Just a general note on quality and herd practices really.
US beef has only just reached Australian health & safety standards* after being banned for import into Australia for two decades.
* perhaps it's more the case that Australia has only just bowed to US tariff pressure to accept US meat that isn't up to Australian standards for herd health tracking.
I've had both and American beef is mediocre compared to Australian or NZ beef (which is usually grass fed).
If you want BBQ, go to the US. Else for just a normal steak, just source good ANZ beef and pay for it. Cheaper Indian beef (mostly buffalo - you can get cow meat but that's mostly tougher) can also be mostly grass-fed but it's harder to source.
Grass-fed beef isn't necessarily better. It tends to be comparatively leaner than grain-fed, and a richly marbled rib eye is for a lot of people (myself included) just about as good as it gets.
Australian wagyu is, for my money, the best beef in the world (yes, better than Japanese wagyu, which really is too richly marbled), but American Prime is no slouch either.
Yes, my bad. I think the correct term I should've used isn't grass-fed (a flimsy marketing term) but free range. ANZ cattle isn't generally cooped up in feedlots and factory farmed, although this is now changing rapidly for the worse.
Australian wagyu is actually the worst offender in this regard, since it means that cattle spend 1-2 years in a factory farm feedlot.
Western cooking tends to prefer having rich fat marbling on the beef and let it cook in its own fats, but in Asia, we tend to prefer leaner cuts for our cooking, mostly because beef isn't usually eaten on its own as a steak.
My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say American cattle are superior in really any other way, and are not the best cuts globally either.
Switzerland I cannot speak to, but having had meats from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Japan - a lot of places around the world have great and superior quality meats.
Poultry isn’t even in the conversation here, American poultry is off putting by nearly any person you ask who didn’t grow up with it.
> My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally.
I remember a conversation in a Dallas hotel bar with an increasingly crestfallen cowboy as we talked about how the King Ranch "wasn't a particularly large ranch, all things considered". Initially, confusion. "What do you mean, it's the largest ranch in the world?" No, the US.
And then we talked about Australian cattle ranches, where Anna Station is over seven times bigger than King Ranch, bigger than Israel, and that if King Ranch was in Australia it'd be only be, at best, the 70th largest ranch in the country (and more likely only just scraping into the top 100).
Everything is not always bigger in Texas.
I despise American poultry - factory farming, copious saline injection, bleh.
Some of the ~150,000 metric tonnes of beef recently imported from Australia?