Our Daily Bull
The Knife Also Organizes the World
Meat seems to arrive on the plate as something self-evident. It is there, cut, wrapped, seasoned, grilled, served, disputed. It may appear on a Sunday grill, behind the glass of a butcher’s counter, at a Korean restaurant, on an Argentine parrilla, in a Brazilian steakhouse in the United States, in a backyard burger, in a supermarket tray, or on a refined plate where the cut has already been surrounded by origin, breed, aging, scarcity, and a foreign name. In each of these scenes, the surface appears simple: someone is eating meat. But that simplicity breaks down as soon as we notice that, before meat is eaten, it has already been interpreted.
The report on Brazilian meatpackers influencing science and food policy in the United States matters not only because of its economic dimension. That layer is real, but it is not the whole phenomenon. The deeper point is that beef does not remain central through appetite alone. It has to be defended, framed, legitimized, recommended, refined, and kept inside a zone of normality. Before it reaches the plate, it may pass through scientific studies, industry associations, dietary guidelines, public policy, discourses about protein, family tradition, food security, employment, rural identity, masculinity, pleasure, and national belonging. Meat does not enter social life as a neutral fragment of animal body. It enters already surrounded by permissions.
That is the first necessary displacement. The question is not only why we eat meat, but how a society learns to recognize certain animals, certain parts, and certain cuts as food. A bull, a steer, a cow, in itself, is a whole animal. Culture does not receive it whole. It separates, names, ranks, and distributes it. One part becomes picanha. Another becomes brisket. Another becomes short rib. Another becomes flank. Another becomes stew meat. Another becomes ground beef. Another becomes broth, tail, trotters, tongue, offal, discard, industrial product, or premium cut. The animal is biological. The cut is technical. The value is cultural.
The knife, therefore, does not merely cut. It organizes. It separates noble from ordinary, grill from pot, festive plate from daily food, recognized cut from forgotten part. It transforms body into map. The animal is one, but each culture draws another territory on it. Brazil finds in picanha a kind of symbolic center of barbecue. Argentina and Uruguay organize fire through parrilla, vacío, entraña, tira de asado, bife de chorizo, achuras, patience, and time. The United States turns brisket, ribeye, T-bone, porterhouse, burger, and barbecue into different grammars of meat. Korea turns Hanwoo into a marker of affection, status, and occasion. Japan turns Wagyu into marbling, precision, and global luxury. The same animal, or animals close to it, crosses different worlds.
It is not that these cuts do not anatomically exist elsewhere. They do. What does not always exist is the cut, the name, the prestige, and the ritual. Picanha may be translated as rump cap, top sirloin cap, or coulotte, but none of those terms automatically carries Sunday, coarse salt, preserved fat cap, skewer, and Brazilian barbecue. The chest of the animal exists in every carcass, but “chest” does not produce the same effect as brisket when it enters the American barbecue imagination, with smoke, long hours, dark bark, wood, and patience. Sirloin and strip loin may be familiar, but ancho and chorizo arrive elsewhere as prestige vocabulary, importing not only a cut, but a way of desiring.
The name changes the meat before flavor even begins. It creates expectation, distinction, and trust. “Top sirloin cap” sounds anatomical. “Picanha” sounds like a promise. “Chest” or “breast” may sound like cooking meat. “Brisket” may sound like technique, authenticity, and cult. “Strip loin” is descriptive. “Bife de chorizo” shifts the piece into another scene. Meat does not change by itself; it changes when the regime of reading around it changes. In many cases, the market does not invent a new part of the animal. It invents a new perception for a part that was already there.
This also helps explain why buying a whole animal for a barbecue no longer corresponds to contemporary urban desire. A whole animal does not deliver only the pieces consecrated by the grill. It arrives with shoulder, chuck, breast, shank, round, bones, fat, tongue, tail, organs, trotters, and many parts that require another repertoire. In a culture of whole-animal use, that makes sense. One part goes to the fire, another to the pot, another to broth, another to curing, another to grinding, another to the neighbors, another to the feast, another to the week. The whole animal requires a whole kitchen.
The urban consumer, however, rarely wants the animal. He wants cuts. He wants picanha, flank, ribs, rump, strip steak, ancho, chorizo, burger, sausage, a clean piece, a ready portion. The butcher and the meatpacker solve the distance between the complete body and selective desire. They hide the asymmetry. For the buyer, meat appears as choice. For the producer, it remains carcass. Industry has to sell the whole animal; the consumer wants only the parts he has learned to desire.
That is why the multiplication of premium cuts is not merely a gastronomic trend. It is also a way of redistributing value across the animal. What once belonged to the forequarter may become flat iron or Denver steak. Rib sections may become short rib, prime rib, tomahawk, or asado de tira. The breast becomes brisket. The loin region divides into ribeye, New York strip, ancho, chorizo, T-bone, porterhouse. Language works where anatomy seemed to have closed the matter. It removes certain parts from invisibility and places them back inside the circuit of desire.
This operation becomes even clearer when Brazilian churrasco is compared with the American cookout so often shown in films. In the United States, the domestic grill may be organized around burgers, hot dogs, sausages, chicken, corn, ribs, sauces, and sides. Meat can appear as a stabilized product: ground patty, sausage, portioned unit, fast food, practical food, repeatable food. In Brazil, even when there is sausage, garlic bread, chicken hearts, coalho cheese, or chicken, the symbolic center of churrasco is still usually unprocessed meat. The piece must appear. The fat must be seen. The fiber must exist. The knife must cut in front of someone. Brazilian churrasco preserves a theatricality of recognizable meat.
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This does not make one tradition purer than the other. Both are crossed by industry, brands, packaging, slaughterhouses, logistics, and standardization. But the visual hierarchy is different. In Brazilian churrasco, meat presents itself as a fragment of animal transformed by fire. In the American cookout, it often presents itself as an industrial form returned to the grill. In one case, the cut still organizes the scene. In the other, the ready-made form organizes convenience.
This distinction between visible and invisible meat may say a great deal about the future. Cultivated meat, plant-based substitutes, and hybrid products are unlikely to begin by defeating picanha, ribs, ritualized brisket, or the family asado. They are more likely to enter where meat has already lost the shape of the animal: burgers, nuggets, fillings, sausages, meatballs, emulsified products, fat, broth, pet food, prepared meals, processed seafood. Invisible meat is easier to replace because it has already been translated into function. Ritual meat resists more because it offers more than protein. It offers memory, cut, smoke, name, occasion, and belonging.
But it would be insufficient to limit the question to beef. The same mechanism appears when we think of pheasant, rabbit, frog, pigeon, duck, goose, quail, kidney, liver, tongue, trotters, blood, tripe, tendons, and feet. A culture does not eat only what is edible. It eats what it has learned to recognize as food. Pigeon may be haute cuisine in a European tradition and urban pest in the Brazilian imagination. Rabbit may be ordinary meat in parts of France, Italy, or Portugal and an affective domestic animal in many Brazilian homes. Frog may be a legitimate ingredient in some cuisines and a source of estrangement in others. Kidney may appear naturally in older British meals and cause rejection in those who did not inherit that grammar.
China expands this contrast, provided it is not turned into caricature. The point is not to say that “the Chinese eat everything,” but to recognize that many Chinese cuisines incorporate a wider range of parts, textures, and uses than the average urban Brazilian cuisine. Cartilage, skin, tendons, blood, feet, organs, bones, broths, and gelatinous textures may occupy legitimate places in the repertoire. There, the question is not only which cut is tender, but what texture, what effect, what occasion, and what tradition a part carries. Value is not always located in muscular cleanliness. It may be in collagen, elasticity, resistance, and slow transformation.
This shows that the hierarchy of meat is not in the animal alone. It is in the gaze that cuts it. What one society calls a noble part, another may call a leftover. What one calls sustenance, another calls repulsion. What one turns into a chef’s dish, another associates with dirt. What one reserves for celebration, another eats every day. What one hides in the pot, another exposes on the grill. Meat is biology inside the animal’s body; it becomes culture when it passes through the knife.
That is also why fire is not merely technique. Brazilian churrasco, Argentine asado, Uruguayan parrilla, American barbecue, South African braai, Mexican carne asada, Korean gogi-gui, Japanese yakiniku, and kebabs from several parts of the world all belong to the same ancestral family of heat applied to meat, but each one organizes a different relation between cut, time, salt, smoke, fat, sauce, table, and conviviality. Fire brings them close. Culture separates them. In some places, fire celebrates the large piece. In others, the thin slice. In others, prolonged smoke. In others, the skewer. In others, the tabletop grill. In others, the bread that receives the meat. In all of them, food becomes scene.
In Brazil, churrasco tends toward circulation. Meat passes, is sliced, distributed, repeated, commented on. The piece does not belong only to an individual plate; it moves through the group. In Argentina and Uruguay, parrilla organizes another sobriety, another sequence, another respect for the time of the embers. In the United States, barbecue transforms tough cuts into smoked patience, while the suburban cookout turns the grill into a device for quick conviviality. In Korea and Japan, the table grill brings meat close to a shared gesture, but on a smaller scale, with thin cuts, sauces, side dishes, and precision. Each fire teaches a way of eating together.
Meat also carries memories of scarcity. In many families, buying good meat meant upward movement. Having a barbecue meant life had improved. Serving meat to a guest meant care. Having “something to go with the rice and beans” meant stability. In Korean dramas, expensive beef can mark reward, affection, apology, promise, recognition. In Brazil, picanha has long been an object of popular desire, a symbol of weekend, abundance, and domestic pride. Meat does not feed only the body. It confirms that something has been achieved.
That is why its persistence does not depend only on lobbying or habit. Meat persists because it operates on several layers at once. It is pleasure, protein, tradition, feast, distinction, masculinity, affection, memory, industry, environmental problem, sanitary risk, rural symbol, gourmet object, ethical target, and global commodity. Few foods concentrate so many contradictions without losing centrality. Perhaps that is why meat is so fiercely disputed. Whoever disputes meat disputes much more than food.
The future may not be disappearance, but bifurcation. In everyday life, meat may become simpler, concentrated in a few dominant forms: chicken, ground beef, burgers, sausages, packaged cuts, easy portions, ready-made products. In the premium market, the opposite movement is already visible: multiplication of names, breeds, origins, aging processes, special cuts, fire narratives, seals, techniques, restaurants, and experiences. The mass market simplifies; luxury differentiates. Meat defends itself through convenience at one end and aesthetic intensification at the other.
This bifurcation helps reread the initial report. The influence of meatpackers over science and food policy is only one of the ways meat is kept within the field of the acceptable. There are other ways, quieter, perhaps deeper: picanha as pride, rodízio as abundance, Wagyu as luxury, Hanwoo as national distinction, brisket as technical cult, parrilla as identity, the burger as convenience, the premium butcher shop as curation, cultivated meat as future promise, the family barbecue as memory. Each layer reorganizes the same question: why does this still seem necessary, desirable, or natural?
In the end, our daily bull is not only the animal that reaches the plate. It is the whole set of operations that makes that animal thinkable as food. The knife separates the piece, but it also separates the acceptable from the strange, the noble from the lesser, the everyday from the festive, the visible from the invisible, the animal from the product, the body from the name. Between pasture and plate there is an entire world of mediations. When we finally eat, we do not encounter only meat. We encounter a classification that has already been prepared for us.
We do not eat only meat. We eat permissions, cuts, names, memories, and belongings. We eat the fragment of the animal that a culture has taught us to desire.
Portuguese version available on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/nexhowledumampo/p/o-boi-nosso-de-cada-dia-our-daily?r=5tj4nj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Tags: meat culture, food systems, barbecue, beef, food identity
