The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  For a plant to pass a McDonald’s audit, the stunner needs to render animals “insensible” on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second shot is allowed, but should that one fail, the plant flunks. At the line speeds at which meatpacking plants in the United States operate—390 animals are slaughtered every hour at National, which is not unusual—mistakes would seem inevitable, but Grandin insists that only rarely does the process break down.

  “After the animal is shot while he’s riding along, a worker wraps a chain around his foot and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg, he’s carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his throat. Animal rights people say they’re cutting live animals, but that’s because there’s a lot of reflex kicking.” This is one of the reasons a job at a slaughter plant is the most dangerous in America. “What I look for is, Is the head dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He’d better not be trying to hold it up—then you’ve got a live one on the rail.” Just in case, Grandin said, “they have another hand stunner in the bleed area.”

  Much of what happens next—the de-hiding of the animal, the tying off of its rectum before evisceration—is designed to keep the animal’s feces from coming into contact with its meat. This is by no means easy to do, not when the animals enter the kill floor smeared with manure and 390 of them are eviscerated every hour. (Partly for this reason, European plants operate at much slower line speeds.) But since that manure is apt to contain lethal pathogens like E. coli 0157, and since the process of grinding together hamburger from hundreds of different carcasses can easily spread those pathogens across millions of burgers, packing plants now spend millions on “food safety”—which is to say, on the problem of manure in meat.

  Most of these efforts are reactive: it’s accepted that the animals will enter the kill floor caked with feedlot manure that has been rendered lethal by the feedlot diet. Rather than try to alter that diet or keep the animals from living in their waste or slow the line speed—all changes regarded as impractical—the industry focuses on disinfecting the manure that will inevitably find its way into the meat. This is the purpose of irradiation (which the industry prefers to call “cold pasteurization”). It is also the reason that carcasses pass through a hot steam cabinet and get sprayed with an antimicrobial solution before being hung in the cooler at the National Beef plant.

  It wasn’t until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler, thirty-six hours later, that I was allowed to catch up with them, in the grading room. I entered a huge arctic space resembling a monstrous dry cleaner’s, with a seemingly endless overhead track conveying thousands of red-and-white carcasses. I quickly learned that you had to move smartly through this room or else be tackled by a 350-pound side of beef. The carcasses felt cool to the touch, no longer animals but meat.

  Two by two, the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the rails, six pairs every minute, to a station where two workers—one wielding a small power saw, the other a long knife—made a single six-inch cut between the twelfth and thirteenth ribs, opening a window on the meat inside. The carcasses continued on to another station, where a USDA inspector holding a round blue stamp glanced at the exposed rib eye and stamped the carcass’s creamy white fat once, twice or—very rarely—three times: select, choice, prime.

  For the Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of truth, for that stamp will determine exactly how much the packing plant will pay for each animal and whether the fourteen months of effort and expense will yield a profit.

  Unless the cattle market collapses between now and June (always a worry these days), I stand to make a modest profit on No. 534. In February, the feedlot took a sonogram of his rib eye and ran the data through a computer program. The projections are encouraging: a live slaughter weight of 1,250, a carcass weight of 787 pounds and a grade at the upper end of choice, making him eligible to be sold at a premium as Certified Angus Beef. Based on the June futures price, No. 534 should be worth $944. (Should he grade prime, that would add another $75.)

  I paid $598 for No. 534 in November; his living expenses since then come to $61 on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the feedlot (including implant), for a total investment of $917, leaving a profit of $27. It’s a razor-thin margin, and it could easily vanish should the price of corn rise or No. 534 fail to make the predicted weight or grade—say, if he gets sick and goes off his feed. Without the corn, without the antibiotics, without the hormone implant, my brief career as a cattleman would end in failure.

  The Blairs and I are doing better than most. According to Cattle-Fax, a market-research firm, the return on an animal coming out of a feedlot has averaged just three dollars per head over the last twenty years.

  “Some pens you make money, some pens you lose,” Rich Blair said when I called to commiserate. “You try to average it out over time, limit the losses and hopefully make a little profit.” He reminded me that a lot of ranchers are in the business “for emotional reasons—you can’t be in it just for the money.”

  Now you tell me.

  The manager of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of steaks from No. 534 before his carcass disappears into the trackless stream of commodity beef fanning out to America’s supermarkets and restaurants this June. From what I can see, the Blair brothers, with the help of Poky Feeders, are producing meat as good as any you can find in an American supermarket. And yet there’s no reason to think this steak will taste any different from the other high-end industrial meat I’ve ever eaten.

  While waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I’ve explored some alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays you can find hormone-and antibiotic-free beef as well as organic beef, fed only grain grown without chemicals. This meat, which is often quite good, is typically produced using more grass and less grain (and so makes for healthier animals). Yet it doesn’t fundamentally challenge the corn-feedlot system, and I’m not sure that an “organic feedlot” isn’t, ecologically speaking, an oxymoron. What I really wanted to taste is the sort of preindustrial beef my grandparents ate—from animals that have lived most of their full-length lives on grass.

  Eventually I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me a quarter of a grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most of my freezer. I also found ranchers selling grass-fed beef on the Web; Eatwild.com is a clearinghouse of information on grass-fed livestock, which is emerging as one of the livelier movements in sustainable agriculture.

  I discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than supermarket beef. Whatever else you can say about industrial beef, it is remarkably cheap, and any argument for changing the system runs smack into the industry’s populist arguments. Put the animals back on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it takes too long to raise beef on grass, and there’s not enough grass to raise them on, since the Western range lands aren’t big enough to sustain America’s one hundred million head of cattle. And besides, Americans have learned to love cornfed beef. Feedlot meat is also more consistent in both taste and supply and can be harvested twelve months a year. (Grass-fed cattle tend to be harvested in the fall, since they stop gaining weight over the winter, when the grasses go dormant.)

  All of this is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot system is hard to refute. And yet so is the ecological logic behind a ruminant grazing on grass. Think what would happen if we restored a portion of the Corn Belt to the tall grass prairie it once was and grazed cattle on it. No more petrochemical fertilizer, no more herbicide, no more nitrogen runoff. Yes, beef would probably be more expensive than it is now, but would that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every day might not be such a smart idea anyway—for our health, for the environment. And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.

&nb
sp; So how does grass-fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out to be the best steak I’ve ever eaten. But unless the meat is carefully aged, grass-fed beef can be tougher than feedlot beef—not surprisingly, since a grazing animal, which moves around in search of its food, develops more muscle and less fat. Yet even when the meat was tougher, its flavor, to my mind, was much more interesting. And specific, for the taste of every grass-fed animal is inflected by the place where it lived. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but nowadays when I eat a feedlot steak, I can taste the corn and the fat, and I can see the view from No. 534’s pen. I can’t taste the oil, obviously, or the drugs, yet now I know they’re there.

  A considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing (and, OK, chewing) a grass-fed steak: a picture of a cow outside in a pasture eating the grass that has eaten the sunlight. Meat-eating may have become an act riddled with moral and ethical ambiguities, but eating a steak at the end of a short, primordial food chain comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and light is something I’m happy to do and defend. We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that’s only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

  FORTUNE’S SMILE: WORLD SERIES OF POKER

  James McManus

  BETTING BIG AT THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER

  I flew in on American Airlines, the nickname for two pocket aces, and I take that as a very good sign. I’ve got my poker books, sunglasses, and lucky hats, including the White Sox cap I got married in. My room at Binion’s Horseshoe overlooks downtown Las Vegas’s dolorous, last-gasp attempt to keep up with the billion-dollar resorts five miles south on the Strip, which in the last few years have siphoned off most of the city’s thirty-four million annual tourists with pixilated facsimiles of Paris and Bellagio, Imperial Rome and Renaissance Venice—all the more reason to be happily ensconced way up here at the Horseshoe. Even better this evening is that the 2000 World Series of Poker is in full swing downstairs. Tomorrow, with a $4,000 stake, I’m going to try to win a seat in the million-dollar championship event, due to begin in five days.

  I ain’t superstitious, as Willie Dixon once sang, but my second daughter, Beatrice, was conceived in Bellagio, Italy, so my lucky hats include a sun visor sporting the logo of the local version. I’ve also been playing poker for thirty-nine years now, everything from penny-ante family games in the Bronx to $80 to $160 hold’em at the Bellagio, but never at anything close to this level. The championship event costs $10,000 to enter, and always draws the top two or three hundred pros in the world. I’m good, but not that good. I was taught by my uncle and grandfather, both named Tom Madden, then got schooled in caddy shacks by guys with names like Doc and Tennessee. My current home game in Chicago involves day-traders, attorneys, a transit-systems planner, and a pizza delivery man. It’s a game that I fare pretty well in, but I still have no reason to doubt T. J. Cloutier, the former Canadian Football League tight end who is now one of poker’s best players, when he says, “The World Series is a conglomeration of local champions. There’s Joe Blow from Iowa who’s the champion in his game at home; hundreds of local champions like him come to Vegas to play the World Series. But it’s like the difference in going from playing high-school football to college football: It’s a big step up.”

  To reduce the long odds that I’ll only embarrass myself, I’ve spent the last year practicing on a computer while studying the four poker bibles: Cloutier’s Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold’em, cowritten with Tom McEvoy, the 1983 world champion; David Sklansky’s seminal Theory of Poker and Hold’em Poker for Advanced Players, the latter cowritten with Mason Malmuth; and Doyle Brunson’s Super/System: A Course in Power Poker, cowritten with (among others) Sklansky, Chip Reese, and Bobby Baldwin, the 1978 champion and currently president of the Bellagio—which is good luck right there, I figure, as I switch on the light in the bathroom. These little yellow horseshoes on the shampoo and soap might help, too.

  The crowded main tournament area has forty-five oval poker tables, each surrounded by ten or eleven chairs. The size of a grammar-school gym, the room has an eighteen-foot ceiling fitted with cameras and monitors but not quite enough ventilation for the number of players who smoke. Posters along the walls give results from previous events, including a color photograph of each winner. There’s precious little else in the way of adornment, no music besides the droning announcements of poker activity and locust-like clacking of chips. Shangri-la!

  The $3,000 no-limit hold’em event starts tomorrow at noon, so that’s when I’ll play my first satellite—while the best two or three hundred players are otherwise engaged. Before I go to bed, though, I need to take a few notes on the action. In satellites for the Big One, ten people pay $1,000 apiece and play a winner-take-all freeze-out. Which will make me a 9 to 1 underdog tomorrow, assuming I’m evenly matched with my adversaries, and of course I will not be. But a night’s sleep and diluted competition will give me the best, or least bad, chance of winning.

  Most of the satellites have $300 buy-ins and generate a seat in tomorrow’s event, but one table along the near rail is reserved for $1,000 action. A harried blond floorperson with a microphone—her nametag says CAROL—is trying to fill the next one. “Just one more seat, players! Chance to win a seat in the Big One. . . .” Nine hopefuls already have chips stacked in front of them, along with their Walkmans and water bottles, ashtrays and fans. As Fyodor Mikhailovich confessed to his second bride, Anna Grigoryevna, who’d conquered his heart while taking down The Gambler in shorthand: “Once I hear the clatter of the chips, I almost go into convulsions. Hear hear!” Down I sit, forking over $1,015, the $15 being the juice. Tired schmired. Once I receive my own $1,000 stack of green ($25) and brown ($100) chips and the dealer starts shuffling, I’ve never felt any more ready.

  Hold’em involves nine or ten players receiving two facedown cards each (called “the pocket”), followed by three faceup shared or “community” cards (“the flop”), a fourth community card (“the turn” or “fourth street”), and a fifth community card (“the river” or “fifth street”).7 Two rotating antes called “blinds,” small and large, initiate a round of betting before the flop, with a round of betting after the flop, after fourth street, and after fifth street. Starting at $25 and $50, the blinds double every twenty minutes. Since the game is no-limit, a player may bet anything from $50 up to all his chips at any point in the sequence. No-limit action seldom reaches a showdown on fifth street, where, if it did, the best five-card poker hand wins. Most often, an intimidating wager before or just after the flop gets no callers, and the bettor receives the whole pot.

  Things get much trickier when factoring in your position. Acting last from the dealer’s button (which rotates hand by hand) is the strongest position, since you see everyone else’s action before deciding whether to fold, call, or raise, and can therefore get away with playing slightly weaker hands; whereas only big pairs, ace-king, or suited connecting face cards (Q ♦ J ♦, for example) are likely to make money played from an early position. As early shades clockwise into middle, then late position, the valences of wagering assert themselves and less savvy players get soundly outmaneuvered.

  My satellite rivals are mostly middle-aged guys of all stripes: the anxious, the collected, the pocky, the sleek; ex-beatniks, ex-jocks, and ex-hippies. So I feel right at home on all counts. Although one of us will stroll off with everyone else’s money, the table has a friendly, if not quite munificent, vibe. When someone gets edged at the showdown, the usual response is, “Good hand.” We also tip the cocktail waitress for one another. None of this fools me, however.

  A gray-haired Vietnamese woman in round mirrored shades has taken the lead, winning three of the first eleven pots. Doing less well is the toothless varmint in seat one, just to the left of the dealer. His scraggly beard starts high on his cheekbones and covers his Adam’s apple, with scalp hair of similar
aspect, the entire gnarled package tentatively winched together by a powder-blue UNLV cap. Yours truly sports poker face, titanium shades, and Bellagio visor but still hasn’t entered one pot. Him too scared.

  Most of my no-limit experience is on Masque’s World Series of Poker program and Bob Wilson’s Tournament Texas Hold’em. By playing hundreds of thousands of hands (and winning three virtual tournaments), I’ve sharpened my card sense and money-management skills, and developed a not-bad sense of no-limit wagering rhythms. Yet computer play affords no opportunity to read faces and body language for “tells,” and may actually diminish the mental, fiscal, and physical stamina required for live-action poker. The $1,015 I’m risking is real, with 9 to 1 odds that I’ll lose every cent. I can’t sit here with T.J. and Brunson and Sklansky open in my lap, thumbing an index or two for advice about playing an unsuited ace-jack.8 The main thing I need here is feel, and for this, books and computers can’t help much. Right now the pot has been raised by the muscular Arab in the salt-stained tortoiseshell Wayfarers, not Masque’s “Player #4.” What is Stains thinking that I’m thinking that he’s thinking? Is his visceral aplomb all an act? The only things I’m sure of is that he wants my money more than Player #4 ever could and that he’s already knocked out Madame Ho. But if I can’t look into his eyes, at least I can observe how hard his lungs are working. If I’ve tuned him in right, I can feel it.

  Right now from middle position I’m playing A♦ J ♥, having called Stains’s $200 preflop raise. The flop has come ace, five, king—all of spades. With flushes abroad, there’s a bet and three calls ahead of me. That no one has raised makes my pot odds about 12 to 1, with my shot at a full house a lot worse than one in thirteen. But I call, God knows why, and fourth street comes up J♠, giving me aces and jacks. After Stains bets another $200, two hands get folded, but the guy on the button reraises. Two other calls on my right, then a fold, then . . . the next thing I know the dealer is staring at me. So is Stains. So is the Pakistani guy to his left. With only four outs (the two remaining aces and jacks), folding aces-up makes me groan with irrational pride, but when the dealer turns over J ♣, I no longer have a good feeling.