Culinary Codex: Beyond Beef
Kean Collection
In Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, a group of wealthy dinner guests discover, sometime after supper, that they cannot leave. There is no barrier to leaving but no one crosses that threshold.
Buñuel never gives the paralysis a good explanation. It is unnerving that one person will choose not to leave just because many people before chose not to leave.
There seems to be some kind of barrier too when it comes to choosing a protein other than beef. Despite having “no one right answer,” people give the same claustrophobic answers when they are asked about what they are eating to hit their macros. Ground beef, steak, ribeye; occasionally chicken, if they need a fourth protein.
Beef has had an extraordinary run. On a Friday, it is the smashed double cheeseburger you eat through its wrapper between meetings. It reappears hours later as the centerpiece of a steakhouse dinner with a client or a date. When the weekend comes, it crackles as carne asada on a street-side plancha and spends Sunday afternoon under gravy and potatoes. When the next workweek rolls around, it makes you agonize between a sandwich from Al’s Beef and a Korean BBQ protein bowl from South Branch (if you work in Chicago).
Taste alone would not have cemented beef as the singular synonym to protein had it not followed us into the gym. Steak and eggs became the breakfast of muscle, before ground beef and white rice colonized meal-prep containers. Beef bundles high-quality protein with iron, zinc, and vitamin B12: protein supplies the amino acids from which tissues are built and repaired; iron carries oxygen around the body, while zinc turns up in immune function and wound healing; B12 is essential to blood and nerve cell health. As its famous slogan goes, “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.”
Beef’s nutritional benefits are not a mystique, but usefulness hardly makes a case for exclusivity. The body has never eaten a steak. The digestive system is apathetic to the marbling or the cultural prestige of dinner. In our bodies, beef falls into a “super collider” and gets dismantled into amino acids and commingled with hemoglobins and enzymes, much like Sandman from Spiderman. What makes us think those molecules had to come from a cow?
They don’t, says soy, waving its non-existent fists. Tofu has spent decades in the Western imagination as meat’s pale understudy, brought onstage when the real protein is unavailable. Yet soy contains all nine essential amino acids and is considered a high-quality protein. When researchers pooled clinical trials comparing soy and animal proteins alongside resistance training, they found no significant difference in gains in muscle strength or lean body mass. Lentils and beans also pair protein with fiber. Eggs bring with choline, a nutrient involved in memory, muscle control and cell membranes, while nuts and pumpkin seeds contribute extra minerals and unsaturated fats.
Many other options are left out because “less beef” is often equated with “more plants.” Pork is a curious omission. Americans hardly neglect the pig, since we turn it into bacon, ribs, pulled pork, and sausages any chance we get. But it rarely achieves the elevated status as a serious protein, when that distinction, nutritionally, is hard to explain. Lean cuts such as tenderloin are particularly rich in thiamin, the B vitamin the body uses to help turn food into energy. Pork also supplies selenium, zinc and other B vitamins. It may lack the bodybuilding glory of steak and rice, but your muscles don’t know the difference!
Beef’s nutritional values, though correctly praised, are also not exclusively bovine. Salmon, sardines and trout supply high-quality protein but also the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA associated with cardiovascular benefits. The American Heart Association recommends eating two servings of fish a week, particularly fatty fish, for this reason. Seafood can also provide vitamin D, iodine and selenium, nutrients that do not usually headline conversations about protein but matter nonetheless, according to FDA guidance.
Shellfish, too, have been typecast as delicacies ordered by the dozen alongside a glass of Champagne. Oysters are the richest food source of zinc; beef contributes so much zinc to the American diet partly because Americans simply eat so much of it. Clams, meanwhile, are exceptionally rich in B12, with mussels and crab offering substantial amounts as well. And these are hardly some mercury-laden nutritional bargain: the FDA places clams, crab, oysters, salmon, sardines and trout among its lower-mercury “Best Choices.” These foods aren’t obscure finds, so naturally they shouldn’t remain peripheral to our idea of everyday protein.
Our grandparents might find another supposedly adventurous alternative rather ordinary: organs. Liver and kidney have retreated far enough from many contemporary American dinner rotations, but they are also among the richest natural sources of essential amino acids and micronutrients. They are not foods to consume indiscriminately, as the liver, in particular, is extremely high in vitamin A, which can be harmful in excess. But, again, variety in moderation matters more than crowning any one food the answer.
Discussions about eating less beef have a peculiar tendency to collapse into a referendum on eating animals at all, as though the alternative to beef must necessarily be meatless. That’s why “meat substitute" is such a misguided premise. It sends us searching for a perfect understudy that we don’t need. We have gone to extraordinary lengths to make plants behave like meat: peas and soy engineered to bleed, brown and sizzle, patties molded to the dimensions of burgers. But why must anything impersonate beef? Tofu can be lunch and salmon can be dinner. Tomorrow there might be pork, lentils, eggs or mussels. We shouldn’t assign all responsibilities to one food in the first place.
There are advantages to dividing the labor, which is why “eat less beef” is incomplete advice. Beef does some things exceptionally well: its heme iron is more readily absorbed than the nonheme iron in plants. That does not make lentils or tofu inadequate replacements so much as different ones. Their iron is more particular about company: vitamin C helps the body absorb it, giving lentils and tomatoes or tofu and broccoli a little nutritional logic beyond tasting good together. Other substitutions offer their own tradeoffs. Every choice rearranges the nutritional puzzle and the diet you choose fills in the blanks. No singular food wins.
Buñuel’s guests could have crossed the threshold at any time, but they lived with the invisible boundary long enough to mistake it for a wall. Beef deserves better than becoming another invisible barrier. There is so much stuff on the other side.
