Is This The Healthiest Steak In The World? The *Crazy* Story Of How One Breed Of Cattle Became A Protein Powerhouse (& How You Can Get It!) With Justin Owens.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, the whole story of this breed is absolutely wild.

Being in a unique geographic environment, certain traits stuck with the breed. They would graze at 8,000 feet in the Alps, and they still do to this day, and then they would graze down in the Mediterranean lowlands, drawing these different genetic factors from the two species. They can handle 120 ° summer humidity heat and -65°C Canadian winters. This breed produced the meat for Julius Caesar. It produced the meat for the Kingdom of Sardinia when it was ruled by the House of Savoy. You had this meat going to the kings and queens and the royalty.

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Ben Greenfield: Well, I don't think it's any secret that I'm a big fan of really, really good meat, and I'm constantly on this quest to find good beef. You've probably heard me talk about some different grass-fed, grass-finished beef manufacturers, on this podcast before, but this really weird thing happened like, I don't know, 3 or 4 weeks ago. I got an invite to visit a local farm called Owens Farms, literally maybe a 40-minute drive from my house in Spokane. And, I was introduced to this Piedmontese beef there that's some of the only true pure Piedmontese beef you can get anywhere. Like the most succulent tasty beef with like 1/16th the diameter or something like that of a normal beef cow. So, it's incredibly tender, huge amounts of muscle, amazing fatty acid profile. I spent about an hour and a half on the farm walking around seeing the 12 different types of nutrients that they feed these beautiful huge muscular cattle. And, it turns out that it's such high-quality meat. They're supplying professional athletes and celebrities, and I had no clue this all existed basically right in my own backyard. So, the guy who graciously gave me that tour was Justin Owens. He blew my mind about where these cows come from, what cows should and should not be fed, how to actually prepare this stuff and eat it, which is super important. So, I was like, "Dude, we got to do a podcast." So, Not only are we doing this podcast, but we also shot some videos out on his farm. I'll probably go out there again and we'll shoot some more at some point. I'm going to start eating a lot more of this beef myself as well. And so, if you want to check out the actual beef and the shownotes, which I promise will be nice and savory and juicy, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/BeefPodcast. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/BeefPodcast. I'm just introducing you as a farmer, Justin, but I know you've got a much bigger backstory than that. So, first, welcome to the show. And second, fill us in. How'd you get into all this?

Definitely born into it. I grew up with my grandparents on the farm. They had purchased the farm in the '60s originally.

And just to clarify, this is the farm right outside Spokane, Washington?

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, just 15 minutes south of the city limits. Originally, they were in restaurants at the time that they bought the farm. And my grandpa initially turned the farm into a thoroughbred stud farm. And they ended up turning it into one of the largest stud farms west of Kentucky, breeding 200 mares a year, and having a lot of fun.

And by the way, just, just, just for all the city slickers out there, stud farm means horses, not cows.

Horses. Yep, we're thoroughbred, so racehorses. They, they had horses that, uh, had run in the Kentucky Derby, uh, they produced horses that were running at Del Mar and Santa Anita in California, uh, big horses. And in the '80s, they kind of saw some signals in the horse industry and wanted to get back to their roots, and they started switching the whole operation over back to cattle. And so I was born in '87 and really grew up amidst that transition. I remember going to the horse track and seeing horses around, but primarily the cattle. Yeah, I never, never imagined I would go into cattle. Honestly, every day, you know, we're checking on cows, checking on calves, and I kind of enjoyed the restaurant side of it in town.

You mean because you liked horses better than cows and the whole like horse racing industry, thoroughbred thing?

No, I just, I don't know, it was a, it was a funny childhood where I grew up rurally, but then every day we're going into town to check on his restaurants all over Spokane. And, uh, at that point in my life, I really enjoyed that business side of it, being in town, being around a lot of people, because on the farm it really was just my grandpa and I, and we did everything. I think I started building fence when I was 9 and driving trucks about the same age.

Yeah. So, you grew up mostly with this being a horse farm and then what happened after it shifted to cattle?

Yeah. So, he initially went into a different breed of cattle than we have now called Simmental. And very quickly, somebody reached out to him in the horse industry to tell him about this Italian breed of cattle. And, The claims at the time seemed pretty sensational, basically a zero-fat beef, high protein, but also really good source of omega-3, 6, and 9.

So, by the way, to clarify, when you say zero fat because I'm sure people's ears perked up right away, what about all the health benefits of omega fatty acids? Are you saying low levels of saturated fats or can you clarify when you say zero fat?

In a whole carcass, we're probably looking at about 3% body fat. It's very low total fat, but it's extremely nutrient-dense.

Right, meaning like intramuscular omega fatty acids would still be high, but the actual saturated fat marbling would be lower.

Yeah, much lower. So, this breed has a lot of unique genetic traits where the functions to create fat deposits aren't occurring in their body. They have a gene that's naturally turned off.

Ben Greenfield: And, when you say the gene that's naturally turned off, I think you and I maybe been talking about this, some people have Googled mTOR knockout mouse, mTOR knockout dog, mTOR knockout cow, and you see these massive muscular beasts with ungodly amounts of muscle. Is it that same gene?

Well, what's really, really interesting is so the gene that people are usually trying to mitigate or address is myostatin function, because myostatin is a muscle inhibitor or regulator is a better way to think of it. When you take in protein, myostatin is in your bloodstream and it bonds with the other proteins that it encounters and flushes them out of your system to regulate how much muscle mass your skeletal system is building or maintaining. Uh, with Piedmontese, that gene basically makes myostatin incapable of bonding with other proteins that it encounters. It's inactive. Uh, so all the protein they eat goes towards more normal muscle production.

Right. You're disinhibiting muscle growth. For a lot of people who might not be familiar with farming genetics or cattle, you hear, for example, about longevity enthusiasts getting follistatin injections now to build muscle. I actually did that. A few people have done it, and you do see a remarkable increase in muscle. On the flip side, you also see longevity enthusiasts talking about inhibiting mTOR, basically slowing down the processes that would allow for unrestricted muscle growth because obviously being in too pro-anabolic state would result in potential lifespan shortening in humans. But, I guess what you're getting at with the cattle, these things have a specific gene that allows for massive amounts of muscle accumulation.

Yeah, well, and it, it ends up everybody calls these animals double muscled and it's such a misnomer because it really ends up being about 30 to 35% more muscle mass. And there's a lot of attributes that get attributed to or connected to this one gene. But like you were talking about, follistatin, now you have an animal where myostatin is non-functioning, the follistatin is uninhibited with its interactions with myostatin. So you end up with a higher quantity of muscle fibers. And paired with that is their muscle fibers, like you mentioned earlier, are 1/16th the diameter of conventional muscle fibers. So you end up with this 35% larger muscle mass or muscle group, but it's so much more densely packed with muscle fibers. Ironically, well, bundled in that is collagen, right? Collagen is the connective tissue that holds each muscle fiber together to each other. Typically collagen is why you want marbling in beef. That's why Wagyu breeds are highly prized, is it's a much more even marbling through the meat rather than globs of fat. With Piedmontese, you end up with a higher total collagen content in the meat, but it's so fine because the muscle fibers are so fine that you end up with the most tender muscle groups, the most tender meat.

Ben Greenfield: So, what you're saying is, and by the way, because you had sent me a few cuts to try, I essentially cooked it the same as I do normal beef. I think I pulled it maybe like— I still pull it medium rare around 140, 145. You told me I didn't even go anywhere near that because that 1/16 muscle diameter thickness allows for a melt-in-your-mouth tenderness despite it being a pretty big chunk of muscle with low levels of fat, which isn't something you'd normally find.

Yeah, yeah. You're taking away all the insulators from heat. So, the heat transfers really quickly from muscle fiber to muscle fiber without fat blocking heat transfer and collagen slowing down heat transfer.

Well, that's interesting that you say that about the heat transfer. And maybe this will bring us back to the origins of how this cattle got here in the first place, because the genetics and origin of this thing coming into America, it's, it's pretty interesting. You were explaining it to me on the farm.

No, it's a— the whole, the whole story of this breed is absolutely wild. Um, I've seen different numbers or dates, but typically the origin of this breed is traced back to about, uh, 20,000 years ago. And they've pegged it to this mass migration of Zebu cattle. We would consider them the modern version, Brahman cattle.

Zebu, is that, is that like Zebu?

Zebu. Yeah. And that's, that's like the original Bos indicus. If you're getting into the genus, you know, a lot of the continental cattle like Angus are Bos taurus. So these Bos indicus cattle migrate west and they go into Europe. And when they hit the Alps and the marshy grounds in northwestern Italy, that migration kind of comes to a halt and they start intermingling with the local animals, which would be European bison called aurochs. A-U-R-O-C-H. And neither of these animals, if you looked at them on their own, you wouldn't peg them as the ancestors of Piedmontese. They just look wildly different. But over the thousands of years of natural selection and being in a unique geographic environment, certain traits stuck with the breed. So they would graze at 8,000 feet in the Alps, and they still do to this day. Uh, so very rough, rocky, sparse terrain. Uh, and then they would graze down in the Mediterranean lowlands. So drawing these different genetic factors from the two species You have sweat glands and the highest number of sweat glands of any cattle breed. And then you also have medulated hair follicles, so they're hollow, so they can handle 120-degree summer humidity heat and -65-degree Canadian winters.

And in case people are getting bored at this point about you talking about how cows sweat, There's some definite culinary— there's definite culinary implications coming down the pipeline here.

Exactly. All of that has to do with mitigating stress. You know, we— I think a lot of people think about stressing the animal out as how people are treating the animals. The biggest factor that plays into stress for animals is climate. It's usually heat and cold stress. If they're standing in wet mud, all of these things cause a lot more stress constantly than any human interactions.

Right. And to clarify, I think folks have probably heard me say before that if I'm bow hunting, I want a good ethical clean surprise shot on an animal so that the cortisol and stress levels on that animal are limited because that can affect the toughness of the meat due to the calcium influx into the muscle when cortisol levels are high, almost like you're eating a steak of rigor mortis or accelerated rigor mortis. Kind of similar to a conversation I was having yesterday with someone at my home. We were having salmon and they asked me if it was wild-caught salmon like all the health enthusiasts love to talk about. And I said, "No, this is farm salmon." but it's from a farm where the quality of the food is tightly controlled. The fish are in a perfectly sustained environment and you get even better higher quality clean fish. This is from a company called Seetopia than you do from a farmed or from a wild-caught fish. Even as a hunter, would you rather hunt a grass-fed, grass-finished deer on a private ranch or a so-called wild deer that you shot that happened to feed 50% of its life on glyphosate-laden corn and grain near a local farm.

No, it makes a big difference. I mean, that's why it's been so great with people like Temple Grandin who have completely re-engineered the livestock harvesting systems and how cattle are handled and It keeps them safe and calm all the way through. And, it just things like that just drastically improve the meat quality in the end.

Okay. So, back to the genetics. These things are feeding at 8,000 feet up in the Alps. They need to regulate extreme exposure to heat, thrive in a variety of environments, but they're still this kind of ugly cattle breed back in the Alps.

I mean, the original breeds. The Iraq and the Zebu were not pretty breeds.

Yeah, that's, that's what I'm referring to. But like, like now what happens to get them to outside Spokane, Washington, right?

So there's a lot of things going on in Italy where the breeders start noticing these animals that have a little more muscle to them, and they kind of categorize this trait as "gropa doppia." It's like double butt. You know, there's a lot of cattle breeds, it's like their back, and then they have a flat rear end. And all of a sudden you start seeing these cows that actually have a curved, like, bull's butt almost. Like, they start one of the oldest herd books in the world for any breed in the 18— I think 1880s. And they carry that through to the 1950s. Where they start a new logbook basically saying these animals that are more muscled are the definition of the breed. Now, the, that inactive gene, and this is true for humans, dog breeds, you know, mice, those myostatin mutations are, they start off as wild genes. It's not pervasive through the whole species or the whole breed. And so, you'll have with Angus and other breeds other mutations that affect myostatin, but they're occurring in different locations in their genome. And so, it has different effects.

Okay, got it. By the way, in the shownotes, if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/BeefPodcast, I'll put a photo of some of these cattle or a few videos that I shot when I was out there at the farm. But, imagine your super buff CrossFitter friend who's 6'8" with cannonball shoulders or the average NFL athlete. Imagine if every human being looked like that, and that's the human equivalent of walking onto a Pete Montiz beef lot.

Ben Greenfield: And, the wild thing is while the muscle is so big, their bones are actually more fine. So when we take an animal all the way through to harvest, there's less waste in the end than, let's say, an Angus animal. If you— okay, best, best example is you have an Angus that weighs, oh, let's say 1,500 pounds, 1,600 pounds, and a Piedmontese that comes in at harvest at 1,400 pounds. The Piedmontese will produce more meat and there's probably 20 or 30 pounds less bone.

Yeah. So, so the lean mass volume is, is technically lower, but more of that— or the fat-free volume is lower, but more of that fat-free volume is muscle than bone.

They're amazing animals. They're hyper-efficient with their resources, eating less, drinking less, but It all ultimately contributes to how they are able to produce that really, really high-quality beef.

Yeah. So, so how'd they wind up in Spokane?

So Canadian ranchers learned about the breed in the '70s, early '70s. They spent almost a decade trying to get animals out of Italy. Italy had a complete embargo on the breed. They would not sell them beyond their borders. They really knew what they had and they protected it. I mean, this breed produced the meat for, I mean, Julius Caesar. It produced the meat for the Kingdom of Sardinia when it was ruled by the House of Savoy. You had this meat going to the kings and queens and the royalty. So even into the 1900s, it was still this really revered breed, and the slow food movement had kind of formed with this breed attached to it. But those Canadians, and if anybody knows a rancher, they'll know that they're the most stubborn people on the planet. They were just so determined and resolute that they wanted to get these animals to Canada. And they, they went to Italy finally and they got permission from the Canadian government to bring them in. So it was just convincing the Italians. And once they got over there, they were able to basically call a congress of the Italian Piedmontese breeders, and the Italian breeders voted to sell beyond their borders. So for the first time in history, full-blood Piedmontese, or as the Italians will call this breed, Fassona, full-blood animals left Italy. And it was one bull and four cows made it to Canada. And that kind of started the worldwide herd because they started flushing embryos, collecting semen, and they were shipping it to Oh my gosh. Australia, Mongolia, Brazil. I mean, all over the world because some countries couldn't import directly from Europe. And that's kind of where my grandpa learns about the breed in the '80s. He goes up to Canada, kind of investigates it, calls the USDA, asks them, talks to their Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska, And he says, I hear about this Piedmontese breed and all these traits that we've been talking about. Is it real? And they said, yeah, it is, but we don't know why, because that inactive gene hadn't been identified until the late '90s. So at that point, they just kind of had this amazing animal and they were trying to figure it out. And it piqued my grandpa's interest enough. He went up to Canada started buying them, bringing them into the US, and eventually he started bringing truckloads in, selling them at cost just to get people started. And he ultimately founded the North American Piedmontese Association for all the breeders in the US and Canada to have a complete registry.

Now, I think that you were, you were telling me at one point that Despite Piedmontese beef, I think getting a little more popular. I have one friend, a podcaster, Mark Bell. Shout out to Mark. He talks about Piedmontese beef. I think I'd had it before. I had some shipped to my house once, but you said there's kind of a difference in the Piedmontese, the percentage or something like that?

Yeah. So, what people have done since the '80s is The full-blood animals are so rare and so valuable, they were best utilized as breeding animals. The cows used to produce more calves and more full-bloods and grow the population. Because in the US, you know, it's decreased drastically the last 5 years, but we have around 30 million beef cattle. Most of those are Angus. There are maybe 5,000 or 6,000 full-blood Piedmontese in North America total. So very, very small population. Uh, the Piedmontese beef that's been on the market for the last 30+ years is typically half Piedmontese genetics or less.

Kind of reminds me of like, like extra virgin olive oil. You know, a large percentage of it now is diluted with canola oil.

Exactly. So it's diluting it. But on the one hand, you could look at it like when you breed a Piedmontese bull to an Angus herd, you're improving the beef that is coming out of those Angus cows. You're increasing the muscle production. You're increasing the nutrient density and the leanness and the tenderness. So it was kind of a stair-step way to introduce Piedmontese and get some production going quicker because it'll take a long time to get a commercial-level production of Piedmontese going in this country. Right.

So if I have an existing farm and I'm raising Angus and I want to switch to Piedmontese, there's going to be a large financial cost for me to do a straight-up switch versus just subtly shifting some of the genetics of my Angus cattle to have some Piedmontese qualities.

Yeah. I think the tricky part has been that that beef where it's not really tracked by percentage but it's just tracked by the presence of that inactive gene. You can have crossbred animals produced for beef that are 99% Angus, but it's been bred to have that gene from Piedmontese. And you lose, you lose track of a lot of qualities when you do that. And it doesn't have the same— I don't want to say purity, but it doesn't have the same nutrient density. And it doesn't have the same tenderness. It's not the same experience as full-blood meat that they would have in Italy.

Ben Greenfield: You briefly alluded to fatty acid content and fat content, but when you say a different nutrient profile, are there other important things that make a Piedmontese cut stand out?

TJ McClellan: I mean, it's also looking at the calories, the total fat, saturated fat. We've just started looking into or doing nutritional analysis on choline, vitamin B3, B6, B12, iron, but getting deeper. As we've started working with NFL teams, I've started talking to more performance nutritionists and dietitians, and they're giving me kind of the things they're looking at now and looking ahead to what they want to know. And we're starting to run samples through the lab.

And you had mentioned fatty acid content. Is that something you know about, like the omega-3, omega-6 ratios, or omega-7 content, or anything like that?

Yeah, I think the— wasn't the O3 to 6 is like a 4 to 1 ratio. And the hard thing is so many people will look at beef and they'll say, all right, beef has this ratio and it has this protein content, But it can vary so widely across the whole carcass, you know, from the chuck to the rump to hanging tenders or tenderloins. You can have cuts that supply that ratio the way you want it. And then you can have cuts that literally— we've had samples that have zero detectable fat at all. So, when I look at a complete diet, I look at moderation being the key overall.

Ben Greenfield: Have you had anyone in the heart health or cardiovascular community reach out or show interest due to the different fatty acid profile? Because it's commonly a held belief that high amounts of saturated fats or a lower protein-to-calorie ratio, et cetera, might be something to avoid if you have some type of a cardiovascular disease potential or risk. Have you thought about that at all? Has anyone reached out?

It's interesting. Pete Montiz has had different eras of connection with the American Heart Association and different heart-healthy checkmarks and stuff. The claim to fame with Piedmontese has always been the heart health factor. Typically, in an interesting way, the breeders that get into Piedmontese learn about it because they have heart health issues and their doctors are telling them, you should really— you need to limit your red meat intake. You should stop eating red meat entirely, which That's another conversation. But these guys are really determined, really stubborn. They want to keep eating red beef and they always find Piedmontese because it hits those nutritional, I guess, hallmarks of what's going to be healthy. So we've, we've had people that have specifically bought the beef because of the heart health. Aspect for them.

Yeah, and I'm sure many high-fat diet enthusiasts are like trying to jump through the podcast microphones to shout that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. Uh, in cases of pre-existing cardiovascular disease or high genetic risk of cardiovascular disease, you can make a strong case for mitigating overall intake of saturated fats to perhaps be 8 to 10% of your total dietary fat intake. And furthermore, a great deal of attention should be paid to the omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio. Those, right? So, yes, saturated fat is not going to cause heart disease, but in a case of high genetic risk or pre-existing heart disease, especially in the presence of things like inflammation, high blood glucose, et cetera, it is a good idea to limit the amount of marbled hard fats that you consume.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. And I mean, it's such an interesting time because when Pete Montiz first came over, it was the beginning of a lot of heart health knowledge, but it was also the beginning of Wagyu breeds coming into the United States and this push to produce fattier beef. And now we're in this stage where there's a lot of interest in high, you know, fattier beef is healthier and, you know, all cholesterol is good and all fat is good and I think it kind of gets lost because we talk about how much beef we used to eat before, you know, the food pyramid and stuff. In the 1970s, I think we were eating in the US per person annualized about 90 pounds of beef per person. But a lot of people forget that that was lean, lean beef. We didn't have really fatty beef back then and we've not had fatty beef historically out on the plains or out in the wild. These are typically pretty lean animals.

And not only increased consumption of fatty beef, but based on subsidization and other factors, markedly increased consumption of grain, corn, sugar, and seed oils along with those fats, all of which can cause them to become more athrosclerotic. And, I'm glad you brought up the Wagyu because we were talking about the fact that Wagyu cattle are often given beer as a way to regulate their biome. I'd like this to potentially lead into a greater discussion what you feed the Piedmontese in general. But, the first interesting thing that you told me, just fascinating, was the attention given to the biome and how you take that into consideration, the feeding of the cattle. Especially compared and contrasted to a typical Wagyu practice. So, can you get into that?

Yeah. No, I love this. So, jumping on what we were talking about with feeding Wagyu beer, there's that whole mythology around they're massaged, they're fed beer, and that's why the beef is so great. The practical reason that they're feeding these animals beer is because the animals, whether it's Kuroge, Akaushi, those Japanese breeds are terrible at growing body mass. They grow really, really slow. And so that's why they have to feed them tons and tons of grains. When they're ramping up the grain percentage of their diet, it's absolutely annihilating the rumen biome in their first stomach. So to regrow the rumen biome, which is— it's so highly attuned to what they're eating at any given point. You can have rumen die-off or acidosis, even if an animal goes from eating grass pasture to grass and alfalfa pasture. You know, there's just— it's so attuned to be highly efficient. But when there's die-off, it takes 30 days to repopulate the biome to then be digesting at the optimal level. Well, the Japanese figured out if they feed them beer, and I mean, it really is force-feeding and chugging pints of beer. If you get the yeast into that rumen, it'll accelerate the repopulation of their rumen. So they're not losing as much efficiency, but you have to keep it up because they keep increasing the grain. What I wanted to look at was, you know, I know that Piedmontese grow quicker. In Italy, they can finish an animal in 16 months, which is 2 months on average faster than commercial feedlots in the US.

That's kind of like a birth to birth to steak on the table type of thing.

Exactly. Birth, birth to being at the harvest. Yeah, being at the butcher. Right. So I really knew a lot about raising Piedmontese for seed stock longevity. That's like the breeding animals, the stud bulls, the herd cows. I knew how to dial in their nutrition to have a 15, 20-year-long life. Feeding them for beef in a year and a half after birth, totally different scenario. My goal was to keep them healthy. I wanted to keep the rumen healthy, because then they're, you know, that's where you get into the animal gets sick and then you know, people have to give them antibiotics or, you know, the animal suffers or something. So I worked with an animal nutritionist to look at what do Piedmontese really need? And we ended up finding out that they need about 25% more protein in their daily diet. Um, so then we started looking at ingredients that are backed by research. Whether it was in the beef industry or the dairy industry. And that led us to peas, pressed wine grapes, garbanzo beans, lentils, uh, and then to a lesser extent, barley and oats. But we also are looking at carrots, apples, hazelnuts, walnuts, where there's a precedent for a positive impact on the flavor of the meat, and it's nutritionally supportive for the animal.

Ben Greenfield: I'm sure some people might be wondering because I was— I think people get this idea when they hear whatever grass-fed, grass-finished that that's going to result in the healthiest cow and the one that's least rife with contaminants or omega-6s from grain or or something like that and maybe even have this idyllic image in their head of cows out in a pasture eating really bright green grass. When I was at your place, there's giant pallets with pressed wine grapes and all these other different vegetables that you talk about. And so, it was very interesting, the fact that these cows don't necessarily need to be out on a field eating 100% grass for their entire lives and to really optimize the nutrient content, you'd go beyond that, kind of like having a salad with just lettuce or having a salad with radishes and cucumbers and sliced carrots and kale and whatever. So, the other thing though that's important is, of course, if you're feeding them such a wide variety of vegetable matter, where's it coming from? For example, a lot of people think grapes are— they think rightly enough grapes are sprayed, right? They're a sprayed crop, herbicides, pesticides, et cetera. Do you take that into consideration when you're talking about something like pressed wine grapes?

Most of our grapes come from the Red Mountain AVA in Oregon. All the grapes, all the ingredients that we feed come from farms that are within, within 30 miles of our farm. So hyperlocal. We've known all the ranchers for decades. I mean, this is going back to when my grandpa was in high school. Knowing these farmers. Um, the goal— we do have goals on what we would love to partner with some of them on in changing over their fields, how they're harvesting and how they're planting. Uh, but yeah, the grapes, all the grapes come from local, uh, wineries that are pressing in Spokane and Liberty Lake. They provide us with as much information as we can get. We go out and visit the farms that we get our grass, our alfalfa, the peas, the lentils, and we have it all ground and mixed fresh every 2 weeks.

Ben Greenfield: I'm sure people's mouths are kind of watering a little bit. So, let's talk about the part that might lose us several vegan listeners. We're going to delve in anyways. You talked about the butchering of the cow. Is there a specific method that's used for something like that that would influence the quality of the cut? I've heard a few times that there's different butchering methods, but do you guys take that into consideration at all?

Oh, yeah. We're really fortunate. We got lucky in our area where a processing facility that had been shut down was purchased during COVID when so many facilities were shutting down because of illness. This little facility in Odessa, Washington got purchased by a local family, started back up, and they're doing— I think at the time they started doing 5 head a day, 5 animals. Now I think they're doing 10 animals a day, which is really, really small, uh, but it allows them to do almost everything hand-carved. Uh, they'll do some, uh, bow saw cutting with— for canoe-cut marrow bones where you have like the femur that's cut in half. But I had heard for a long time that Italy had food dishes that we didn't have in the States. And it came down to having cuts of meat that we didn't have here in the States. And a little bit of that was— or a lot, a lot of that really was the tenderness of the whole carcass. So on a typical animal, you know, the tenderloin, the ribeye, the New York, those are the most sought-after cuts because they're the most tender. You get back to the rump and, you know, it's typically just roasts. It's a lot tougher. That muscle works a lot more. With Piedmontese, the whole carcass is brought up to the tenderness of that midsection. So when we had Warner-Bratzler shear force tests, we had scores for the top round that were the same as the New York's, which is just wild.

I'm assuming the Werner Bratz or shear force test is a test of the actual toughness or tenderness of the meat.

Yeah, they take like a cut of meat, a cube of meat, they'll cook it up and then they have this blade hooked up to a machine that records the PSI that's required to make a initial cut and then a continuing cut, and it records it in kilograms. So tender beef, I think defined by the USDA, is 3.99 kilograms and below. Very tender is 2.99 and below. And our top round registered a score of 1.89. 1.8. And then our New York's, I think the best score was a 1.1. And to put it into perspective, below 2 kilogram PSI, the human palate can't even discern a difference in tenderness. So, this is tenderness beyond comprehension basically.

Ben Greenfield: So, I could have, let's say, a chuck roast that would normally be a Crock-Pot or a roast style. Cut and that would have the tenderness similar to say a filet mignon.

Yeah. Wow.

It's wild. That's amazing. Wow. And, this is all due to both the genetics of the beef itself and the butchery techniques used?

I would say all of it combined. It's the genetics, it's how we raise the animals, the process of feeding them. We feed a lot slower and a lot lower. Even though we harvest at 18 months, we're not waiting a long time to ramp up the feed of the peas and everything else at the very end of their life. We'll start that when they're 6 months old and give them half a percentage of their body weight in this feed for 12 months. And that just makes it easier to take it on as an ingredient in their diet. And it gives a longer period of time for the flavor and all of those nutrients to infuse with the muscle. Yeah, the butchery techniques. I mean, we, we sent a meat scientist from the University of Idaho to Italy for 2 weeks to train with Italian master butchers in this old world style. You know, we— I had heard from different people that Europe was starting to mechanize a lot of their harvesting. So a lot more machine cutting. And we looked at this as an opportunity to preserve that knowledge while it was still being used. And they were, they were so excited to have Dr. Bass, Dr. Phil Bass, come and train with them. It was supposed to be, I think, 2 days with 1 butcher, and it ended up being 3 different butchers, multiple days with each. And at the end, they all said, "You now know what we know." So Dr. Bass brought that knowledge back to our processing, the facility we work with, and taught all the butchers there how to seam the meat. So seam the cuts the way that they do in Italy, where to make the breaks on the carcass. And some of it can just come down to the direction that you're cutting the meat. So going with the grain versus against the grain, uh, you can end up with cuts that give you a different utility. You know, in Italy they have a lot more tartars and carpaccios. And, right now, for instance, we have the Four Seasons Hawalalai on the Big Island in Hawaii using our Eye of Round for carpaccio. And, that's because we have it in a shape that makes it really conducive to producing that dish.

So cool. Man, if you ever need somebody besides Phil to go to Italy and eat steak, just give me a call and I'm your man. But let's say I'm a super OCD anal retentive chef who's very picky about the taste of my meat or wants extremely specified qualities of the beef. Could you actually feed your cow what I wanted it to be fed or what I specified it to be fed for the cow that I'm purchasing for, say, a restaurant or, I don't know, a home or one of these professional athletes that you work with?

Yes. So that's, that was a tenet of founding our beef label, Monzo. I really wanted full and complete customization where you come in, you get to choose if you want a bull, a heifer, oxen, and then you get to influence the flavor and the nutrition of the meat with what you're feeding. And, you know, you can go heavier with the peas and get more into the omegas. You can go— I mean, you could go purely grass finish.

Ben Greenfield: That is crazy. Now, I'm assuming you must because not a lot of people have a working knowledge of that. Most people probably say, "Well, feed my cow dark chocolate and red wine." Do you have a table or a list that you supply to people that say, "Hey, if we—" Feed it this, this, and this in these ratios, this is kind of sort of what you could expect as far as the quality, the flavor, et cetera. Yeah.

And we have, we kind of have the estimates. It's so difficult because we're taking research from like the dairy industry, for instance, where they're feeding a very different breed of animal. We're looking at their numbers and Monzo is still very young. It's under 2 years old that we've been doing this for beef. And yet we've done probably 20, 20 different nutritional analysis samples where we're looking at what is the feed on kind of a conventional diet of grass, alfalfa, and then a little bit of corn and other grains. What's that profile look like compared to an animal being fed grass and peas, peas and wine grapes, So, we continue to stair-step our knowledge with it. But yeah, there is a little bit that we can say with these augmentations, you can achieve these nutritional profiles and flavors.

Yeah, you'll be able to generate your own internal dataset soon. That's pretty cool. So, just 2 years. Have you ever done a podcast before, Justin?

I have a couple times, mainly before we got into the beef and it was mainly talking about the cattle.

Okay. Alright. Well, I asked because you're probably going to get inundated with people who want meat. So, now comes this part. You mentioned that you do cuts, I think you said quarters, wholes, halves, cows, bulls. How does it work? What's the process? And, tell me about the box too. You showed me a picture of this sick, sexy custom box that comes with your meat. That alone looked incredible. And, I don't know if you can even say the athletes or the corporations or the celebrities who you work with. If you can, feel free to drop a few names, but walk us through what people are actually able to order at this point. Yeah.

Right now, people can place— we have a very limited supply now. We're kind of at the end of our— well, we're about to start harvesting again. So our supply from last year is dwindling. It's kind of picked over and we're out of most cuts. People can place reservations for future animals that are being harvested. That way they get to choose how the animal is, how the carcass is cut up. You know, do you want rib roasts or do you want tomahawks, ribeye filets? The whole carcass can be customized and if you buy a whole animal, you can customize each half of the carcass independently.

And, by the way, real quick as you're going through this not to throw you off, can you also do because you mentioned the marrow bones, can you do those too? Oh, yeah.

You can do marrow bones, dino bones, soup bones, Thor's hammer. Wait, what's that? Oh, Thor's hammer. It is gorgeous. It's a shank, so it's the leg, but it's trimmed up to basically look like this big hunk of meat with a bone sticking out of it. It's a very, very fun dish. You can braise it.

You can smoke it. Wow. Hopefully, my Traeger is big enough. I'm going to try that someday. I got a Traeger Ironwood back there. It's a pretty Pretty long grill. Oh, yeah.

Oh, no, we had one that we sent to Warren Sapp and he loved, loved the Thor's Hammer. That was a fun experience. Alright.

So, you've got these different bone cuts, you're running through the different meat cuts, and then, yeah, what else? So, after they essentially—

we will work with them, we'll work with private chefs, for families to really dial in how they want the meat packaged. We'll store the beef after it's finished at the butcher. It's all vacuum sealed. We take it to a cold storage facility, organize it. Then they can pretty much— if they want to take delivery, they can take as much as they want or as little but we ship it anywhere they want.

Are you saying if I get a half cow and my freezer isn't big enough, I could have you ship me a quarter of it and leave a quarter at your facilities until I'm ready for more? Oh, yeah.

You could have me send 5 steaks if you want. If you're traveling and you really want to have beef there, we'll ship it to wherever you're going to be.

Right. If I'm staying at the Hilton Inn Suite that has one of those little kitchens and a microwave, you can just send me a ribeye.

Oh, I've worked with, uh, hotel chefs where we ship it to the hotel that people are staying at and the hotel chef prepares it. It— I will say it does get tricky with this beef because kind of like you were alluding to before, it cooks so differently. And the blanket statement is it cooks 50% faster.

Yeah, I totally overcooked my first cut and then I texted you. The next one was incredible.

The first one, it was definitely over. Yeah. And it's, it's a delicate meat. You know, I've had other chefs joke and refer to it as veal salmon because it's, it's delicate and you've got to be finely tuned with using it. So there's a learning curve. And, when you tried it and overcooked it, I would say 99% of the people that cook with full-blood fassona beef, they'll overcook it the first time.

Do you have recipes on your website?

We are working with chefs right now. We have a few.

Yeah, I was going to say it'd be a good idea. Yeah.

We need to get our cookbook going.

Yeah, that company I was telling you about, Seatopia, that ships the salmon, they have a QR code. On the label. So, they flash freeze it and then they've got this compostable packaging which you can literally throw in your yard if you needed to. But, you scan the QR code and it brings you to a website for that fish and then they've typically got 5 to 10 recipes for that particular fish. There's little videos and articles on the website, which is a great idea. Yeah.

No, that's a huge asset. We've kind of been doing these test kitchens with various chefs like Chef Chad White, in Spokane.

What's his restaurant?

He's had a number of restaurants. He, he has them all closed right now. He's launching a new venture called Trail Feast.

I heard about that. Yeah, I read about it in the Inlander, Inside Baseball for Real and Live in Spokane. But isn't that the one where you like go eat in the forest or something like that?

Oh yeah. You go out to the middle of nowhere. His first one was amazing. He did it the night that the Spokane area had the Aurora Borealis. And yeah, you got to the middle of nowhere. He sets up this whole campsite, mobile kitchen, cooks dinner. You camp out, wake up, he cooks breakfast. And he's used our beef at those events a bunch.

Wow. Amazing. Wow. Okay. So then, the box. Tell me about the box.

Box. You know, I really wanted something that people could keep after they get the beef and they eat the beef because everything with meat, you typically, it's disposable, you know, but you look at other packaging like wine bottles and it's iconic. There's paintings of wine bottles. I really wanted something fun that took the experience up a level gave it this little bit more old-world feel that you, when you received this, you understood that this was not just regular beef. Uh, so the, these boxes we designed have these wooden skeleton keys, and we continue to iterate, uh, and include new, new designs. But essentially people that order a half animal and a whole animal can receive one of these boxes complimentary with their order. And we'll ship the beef in it because it's completely insulated. But you get to choose the type of wood, the type of fabric inside, and we'll monogram it. We will do custom etched designs. You can choose the finish of the hardware if it's brass, you know, matte black, chrome. We had a former NBA player order one for this show that he was doing. It was like a dating show. And we did this custom box for, you know, one of the dates that he did.

That's amazing. Yeah, I can tell you what, if I do it, I just finished building this house. It's all black charred wood on the outside, steel on the inside. Is it going to Black Charred Wooden Steel. By the way, you guys do get a complimentary box if you do do a reservation order. The code is BENBOX at their website and also 35% off individual cuts. That code is BEN if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/MANZO. That's M-A-N-Z-O. But, I'll put all that along with those sexy Piedmontese beef photos at BenGreenfieldLife.com/MANZO. Beef Podcast. Also, like I mentioned at the introduction, I shot some videos and photos out of Justin's farm. I'll probably be out there again, maybe even do some recipe videos for you guys. Justin, anything else you want to share with folks before we let people hang up and go order their meat?

Not really. This has been a really fun conversation. I love your knowledge base too. This is an area that I don't get to dive into very much with kind of the nitty-gritty of the genetics and the meat and the performance of it. You know, that's been a lot of fun to see how it can come out, uh, with like the NFL teams that we supply, the Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs, and, uh, the feedback from them being, you know, we see the value in it, we love it, we— and they can see where it would be great where people are buying it in the half and whole animal where they're eating it consistently as a large part of their diet where it'll have that effect on performance.

Yeah, like supports like. Feed muscular fit resilient people, muscular fit resilient cattle and see what happens. Yeah. And especially if you have teenage boys like me, prepare for the muscle to pack on. Well, Justin, this is just fascinating. I'm so glad I found you. I was pinching myself when I realized you were right in my backyard. But again, Folks, BenGreenfieldLife.com/BeefPodcast. I'll put your discount codes there, 35% on beef, a complimentary customized wooden box if you do a reservation order for a larger half or whole cow or bull or whatever you choose. And Justin, thank you so much, man. No, thank you, Ben.

This has been wonderful. Alright, folks.

I'm Ben Greenfield along with Justin Owens from Monzo Piedmontese Beef. Signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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