Addressing the Cow in the Room: My Would-Be, Should-Be Goodbye to Beef

House of Prime Rib in San Francisco captures the urban steakhouse aesthetic to a tee. You walk in and are greeted with low lighting, tones of oak and red, suited staff, and white tablecloth. The decor is formal, but not overstated; rather than anything ostentatious, the goal here is simply a dignified presentation. One gets the sense that the place was once an old luxury home: unless your table is in the primary dining area by the entrance, your server will escort you through a number of wood-paneled rooms, around a number of corners, perhaps down a hallway or two, before seating you. The place is a steakhouse, with as much emphasis on the house as on the steak.

You order through a simple, stripped-down process: There are only three items available as your main course, all of which are varieties of steak. There are a handful of sides, and you get to choose two or three. Looking around the room, you’ll find that everyone’s dinner appears almost identical.

Your dining experience is built around an aesthetic that champions size, simplicity, and imprecision. The bartender served us our martinis and left us the shaker, where, thanks to a preparation process that values gusto over meticulous measuring, a few sips remained. Some salad remained, too, after our server eyeballed the portions and tossed everything in a big bowl next to our table before personally doling it onto our plates with tongs. Chefs’ carts are set up like mobile outposts throughout the restaurant — in the threshold between two rooms, in the corners — where chefs in white hats preside over their lovingly-prepared masses of meat, tender and just the perfect shade of pink. Our server brought one of the chefs over to our table to meet us personally before we were served the final product: a plate arranged with a massive slab of beef, glistening in its juices, as well as mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, and Yorkshire pudding.

The chefs are passionate masters of a beautiful and timeless craft, one that brings people together and feeds the belly and soul. The serving staff are the utmost professionals, experts at delivering exactly the kind of experience you want out of a place like that. The food was utterly delicious, and wanted for nothing.

House of Prime Rib, and places like it, probably shouldn’t exist. The Earth has never been as close to the precipice of man-made climate catastrophe — one that threatens human and animal life at a mass scale — as it is today. Last year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that we have only twelve years to make the changes necessary to avoid the level of global temperature increase that would trigger that catastrophe — and that making those changes will require seismic, fundamental changes to our economy and our way of life. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has stated that 14.5% of the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change come from animal farming, driven primarily by the source of the core product at House of Prime Rib: cattle.

Grazing cattle requires space, which in turn requires deforestation, reducing the planet’s supply of the trees that absorb all the carbon we spew into the air. The animals themselves belch and fart enough methane into the atmosphere to be considered a major emitter of greenhouse gases. Rising global temperatures have caused extreme and widespread droughts that imperil access to life’s most precious resource — water — and the extremely water-intensive beef industry isn’t doing us any favors in that department. Critics have derided a provision of the Green New Deal that indicts beef consumption as an effort to “take your hamburgers away” — while many on the political left have condemned this as inaccurate pearl-clutching, the fact remains that if we all really did stop eating hamburgers, we might actually make a positive difference.

The engine of climate change is fueled largely by industry, and it can therefore be difficult for the individual to combat. I’ve been trying, though. I’ve made donations to organizations promoting renewable energy and defending nature from corporate exploitation. I’m one of a dwindling population who still shops almost exclusively at brick-and-mortar establishments instead of relying on Amazon, which boasts a huge carbon footprint in the form of its gargantuan shipping apparatus (to say nothing of the needless plastic often included in its packaging). And I’ve significantly cut down on my beef consumption.

It hasn’t been easy. I love beef, and abstaining from it in the face of its ready availability often feels like a chore. For the most part, I can opt for the chicken or the vegetarian option on a menu and be perfectly content — but sometimes I cave. I’ll tell myself that I feel an iron deficiency, knowing that I’m probably just craving a burger and haven’t had one in a while. In this way, I rationalize in order to allow myself to continue engaging in something that I know is contributing to no less than a threat to human civilization, one on par with the plague and nuclear proliferation. And for that, I’m guilty.

But in my defense — and in defense of others who recognize the problem, want to do their part to solve it, and are struggling to do so — there’s an emotional component to the elimination of beef that is largely absent from other measures that are important to the fight against climate change. Air travel, coal power, single-use plastics — these are, for the vast majority of the population, pragmatic matters. If styrofoam disappeared from the planet tomorrow, there might be some inconvenience, but few would pine for the experience of filling a grainy white cup with coffee at a gas station. More serious, infrastructural changes like eliminating coal would cost jobs and would likely cause additional expense to consumers, at least in the short term — but it’s hard to imagine many Americans outside of West Virginia or Kentucky feeling like an element of their very culture had been lost.

Beef is different. Beef is joy. It belongs to the culinary domain, which overlaps significantly with art, family, and pleasure. Cuisine is culture, and beef is central to the cuisine of societies across the globe: carne asada, bulgogi, filet mignon. People taste beef and are reminded of their mothers’ cooking. Barbecue joints, burger shacks, and cookouts — and all the sights and smells and sounds and tastes and memories associated with them — are timeless and indispensable components of the American experience, whether you’re from New York or Nevada.

The hard truth is that saying goodbye to beef more or less means saying goodbye to all of this. As hard and valiantly as some have worked to ease the transition away from beef with new culinary innovations, it won’t be the same. Like other foods, the taste, appearance, smell, and texture of beef have specific features and deliver a specific enjoyment that cannot precisely be replicated by substitutes or alternatives. Even if someone one day discovers how to create a beef substitute that is truly indistinguishable from actual beef, the knowledge, at the consumer level, that it’s still not the real thing would be unsettling and cause vague distrust. It’s hard to see the clientele of House of Prime Rib taking kindly to the Impossible Prime Rib.

I don’t know if my near-abstinence from beef is having any impact on beef production. If I order less beef from a restaurant, the thinking goes, then that restaurant will take longer to run out of its beef supply, which means they’ll be delayed in putting in their next wholesale order, which means cattle farmers will face a modicum less demand and will thus produce a little less. But that’s awfully convoluted, and I’m sure the reality is that any beef I don’t order is more likely to end up in a dumpster than to remain in a restaurant refrigerator a little longer.

Still, though, we have more control over what we eat than we do over where we get our power — it’s still more feasible to stop eating beef than it is to stop consuming energy produced by fossil fuels. What a tragedy, then, that the easiest means of reducing my carbon footprint is also the only means with a byproduct of emotional trauma.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, it’s a small price to pay. Civilization as we know it is at stake. If you think of it as a choice between losing a single aspect of your culture through eliminating beef and losing your culture in its entirety through climate apocalypse, the choice seems obvious, and any internal turmoil you may feel over it seems almost laughable. If beef were banned tomorrow, I would gladly comply, knowing it’s for the best. But I would also be sad. I would mourn beef in a way that I certainly won’t mourn coal and oil when their time is up.

But it’s a sadness and a mourning that we all may have to accept — especially when we’re all hurtling toward the tipping point of climate change. We may well get there regardless of what I choose to eat. But until we do, I’ll be doing my best to order the portobello mushroom burger.