Beef

Beef is meat that comes from a cow.

Cows live on farms, in big grassy fields called paddocks. A cow spends nearly all day doing one thing: eating grass. Grass is hard to turn into a body, so a cow has a special stomach with four rooms in it. The grass visits all four rooms, one after another. That’s why cows chew so slowly, and so long. They are not being lazy. They are doing something amazing that you can’t do.

Beef is the cow’s muscles — the same parts that you use to run and climb. That’s why beef makes muscles strong: it’s made of the very same stuff.

Different parts of the cow have different names when they become food. There’s one called porterhouse. There’s one called chuck. People who cut meat learned all these names from each other, going back hundreds of years, like a very old song.

Growing a cow takes a lot from the world — lots of grass, lots of water, lots of land. People who measure these things say beef takes more than almost any other food. That’s not naughty and it’s not fine. It’s just true, and it’s worth knowing.