The argument for eating bison (buffalo) meat

this video is sponsored by crowd cow somewhere on the internet recently i was talking about how various species of meat animal were introduced to the americas by european colonists cattle chickens pigs sheep none of them are native to here they were all introduced from europe and this prompted some reply guy to be like wait a minute did native americans have any animals to eat at all until europeans so generously brought them over and the answer is yeah bro they did until people killed them all unimaginably vast herds of bison once grazed across the north american interior scholars put the population at about 30 million around the time that lewis and clark showed up and reported heard so huge that they quote darkened the whole planes lewis and clark of course called them buffalo which scientists now regard as a misnomer for no particularly good reason the terms were used interchangeably for centuries but over the years science has settled on using buffalo to describe this one genus and bison to describe another genus within the same sub-family at the species level you've got the european bison and the american bison two subspecies of the american bison are the wood bison in northwestern canada and this guy a plane's bison actually i think this is a lady bison small horns narrow head whoa whoa she's laid here in the u.s plains bison are living symbols of the great american west bison were the source of subsistence for people of the great plains for millennia like other ruminants bison take a virtually inexhaustible energy source that humans cannot digest grass and they convert that into proteins and fats that we can live on in the eastern u.s like here in georgia the bison decline happened relatively gradually over the course of a couple centuries human european population was virtually all concentrated in the east and europeans and native people alike hunted bison for meat it's easy to see why each of these animals will yield around a quarter ton of meat what's it like well bison or bovines just like domestic cattle so the meat basically tastes like beef though we should keep in mind that today's bison gene pool has some domestic cattle swimming around in it american bison and cattle interbreed very easily and the resulting hybrids are known amusingly as beefalo surely this happened incidentally from animals just getting freaky in the fields but bison ranchers have also done some deliberate cross breeding to get more beef-like characteristics from the meat all of this is to say i'm not sure what bison meat used to taste like but this is still different from beef in some noticeable ways most obviously it is very lean hardly any intramuscular fat even in this strip steak almost looks like tuna right as with any super lean red meat you probably want to cook it on the rare side or you want to push past the very tough well done phase and braise it until it is soft this right here is bison stew meat a real vidalia onion straight from the field brown my bison bits a bit squeeze a tomato paste you know there's gonna be some white wine any meat juice left in the package season let it simmer for a couple hours you put in some carrots potatoes cook until just tender and baby you got a stew going totally delicious but not my favorite way to have bison i'll show you my favorite before we're done here for now let me show you where i got this beautiful sustainably farmed meat crowd cow the sponsor of this video crowd cow is a marketplace for high quality meats that helps you connect with farmers raising gorgeous stuff the right way that foam dissolves in water everything else is recyclable and even though this shipment was delayed a day the dry ice has kept these rock solid that's a bison flank stick thaw in the fridge overnight or in trickling cool water these steaks were ready in 20 minutes don't be scared of frozen meat you want to get stuff from boutique producers it's gonna be frozen and that's just fine whether it's bison grass-fed beef pastured chicken sustainable seafood anything special you could want is here and you can read all about the farms you're buying from go to crowdcow.com regucia and you will get 15 off your first order that link is in the description and if you use it you can become a crowd cow member for free which means five percent off everything check it out thank you crowd cow and here's a bison strip steak cooked medium rare delicious though still not my favorite way to have bison lauren's never had bison let's see what she thinks no it really tastes like steak and pork had a baby and we ate the baby yeah i think the leanness of this is reminiscent of loin cuts from modern domestic pigs also like good pork there is a sweetness to this a freshness that is different from beef but lovely you taste that and you can see why people would hunt these animals to the brink though alas this sad story is about a lot more than just food native american hunters started hunting a lot more when they found they could harvest heavy winter furs these are known as buffalo robes and they could exchange those robes with european traders for various european goods native people were also able to hunt bison far more efficiently as they acquired european firearms and the colonists themselves regarded bison as an agricultural pest they trampled and ate crops and they competed for water and pasture with introduced livestock few euro americans wept when hunting and habitat destruction either killed or drove away every known wild bison east of the mississippi by the 1830s but again that was a relatively gradual process the bison that lived west of the mississippi were annihilated in the space of just about a decade starting in the early 1870s the reasons for this are multiple but a big theme is railroads post-u.s civil war it was time for westward expansion via railroad and bison herds literally got in the way as did native peoples fighting for the very existence of their nations the solution to both problems according to famous civil war general william tecumseh sherman was to kill every bison in the west i think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of england and america there this fall for a grand buffalo hunt and make one grand sweep of them all until the buffalo and consequently indians are out from between the roads we will have collisions and trouble it was explicit u.s military strategy to wipe out the ancestral food supply of tribes on the great plains that is the assertion made by historian david smith's in the 1990s and his theory had its detractors more recently the canadian economist m scott taylor argued that military policy was indeed part of what happened but the railroads also furthered the slaughter in other ways the workers laying all those endless tracks needed food so rail tycoons hired hunters like the famous buffalo bill cody to ride out and procure bison meat for the men and once they were built the railroads brought in sport hunters in their droves enchanted by the wild west mythology that bison represented some of these sport hunters shot out of their train car windows and waved goodbye to the carcasses as they just went past it is said and here's what taylor thinks was the biggest factor railroads also enabled bison products to be shipped back east a business that exploded in the 1870s when tanners invented a new chemical process for making bison leather native people of course had figured this out long ago by using their brains well actually the bisons brains they would use the lecithin emulsifier naturally found in brain to oil and dry the hides into soft pliable leather the traditional process was too laborious for industrial production but once european and american tanners figured out their own process global demand for bison leather skyrocketed it was tougher than cow leather so the brits wanted it for the souls of shoes for their soldiers expanding their empire and with the industrial revolution whirring along bison leather was the perfect belting material for the wheels in the mills hunters harvested the hides and left the meat to fester by the 1880s the american bison was virtually gone a few ranchers held on to some very tiny herds almost as novelty items conservationists like teddy roosevelt wanted to preserve the bison for all of that wild west mythology that it signified the u.s and canadian national park systems were created in large measure as bison preserves from that low point of just a few hundred animals in the 1880s we are now back up to maybe 30 000 wild american bison that's the biggest estimate that i've seen far more american bison maybe half a million are alive and kicking today on ranches where they are raised as livestock for meat delicious relatively low cal low cholesterol red meat there's a compelling argument that the resurgence of bison meat is good for conservation think about it what is the most numerous large land animal on the planet it's us humans are we so numerous because we are just such ferocious apex predators no it's because we're really really smart now think about what the second most numerous large animal may be land animal it's domestic cattle are they so numerous because they're evil geniuses too nah here's a cow i saw the other days feudally dry humping another cow while simultaneously pooping geniuses they ain't cattle are numerous because we consume them and or their milk you could argue that the way to keep bison numerous is to do the same with them this is precisely the argument made by the man who has owned more head of bison than anyone else alive you probably know his name he's famous i'll give you a second to think about it it's ted turner the mouth of the south pioneer of cable television founder of cnn and other channels and noted outdoorsmen ted turner probably more than anyone else has personally brought bison meat back and with it the bison itself that was his stated intent now the debate is whether that's a good trade people like bison because they are wild is it the same animal if it lives like cattle grazing on an enclosed ranch may be spending its last months fattening up in a feedlot just like cattle is that the bison we want to preserve i don't know i could argue it either way what i know for sure is that i really do like eating it and here let me show you my favorite way to have it this bison strip loin looks like tuna so let's cook it like tuna trim a couple of tidy little pieces sear them really hot and fast just to get some nice flavor and kill any surface pathogens take them out while they're still totally raw on the inside and slice thin just like tuna tataki if you use the lakota word for bison it would be tatanka tataki so i think this was meant to be run that through a little soy sauce it's almost as soft as raw tuna it is incredibly delicious and as good a reason as any to keep bison around

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 332,077

Rating: 4.8777013 out of 5

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Id: fUH1QVtIdp4

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/HanSingular]

So the argument for eating bison is that it would increase the population of bison. But what's the argument for increasing the population of bison? Dedicating more land to bison ranches isn't the same as returning the land to its pre-Columbian state, because of course that's never going to happen. Is raising bison any better for conserving resources than raising cattle? How much more/less water do bison need? How does their carbon footprint compare? Those are the sort of questions I was hoping Adam would address.

[u/Neovitami]

It's essentially the same argument for promoting safaris(both the photo and hunting kind) to save endangered species. If you want more of a thing, you make that thing profitable.

By having some rich american shoot a rhino for an insane amount of money, you incentives people to ensure that there are rhinos around for them to shoot. This can be done in very sustainable ways, for example by only shooting old and sick animal or regulating a surplus of males in a population. The opposite of this is obviously unregulated poaching, which doesn't consider long term thinking.