The absurdity of Wagyu beef

I am not a vegetarian, but I don’t like beef, or rather, the idea of beef. Our palates are heavily influenced by the market. There was a time when lobsters and oysters were considered to be food for the poor and thus yucky, and I think beef also carries some of that perception boost because cattle are inherently more labor and resource intensive to raise compared to chicken and pigs. And with our increasing ability to plunder nature, the persistent demand for more meat and beef specifically is putting unneeded pressure on food security and land use.

Don’t play with your food

The idea of wagyu is the stuff of science fiction once it is deconstructed. It sounds like something that a heavy-handed dystopian young adult sci-fi would come up with. The idea that a meat cow is treated to massages and beer and wine — not because of animal rights but because it makes the beef taste better — leaves a terrible taste in my mouth. And even worse, the beer drinking and massage giving are mostly bullshit marketing stunts and, even when it does happen, are limited to showing bulls for farm animal pageants.

I am not as bothered by the butchering part as I am by the success of its marketing, that we are so eager to embrace the narrative of a win-win situation, that we can consume our way out of our sins. Treating the animals we eat better also makes them taste better! How convenient! What if massaging the cows actually makes them taste worse? Would we still do it then? Probably not.

One of the anecdotes I like to tell when I first moved to the US was that I noticed the fried chicken breasts at the KFCs there were a lot juicier than the KFCs in Hong Kong. I always assumed that was because the chicken used by American KFCs is pumped full of steroids and forced to gorge on grains inside a tiny cage, not unlike how foie gras geese are raised, so they were fattier and juicier. And as long as there is a demand for juicy chicken and greasy beef, the market is going to meet it, and when this satisfaction of eating fatty meat is multiplied by the idea of beef equals luxury, it is a potent formula for an exploding environmental disaster. And I don’t mean it in a hippie let’s save the planet kind of way. On much less ideological terms, I think the demand for this decadent and arbitrary luxury is draining away resources that can otherwise be used to solve more existential problems in society, or simply by not putting more pressure on global food security.

The golden calf and two of the seven sins

The cult status of wagyu beef is a reflection of two of the seven sins— greed and gluttony, and perhaps also envy, or maybe lust — if you like cows that much.

Jokes aside, luxury foods are status symbols like handbags and shoes, which are also sometimes made out of cows. As status symbols, they exert mental and financial pressure on the middle and lower classes, as dangling carrots for extracting more of their labor. A steak dinner for the husband’s birthday and a Gucci bag for the wife on hers.

With the rise of the middle class, China is showing what it will be like if everyone can afford the lifestyle America brags about. We will plunder the world if we can afford to, and on abstract financial terms, we can, and so we are, because it is our turn.

What about the intrinsic pleasure of these items? Do wagyu beef objectively taste better than, say, an ice cream cone from McDonald’s? It’s debatable, although I do believe there is some merit to that argument, because the more expensive something is, the more labor is involved to ensure the product is up to standard. While some of these standards may seem contrived, there is usually at least a portion of that can be objectively justified as having something to do with the quality of the product. For example, it may seem contrived to define what is or isn’t bourbon or Scotch or Kobe beef by geographical locations, but these standards do encompass other qualities that cannot otherwise be benchmarked objectively.

But back to the topic of the whole point of luxury foods. What portion of their value do we as a society assign to them as being symbolic, e.g. eating a birthday cake not because it tastes good but because you want to celebrate your birthday? And what portion of this value do we assign to its intrinsic pleasure value, e.g. eating a birthday cake by yourself on a regular weekend because it tastes good? If we have no problem with judging birthday cakes mostly for their symbolic value, then why do we feel disgust toward, say, a lottery winner devouring a rare million-dollar bottle of wine? If you say because the rare wine is wasted because the lottery winner probably doesn’t have the refined palette needed to fully appreciate its bouquet, etc., then I’d say that you’re missing the point. Because the taste is not where most of its value lies, and by treating it as a pure status symbol instead of a pure pleasure item, the lottery winner is actually utilizing the wine more fully than, say, a wine connoisseur who drinks it in private.

And here lies the problem with luxury foods: their being an accessory to the appearance of financial success.

Wagyu beef is expensive because it is resource intensive, because it does require more land and labor and animal feed for every calorie of the beef produced. Rich people like wagyu beef because it is expensive and is a symbol of wealth. Poorer people aspire to eat wagyu beef because they believe in its value.

And so, with the rise of the middle class who are within reach of these luxuries, there is a market demand for cheaper wagyu beef. Farmers are incentivized to produce more wagyu beef, which is an inherently less cost-effective item for managing sustainability and food security, and we all die.

The C word

So, can we fix this with more capitalism? What about organic foods as a symbol of the new bourgeoisie? No. To one day attain the ability to over-consume is what motivates work in a capitalistic society. Small batch, non-GMO, chemical-free farming, while all well-meaning in spirit, somehow all happen to make the food it produces more expensive and less efficient in terms of land use and labor, etc.

The thought of simply consuming less — not by going organic or going electric or any other lateral lifestyle change — but simply living poorer, as a way to reduce consumption, is simply not compatible with capitalism. And that’s why people say it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

Plot the carbon footprint per capita with GDP per capita line and they are almost the same line. I know, it’s a shocker that how much natural resources a person consumes is correlated to how much money a person spends.

The average person from California, the supposedly hippie vegan state, eats more seafood than the average person from India eats meat. And before you say India is special because of their religion, they are not an extreme outlier when compared to other countries with similar GDP per capita. In fact, the per capita meat consumption for most of the world is less than half of that for an average American, and the average Californian eats just as much meat as the average Texan. Culture and wishful behavior within capitalism just don’t have enough sway to make a meaningful impact because sustainability is only considered when it threatens capitalism from sustaining its profits in the short term. It will be a great win if this grotesque mindset can be reframed for capitalists to consider their own long-term profits — to convince them that sustainable profit is the best kind of profit — but even that seems to be an insurmountable challenge.

Meat supremacy

I do blame Western imperialism partly for accelerating the global yearning for more red meat (e.g. in China). Outside of Europe, it is not uncommon for children to be indoctrinated by white supremacy, about how Europeans are taller and stronger, and smarter because of their genetics and their culture and their diets. If we eat like them, we can get closer to being like them. I have heard these theories from my dad, who was 100% Chinese and had never lived abroad. European colonialism has had a profound and long-lasting impact on the global village that its subjects and former subjects still deal with at a conscious and subconscious level.

Now the rhetoric continues, as the Global South struggles to industrialize and aspire to the lifestyle of the Global North, the goalpost has shifted. Narratives of how Brazil and China and India and Nigeria are destroying the environment, by cutting down trees and making iPhones, and having too many babies, all have the undertone of “Hey, look at them, they are still not as good as us.” All while ignoring that the collective West, even when ignoring the enormous accumulative emission of CO2, still leads the world in terms of CO2 emission per capita.

It is like rich highschoolers laughing at their poorer classmates who work at fast food restaurants to save up money to buy the same shoes the rich highschoolers had, just to be laughed at and say, “people who are into nice shoes are so immature, you should save your money for a Tesla to save the planet.”

Anyway, what I’m saying is. Beef sucks. It doesn’t even taste that good. And I like cows. I think they’re nice. Don’t eat them.