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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

<>> After the Civil War came the heyday
> of open-range cattle.

Before the War for Southern Independence beef consumption was rare and 
sporadic.   My grandparents still maintianed  the Appalachian farming 
tradition of 
the century previous to them of raising a good number of cattle but selling 
all 
of them and eating pork instead.  There was an enormous (enormous in 
reference to my age at the time, I was probably six) bull hide tacked up to 
the wall 
of the corn crib that I was told (in the late 50's) had been the last beef 
they 
had slaughtered and processed on the farm sometime in the 1930's because the 
Depression made eating the bull more economical than selling it.

In history the real "unrivaled storehouse for wealth" was not gold, but cows. 
 I wrote a piece on this for a blog which I might try to abridge for here.  
People by and large ate cows opportunistically rather than as a planned part 
of 
their food supply.  For example 

For an aside:  In German speaking countries a food charateristic of a city, 
or if a city claims to have invented or concocted it, goes by that city's 
name 
plus the ending +er.  So a sausage whose origin is Viena (Wein) is a Weinner. 
 
One from Frankfurt is a Frankfurter.  That's why when John Kennedy addressed 
the people of Berlin in 1963 and said "Ich bin ein Berliner" he was actually 
saying "I am a jelly doughnut."  [I am a Berliner would be 'Ich bin Berliner' 
without the 'ein'].

Oxen pulled heavy ore and ingot wagons to the port city of Hamburg and, like 
those loading palates of today, it was sometimes not profitable to send all 
the oxen back especially the oldest and most broken down.  The tended to pile 
up. But what do you do to eat an old broken down draft ox?   The people of 
Hamburg devised a way of shreading the meat so that it was edible and thus 
.... the 
Hamburger.

What the modern grass farmers are attempting is very good, but it is a modern 
invetion to adapt agribusiness mindset to grass-fed beef.   It's not the same 
thing as raising a homestead beef, especially if that beef and the grass it 
is raised on is surplus.  Nor is it even like the (fortunately) growing 
practice of reaising a few beefs and having people subscribe to them and get 
their 
beef from a meat packer when the steer is turned over for processing.

Grass is the soul of pastoral farming.  But it has much more of a spirit of 
its own than does commercial grain production.  A different economic model 
works best for grass beef than it does for grain beef.


James