack in the cab holds the .22 and the 30-30 Steve uses fro the larger kills. A bumper sticker reads, “Manure Happen$.” Steve tosses two plastic garbage cans and some plastic bags, “bone barrels” and “bone bags” into the bed, along with a blue tarp.

Steve’s 13-year-old grandson John joins us. I comment to him that most people probably don’t think about how steak gets to be steak, and he agrees. “They think, ‘Oooh, it’s nasty. It’s over at Lucky’s.’” He is clearly used to this sort of work. At one point, Steve recounts how the men who taught him to slaughter made him drink some steer blood after his first kill, “as an initiation. Not enough to make you sick or anything.” John tells me he is looking forward to doing the same thing after his first kill.

Our first stop is just a few blocks away, at the home of a Mr. De Los Santos. His two-year-old Holstein has refused to gain weight for some time, so Mr. De Los Santos is cutting his losses and getting what he can out of his skinny, roughly 500-pound beast. The steer bucks and shies a little at the sight of the butcher, but a bucket of feed lures him to stick his head of his pen, and BANG! Steve drops him. As with Vern, he saw a slit in the steer’s throat, which opens into a hole, exposing a cavity in the neck. A host of flies descends on the wound. A tiny stream of blood jumps from the bullet hole; a torrent gushes from the neck. A four-inch pile of pink foam gathers on top of the puddle it makes. The blood is thick. It does not soak into the hoof-stamped earth. The steer curls his head back, and the blood in the cavity sloshes back and forth as he moves. For a time, the beatings of the heart are discernable in the motions of the blood, then the flow slows a little and becomes a steady stream. The violence and gore take me aback for a moment, then pull me in, etching the sight into my imagination.

“.22s sure do the job,” comments Steve. “A little high,” he adds, perhaps to explain why the steer is taking so long to die, about five minutes by my estimation. The legs curl and kick at the dust, then shoot straight out, the motions gradually slowing. John kicks a knee joint. “It gets the blood circulating. Gets the blood out.” The initial flow of blood has begun to soak into the earth, providing a semi-solid surface for the second flow, which layers on top of the first like wet paint spilled on dry, red swirled with black. Urine drips from the penis.

“You keeping the head? It’s $5 to skin it.” Mr. De Los Santos is keeping the head, over which Steve slips a rope noose. He fastens the other end to the trailer hitch of his truck and drags the steer, now dead, out of the pen. The tongue lolls out and drags in the dust. Steve begins work. He cuts a four-inch slit between the bone and Achilles tendon of each back leg; into these he slips the ends of the leg spreaders, a molded steel rod that does just that. The hook from the winch goes under the middle of the rod, and the carcass is raised up until the shoulders and head are all that remain on the ground. Flies are everywhere.

Time for skinning. Taking knife in hand, Steve carves around the back legs, which hang about eye level, and then down the front of the legs into the crotch. Using short, choppy motions, he slices away at the tissue and fat that hold skin to flesh, pulling the skin back with his free hand. He carves down and around the penis, freeing a flap of hide, and then straight down the center of the chest, clear to the base of the neck. The skin pulls away from the split. The knife has just been sharpened, and there is a nick midway up the belly. A bubble of guts pushes through the crevice. Two cuts just below the rib cage, perpendicular to the center cut, make the patches of skin easier to work with. Then more cutes down the backs of legs, more pulling and slicing.

The steer’s breakfast comes up, olive green and stinky. “We fed him this morning, just a little grain and alfalfa, “ offers Mr. De Los Santos. Mrs. De Los Santos comes out, starts talking to John. “Are you ready to start school?” The tone is casual, as if Steve were slicing cucumbers instead of skin.

Pale purple meat shows in patches through the fat, strings of fat, fat like spider webs clinging to the meat, white-paper wrapping of fat, fat like yellow giant-curd cottage cheese around the genitals, fat thinning around the butt, where muscle can be seen, twitching. “It’ll do that until we get it home to the cooler,” says John.

The steer’s back half is skinless; Steve raises the body so that only the head touches the ground and presses on. The meat around the chest has the color of pork. “It’ll bloom when it ages.” The hide hangs about the head like the folds of a bulky turtleneck sweater, then drops down over as Steve raises the steer a third time. Leaving the hide for a moment, he hacks the front feet off at the knee, slashing hard just below the joint. What looks like egg white runs out from the knee. A horse, watching from its stall, gives a loud snort. Steve start hacking into the neck, which is still twitching. Removing the head is ore invasive than removing the skin—messier, with prying and slicing and the sick creaking of the spine as he strains at it. Then the head is off, and he drags it into the shade for John to skin. John works well, carving up the underside of the jaw, around eyes, through lips. The head may be used for soup.

The hide is off as well, and Steve washes the carcass with a hose before tipping a bone barrel against the chest and opening the steer from pelvis to rib cage. The stomachs swell out, a cream sack full of smaller sacks, bulging like a bag of water balloons. He separates the intestine from the anus, and the guts tip out at him, then down into the barrel with a quivering thump. Little globules hang off the big sack, bouncing and swinging as the fall into the barrel. Steve has lit a cigarette; the ash is an inch long. He digs into the cottage cheese genital fat, carves out a kidney. The rubbery liver is outside the sack, as is the pancreas, which Steve says is good for dogs.

After he clears out the guts and lower organs, Steve can reach the heart and lungs. Cutting into the heart, he warns, “If there’s worms in the heart, the meat’s no good.” This heart is dark and perfect. The day is getting on toward noon, and the smell of hot guts makes me wince, but this part of the work, a $45 job of slaughtering and skinning, is done. The carcass is an empty shell. The winch whines, the steer rises, and we swing it into the bed of the truck, which Steve has lined with tarp. Then we do the same for the bone barrels, now full of guts, hide, bits of fat, and the steer’s front feet. Back to the store for the initial butchering.

Behind Romana Meats stands a weather-beaten freezer shed. The white paint is wearing away; the wood is gray beneath. Only the jumbo freezer door handle and the tiny thermometer reading 45 degrees Fahrenheit give any sign that this is something more than an old tool shed. We haul the bone barrels inside; they sit on the right with the remnants of other slaughters—heads, hides, and guts, mostly. On the left, plastic gray trays, full of cuts of meat wrapped in smooth white butcher paper, are stacked in neat contrast to the waste on the other side.

Mounted on one side of the shed is a double-beam balance, 550 pounds on the upper beam, 50 pounds on the lower. Steve fetches a power saw and works through the back feet, rocking and sawing. Then he slides the carcass off the truck bed until he can hook the leg spreaders onto the scale. “Count up 12 ribs from front to hind,” he says, clearing away hunks of lardy whiteness. “That’s where you split front from hindquarters.” So saying, he goes to work with the saw, ripping through the spine, so that the back end swings free and smack the shed. Standing back and looking at them, they seem of a piece, the patchy-fate shell of meat and the battered building, multicolored and dull in the heat of the day.

The saw is applied to the base of the spine and forced straight down, splitting the spine in half lengthwise. Holding the meat steady, I am sprayed with bits of dry white stuff, like overcooked rice, and the meat is warm against me—warm and papery outside, warm and moist inside. The spine cross-section is as wide as a man’s hand, so it’s slow going, and for the first time, that hot, raw, meaty smell hits and start to wear on whatever is still sharp in me. Finally, the hindquarters are free of each other, 92 pounds a piece, and Steve hauls them into the meat locker.

As I follow him in, my stomach jumps at the smell of aging meat. The fat on the beef runs from white to yellow to orange. The color of the meat is deep, florid. The flies are sluggish from the cold. The hindquarters hang from long hooks on runners, the hooks through the slit behind the tendon. The sides of beef are hooked beneath a rib. There are half pigs here, and a deer. After hanging the hindquarter, Steve stamps them “Not for sale” and tags them. Then the front half is given the same treatment—hung on the scale, sawed, weighed (96 pounds), and hung in the locker. Steve has donned a white lab coat; he could be a mad surgeon, working away with determination.

“[That steer was] close to 500 pounds originally,” Steve says after we finish. “We lost 100. But that was a Holstein. Holstein’s got big bones and not a lot of meat. Did you see how long the legs were? A Black Angus, the legs are shorter, and they carry more meat. They’re wider across the chest.” Which brings us back to Vern Robinson’s steer.

Vern was born in Tanquitch, Utah, the son of Pistol Pete and the property of Vern Robinson. While Steve goes to work on his carcass, Lynn explains how he came West. “Her sister had a steer last year that did real well, that we bought at an auction. We found out where it came from, and the steer that got Grand Champion at the L.A County Fair cam from the same place. So we thought we’d get there before the salespeople did. It’s a nice drive. We did that over Thanksgiving weekend, did all the sightseeing stuff first, then picked him up [for $1000] and zoomed back home with him in a horse trailer. He’s never placed lower than sixth. He’s always gotten a blue ribbon where we’ve shown him.”

Randi tells me he placed fifth in his class at Del Mar, “but that was out of 12 steers, so he did pretty good.” What makes a good steer? “The finish—all their ribs would have to be covered with fat. They would have a lot of inner butt muscles, and a lot of outer butt muscle. They would have to be square, with a flat back, not sloping. Their brisket, which is their chest, would have to be really small. [That’s because] most of the brisket is fat. They would have to have a small dewlap. Their legs would have to be straight, not cow-hocked, which is when they’re turning towards each other.”

Why a Maine-Anjoe/Angus? “The crosses like that usually have more meat on them, and Angus are usually more ill-tempered, so if you cross them with something, then their temper goes down. He was pretty nice from the beginning. He just needed a little practice. He was more of a sweeter steer than the rest, except when he kicked. We put them in a stanchion, and then we can tame them. You just have to handle them a lot. You have to keep a halter on them, and pet them, and basically love them and care for them. At night, when it’s cooler, we go out and exercise them. Run them, walk them up and down a hill.”

Randi describes feeding. “[We fed him] grain and corn. Sometimes, if they need to be fattened up, you give them beer and milk replacement. [We fed him] twice a day, about 6:00 in the morning and about 7:00 at night, 15 pounds in the morning, 15 pounds at night. You feel their ribs, and if their ribs are covered by fat, then they’re fine. But if you can feel their ribs, they need more fat. [He ate] maybe 500 dollars’ worth of feed within a year.”

His carcass, though hollow and headless, is magnificent, bringing to mind that archetypal butcher-shop diagram. “The 4H and FFA steers always are,” says Steve. “Just the stature on them. You can tell they’ve been fed good.” The fat hangs thicker on Vern, more of it lumpy and curded. The meat is deeper in hue, marbled with veins of flavor-bringing fat. His size is nearly triple that of the De Los Santos’ steer—he must be sawed in half with a handsaw before he can be loaded into the truck. After quartering, his hindquarters weigh in at 185, his sides at 205. Somewhere between two and three weeks from now, he will be ready for butchering.

A few days later, I visit Ramona Meats to watch the butchering of a similar beast. Steve’s butchering saw and board are set up directly behind the back meat counter. “That way, I can watch what’s going on.” The saw is a band saw. A ten-inch blade runs between the upper and lower housing, which are painted white. “Butcher Boy” is stamped into the upper housing. On one side of the blade, the side farther from Steve, lies a long stainless steel counter. On the near side is a smaller counter, also of stainless steel, that slides back and forth. Sometimes, when Steve needs both hands to hold a piece of meat, he slides the counter with his hips, pressing against it and rocking side to side in a sort of mock dance.

A wooden cutting board stretches from the end of the steel counters to the wall, about ten feet. The board is roughly two and a half feet wide. Near the front end, two deep grooves have been worn, dips and swells from the pressure and friction of countless blocks of meat. “This block used to be much thicker,” recalls Steve. It is now about four inches, less in the grooves. “It can’t be refinished any more. Old timers, they used to put C-clamps on it, then take a band saw, level it out, and put some kind of lacquer on it. The health department cam out her; they said, ‘You can’t use these anymore, you have to use fiberglass.’ Fiberglass is real hard on your knives. But they didn’t do the study far enough. Now they’ve found that fiberglass will hold bacteria longer than wood, and so these are in demand. Even this one, with all these cigarette burns, is worth some money.”

Steve begins by spraying the saw’s interior with mineral oil, to keep the blade clean. Then he sharpens his knives: the familiar eight-inch scimitar-shaped butcher knife and a carving knife, narrow and upturned. Brandishing the power saw again, he steps into the meat locker and digs into a hindquarter, separating the flank, or skirt, from the round and loin. It drops to the floor. On you, the flank is the flesh along your side between ribs and pelvis. The round is your backside. The loin we’ll get to in a moment.

Steve starts carving great blocks of newly exposed fat off the hindquarter. The fat that remains is all sharp angles from the carving, giving an effect of geometric precision to what is inherently a messy business. The fat is yellow and a little gelatinous, and there is too much of it for Steve’s liking. “Sixty pounds of fat on this quarter alone. That’s a lot of money [at 40 cents a pound]. The steaks are beautiful. The marbling, it’s prime, but you’ve got all this [fat] , and the hamburger, well, it’s [bad]. It’ll taste nice, but it’ll be fatty. It’s that yellow fat. He was overfed. Makes me wonder what he got into.”

Ground beef without fat has its own peculiarities. “It you’ve got ground beef with very little fat, like ground sirloin, then the air can’t get into the beef in the middle, and it get dark. It’s, like, what color is the blood in you veins? It’s blue. Then, when the air hits, it turns red. I try to tell people it’s the same with meat. Someone was saying, ‘Oh, no, you wrap the new meat around the old meat.’ I don’t have time for that. I ain’t working more than 12 hours a day.”

The fat removed, Steve begins taking off sections of meat. He narrates his first cut. “This would be like you knee, this is your sirloin tip. You go right along the bone, then when you feel this gristle, you cut out at an angle. Don’t ask me how I know where to cut, I just know.” If you were the steer, you would have just lost the front of your thigh. Next, he saws off the short loin, which covers your spine and surrounding muscle from lower back to rib cage. The sirloin, the region around the upper swell of you buttocks, is the last to come off, and then the lot are hauled out of the locker and piled on the wooden counter. The round is left hanging on the hook. Only now, reduced to these manageable hunks, does the meat begin to look unrecognizable ; only now do I stop seeing a parts of a steer and start seeing a cluster of steaks, waiting for the knife and saw to give them their status as individuals.

Each segment undergoes extensive trimming before cutting; sometimes Steve removes an outer layer of inferior meat, called a cap. This, along with bits of meat that get cut off into a gray plastic basin, the contents of which will be used for hamburger. The sirloin and the sirloin tip are reduced to gorgeous lumps of meat, boneless and glistening. The knife glides through them, and inch-and-a-half-thick slabs of beef drop away. “This top sirloin, you could eat this with a plastic fork and knife.”

From the skirt, he is able to procure one flank steak and some “steak tail.” “This [steak tail] is real good eating. It shreds real nice. This is what’s used for carne asada.” The rest is fat or meat for hamburger.

The band saw is fired up; now for the short loin. Picture the tenderloin, the muscle running alongside your spine through your lower back, as a cone, with the tip at the rib cage and the base just over the sirloin. As Steve saws through the spine, leaving a segment of vertebra in each steak, the amount of tenderloin in the steaks will vary. Those near the pelvis will have a large slice. These are the porterhouses. Then the T-bones; the tenderloin is smaller. And then the New York steaks, which contain little or no tenderloin.

Filet mignon is sliced from the same segment that held the sirloin; it is that part of the tenderloin that extends below the spine, below the porterhouses. Steve peels the tube of meat free, cutting along a seam, and slices it into six pieces. Together with the six or so pieces from the other hindquarter, a total of 12 filets will be all this enormous animal has to offer the beef-eating world.

A meat scraper is used on the spinal steaks before packaging to remove bone dust. The meat is then wrapped in wax paper, wrapped in plastic, and wrapped in white paper, neat bundles to be stacked in trays and brought home to the freezer. Steve’s wife Marie does this while Steve works on the upper half, or side, of the beef. From this he will get prime rib, rib eyes from around the spine, ribs, and short ribs. The shoulders and butt will provide all manner of roasts and stew meat. And the sheer quantity of hamburger spitting from the grinder is a trifle unnerving. So much meat.

This is from a single half beef. How much more meat from the processing plants, where the slaughter is wholesale, where enough beef is turned out to fill the shelves at the grocery stores? Amazing to think of it, but we don’t think of it. We joke that city kids don’t know where milk comes from—who imagines that the bone in a perfectly cooked porterhouse or T-bone is a cross-section of a vertebra? The thought seems like it should be bothersome, and yet, it isn’t. I find myself agreeing with Lynn Baker, who cried when her steers died but says, “He’s going to be good eating; that’s what we care about.” Soon after my day with Steve, my wife broils a flank steak that has soaked overnight in my mother’s marinade, leaving it tender and tasty, a perfect match for a young cabernet.