Breed contra beef: The making of Piedmontese cattle

In the spring of 2014, one of the authors (Paolo) was visiting the Green Market on Union Square, NYC, one of the most renowned farmers’ markets in the United States, performing a direct connection between producers and consumers of food, allegedly alternative to the mass retail channel (Tiemann, 2008), but also promoting what Sharon Zukin terms, from a critical standpoint, ‘the consumption of authenticity’ (2008). Exactly in the middle of the square, a farmer from Pennsylvania displayed a sign to attract customers claiming ‘Piedmontese Only’. Less than half a mile away, on Madison Square, at Eataly – the sumptuous sanctuary of ‘high-quality’ Italian food – the sophisticated New York consumer could already purchase a taste of Piedmontese beef at the butcher’s counter and at the Manzo restaurant (literally ‘beef’ in Italian) since the opening of the food mall, on 30 August 2010. The Piedmontese was officially recognized as a cattle breed in the 1850s. In 1996 it became the first presidium established by Slow Food in Bra, Piedmont.1 Its beef is now well renowned among gastronomists and listed in Michelin-starred restaurants (NAPA, 2010, p.6) and it is Eataly’s official beef in Italy and the US. But, what is, exactly, the link connecting these moments and places and which establishes a relationship between an apparently endangered cattle breed in the motherland of Slow Food and the sophisticated consumption practices of the world elites in New York City? La Granda, in its twofold role as a sociocultural and economic actor, provides the most obvious nexus, which articulates the connection between the past and present of the Piedmontese breed and the refined New York City cosmopolitan consumer. La Granda is the name of the Slow Food presidium of the Piedmontese breed founded by veterinarian Sergio Capaldo in 1996 to summon a small number of breeders and preserve the rearing of this apparently endangered cattle breed. La Granda Trasformazione is the meat-processing company, owned by Capaldo and Eataly’s founder Oscar Farinetti, established in 2004 to supply the Italian branches of the food mall with premium Piedmontese beef directly from the Slow Food presidium (Colombino and Giaccaria, 2013a).2 La Granda, rather obviously, does not directly supply the beef for Eataly New York. The beef sold at the butcher counter and used to cook at Manzo’s is more simply called ‘Piedmontese’ and is supplied by North American companies. The breed has in fact been reared in the US since 1979.3 However, La Granda and its founder play a key role in maintaining the consortium’s original quality conventions (Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006) – fixed and codified by the disciplinare di produzione (specifications of production), the document that establishes how exactly the cattle must be farmed, including strict rules on fodder and hygiene – by organizing workshops and training for Eataly’s butchers. Importantly, as we claim in this chapter, La Granda is only the final outcome of a contested process, originated in the second half of the nineteenthcentury, which has radically modified the political ecology of the Piedmontese breed. In this chapter, we ‘follow’ (Cook et al., 2006) the Piedmontese starting with a peculiar event that took place in 1886 in Guarene d’Alba, a small locality in the province of Cuneo (in Piedmont, Northern Italy) and ending on the butcher’s counter at Eataly, in contemporary New York City. In discussing some of the spatio-temporal trajectories of the Piedmontese, we bring to light the process that undergirds the transformation of a specific morphological feature – known today as the ‘double muscle factor’, and appearing randomly in some animals of this bovine population in the second half of the nineteenth century – from a (monstrous) anomaly to be eliminated into a key trait to be preserved. Consistently with a political ecology/actor-network theory approach (Bennett, 2010; Latour, 1999), we show how the current status of the Piedmontese, as a cattle breed that produces what is marketed as premium beef, is not a reflection of the animal’s genetic characteristics (see Holloway et al., 2011; Morris and Holloway, 2013). Rather, it is a matter of ‘natureculture’ (Haraway 2008; see also Latimer and Miele, 2013), that is the result of the complicated negotiations among veterinarians, livestock technicians, farmers and butchers, which have taken place from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. This chapter is structured into three parts. First, we follow the development of the making of the Piedmontese breed from 1886 until the late 1950s. We bring into light how an intense and heated debate between experts and breeders focused on the ‘nature’ of the breed. Second, we move on to discuss how this contested negotiation between academics and practitioners eventually ‘fixed’ the purpose and ‘nature’ of the Piedmontese as a breed for meat, through the inclusion in this bovine population of animals previously constructed as ‘anomalies’, and the exclusion of other animals beforehand considered as ‘normal’. The last part of this chapter deals with the shifting status of the Piedmontese breed from an apparently endangered local animal species in the mid-1990s into a food specialty for the cosmopolitan consumer in contemporary New York.