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Beef
The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World

Chapter One

From Horn to Hoof

The Ecological and Evolutionary Origins of the Cow: Prehistory—8000 B.C.

The Thread in the Labyrinth

Picasso's Minotaur and the Spirit of Cattle

The Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair opened to a puff of tepid headlines and a yawn from the summer-slow picnickers on the Seine. And no surprise. A few weeks earlier, Paris had weathered the openings of the Nazi German and Soviet pavilions—Herculean mounds of concrete erected to dueling ideologies, between which the modest Spanish building was a mere bungalow rolled out in the name of a lowercase "republicanism." Even the promised unveiling of a giant Picasso mural didn't stir up much more than froth in the café gossip.

That is, until people actually saw Guernica, as Picasso's painting is known. Its subject was an average atrocity by modern standards, but in 1937 it had the power to appall. Two months before the Paris exhibition, German bombers flying for the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War obliterated a civilian target far from the front lines. The massacre killed fifteen hundred people. Picasso had long ago proven he could make strong critics faint and send belle artistes dashing for their fractured mirrors, but he had never yet managed to horrify everybody. It took Guernica, and Guernica, to do that.

The painting wasn't horrible because it depicted war. It was horrible for depicting horror. A twenty-three-foot slash of newsprint-colored violence, it hung behind a workingfountain of red mercury. To Paris's lunching gentlemen and girls in frocks, this was something entirely new. Otto Dix and George Grosz had drawn the First World War's seas of corpses in the 1920s, but Guernica's subject wasn't dead soldiers. It was women, children, and beasts in the act of dismemberment—limbs and heads separating by means of high explosives (making it a perfect subject for cubism, for Picasso's famous splintered eye). Gray and sickly, like a bruise the size of a whale, Guernica is a particularly modern obscenity. It's now an icon of the age of broken glass, airplanes, and random blood pools. Of the age that is our own.

Inside the picture itself, among the blasted innocents, stand two animals. One is a skewered horse, screaming in the dumb, brute pain of dying. The other is a bull standing under a lightbulb, its horns bulging from an asymmetrical skull lump that echoes its scrotal bag. The bull is a fixed hulk, unmoved by the slaughter around it. It may even be complicit, since the horse looks like it's been gored. During an interview in 1944, Picasso said that the bull represented "dark forces," while the horse stood for the Spanish people. Another time he insisted, exasperatedly, that "The bull is a bull and the horse is a horse. These are openly animals, massacred animals. That's all, so far as I am concerned!"¹

Well, no. Picasso didn't like to give away his metaphors, and a bull, especially one placed by a Spanish painter inside his greatest work, isn't mere bystanding livestock. A bull is always more than that. Is it Picasso's original "dark forces"? Distilled cruelty? The animal mask of war? Or is it a symbol for the Spanish nation?²

Good art, much less great art, isn't a code, like a peach clutched by some dusty medieval Virgin. To grope for an exclusive truth behind Picasso's bull misses the point that bulls, like lions, eagles, and unicorns, are charged with millennia of cultural presumptions. So while we can argue that the bull represents Spain, and its stillness is a counterpoint to the screeching female stumbling up from the lower right-hand field, thereby hinting at a dichotomy more elemental than mere political symbols, that would be playing the game of allegories.³ The Guernica bull isn't a national totem, nor is it shorthand for brutality. It's bigger than that.

Picasso understood that the bull, beyond its heraldic clutter, is a throwback to a time before cities existed to be bombed, before civilization existed to be shocked. Under the glare of an electric bulb, we see an ancient face that is neither good nor evil. It is solely dangerous.

Painters all have their favorite monsters, and Picasso's was the Minotaur, the man-bull that crouches, steeped in a Freudian fog, at the center of the artist's twists and feints. Picasso hammered out Minotaurs like a refrain.⁴ He drew them attacking women, or raising a glass to toast the spent bodies in an orgy, or being held at bay by the frail light of a child's upheld candle. They are dark forces, masculine ones. In one etching from 1934, a blind Minotaur walks hand in hand with a girl clutching a plump, white dove—dark forces tamed. But that was before the German bombers flew their devilish sorties over a living city in the north of Spain, leading Picasso to paint a bull that stands, unflinching, in the jagged nexus between primeval force and the phosphorus bomb.

The paradox of Guernica's bull is that it exists in two worlds, an ancient creature bathed in an antiseptic, high-wattage glow. Bulls have become beasts of the stockyard and the chemical feed trough, but their bodies are testaments to long-vanished grasslands and unmarred skies. To understand the spirit that infuses Picasso's painting you have to look at history—a maze more tangled than the logical weave of silicon circuits. This is history as a labyrinth; by turn and corner, this has to be felt to be explored. Artists are naturals at doing this, and Picasso, in the electric dawn of the Jaded Age, was the great artist of his time, proving his mastery by showing the Paris crowds that, despite our newfound knack with motors and steel, we are no different from our grandsires who scraped at flint in the starlight. The story behind the Guernica bull must begin with its flesh, its meat, and its horn.

In Picasso's Spain, bulls lived both in bleached concrete pens and in an ancient place of symbols, sun, and blood. They still do today. Spain is where the thread leads into the labyrinth.