Bringing Back the Beefsteak
RootCause Dispatch #20
Last month I stumbled on a fascinating historical article called ‘All You Can Hold for 5 Bucks’. First published in 1945 in the New Yorker, it explains the history of the free-for-all carnivore banquet called a ‘beefsteak’.
A beefsteak was basically a dinner event held (“thrown”) in local dining hall or club that served unlimited, all-you-can-eat high quality beef, lamb and kidney (and beer).
People would pay the equivalent of $100 in today’s dollars gorge themselves on meat and organs until absolutely stuffed. Initially a male-only event, these later became open to both sexes and were often intended to win favor of the local community.
Here are some choice excerpts from the article:
Can you imagine attending one of these events?
This article provides an interesting insight into recent cultural history of the West that is instructive on a number of levels. Gender apartheid, alcohol bingeing aside, there are a couple of points I want to emphasize:
It was custom of the era that a special dinner event would necessarily serve high quality dry aged beef, lamb chops and organ meats in the form of kidneys.
There was no aspect of food snobbery that attempted to impress diners with ornate plating, exotic ingredients or other culinary novelties.
There was no salad. There were no plants. There was no dessert. Just pure high quality animal meat and fat.
In an age free from propaganda and top-down messaging (as is occurring today), societal norms converged naturally on a a carnivorous, meat based menu to satisfy guests.
In my mind, this speaks to our nutritional needs as evolved carnivores. As researchers Miki Ben-Dor, Raphael Sirtoli and Ran Barkai have recorded, a constellation of anthropological and pale-ontological research including radiocarbon dating places Homo sapiens as the apex mammalian predators – meaning we hunted and ate other carnivorous animals.
Beef and organs were critical to our evolution and enabled us to attain our current form. A beefsteak is simply a re-enactment of post-hunt feasting that would have occurred innumerable times in the million years of our evolutionary past.
All native cultures prize the consumption of animals and of organ meats. Weston Price showed this definitively during his travels in the early 1930s. Meat and organ consumption lies at the core of culinary tradition of all cultures. If you disagree simply ask what your ethnic grandmother’s parents served at a special family dinner and I guarantee I’d be proven right.
The obvious corollary is that we are living in a profoundly unusual era, an anomalous time in which consumption of meat, and meat feasting is frowned upon and socially discouraged. Only for the past 50 years have we collectively been gaslit into believing such a practice is harmful to health. This has only occurred since the infiltration of the puritanical vegetarian ideology of Seventh Day Adventists, Ancel Keys’ cholesterol hypothesis, selective environmental and climate change narratives and other attempts at top-down control of the human diet (more on this in my piece The Corruption of the Human Diet).
And we are currently reaping what we sowed. When deprived of high quality animal meat and fat, people reach for these lower quality plant-based alternatives. A societal-wide increase in consumption of highly oxidated, nutritionally empty and highly refined seed oils, processed grains and sugar. The outcome is metabolic bankruptcy of the world.
It is time to revive the ethos of the beefsteak in the form of community gatherings based on consumption of large amounts of high quality meat and organs.
It’s time to outright reject the insidiously and corporate-pushed propaganda designed to invoke guilt into the minds of people who would eat large amounts of animal meat, fat and organs.
And it’s also time to educate yourself on exactly why each of the anti-meat arguments are invalid, and be comfortable in this knowledge (some good books here and here).
Hold your own beefsteak, and use it as an opportunity to build community, assert your dietary sovereignty and replenish the micronutrient stores of your tribe.
It doesn’t have to be in a beer hall, it doesn’t have to serve alcohol and it certainly shouldn’t exclude women (who need bioavailable animal protein and fat soluble vitamins now more than ever).
Here’s how:
Source locally. Buy your meat from local ranchers. Verify his (or her) grazing and animal welfare practices. Make sure he doesn’t spray his land with herbicides or feed his cattle with false commodities like genetically modified grains. Go for fully grass-fed grass finished and regenerative.
Tell him your preferred hang time for the carcass. And through the butcher specifically request the types and size of various cuts of meat you prefer.
Do not buy Walmart meat which may or may not have been imported, fed grain contaminated with all manner of industrial herbicides, microplastics, poly-fluorinated compounds and mold spores. Texas Slim on Pomp podcast recently explained the likely possibility of consuming 80-different cows worth of genetic material next time you bite into a feedlot-raised and conventionally-processed burger. No bueno. Industrially raised meat is environmentally harmful and is a sub-optimal option.
Invite the rancher to your beefsteak so you can personally shake his hand and thank him for providing the nutrient dense meat your are about to enjoy.
[Bonus]Have a fire pit (or multiple), bring some instruments and sing along with your tribe…you’d be surprised who has hidden musical talent.
There is special type of respect reserved for the provider and griller of copious amounts of high-quality, delicious meat – the beefsteak organizer, the asasdor. For one night you’re the captain of the football team, the local politician and the firefighter who rescued the kitten all rolled into one.
Throw your own BBQ beefsteak…and thank me later.
The Rest Is Up To You…
— RootCause MD
September 14, 2022
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No sir, I will not thank you later, I will thank you now for this feast of an article. Last weekend we held a similar event in our back yard and were blown away by the response. Invited 40 people and 36 showed up. People are starving for such as this. We had 2 guitars, 2 pianists, three flutes, a trumpet, a cello, numerous vocalists, and more. Everyone sang along. Here's a tip-don't over plan it, just invite. Our guests thanked us again and again, and asked when we would repeat it (next month!).
So we thank you now, and your here's how tips we will chew on.
They want us to think insects are the new meat. 200,000+ years of Homo sapien history and no one has made insects the Primary staple of one's diet unless otherwise starving. That is the transhumanist crowd too, thinking they can engineer a better human. More like they are making a god awful mess of the human condition.