If you’re not much interested in meat, you will want to skip this little item. Then again, I’m not much interested in meat — except as an enthusiastic eater of it — and I found this quite interesting. In Impromptus today, I talk a little bit about France, and mention a piece of veal I had: so mouthwatering, it might have been some kind of delicious drug. Why was this so?

NRO readers, collectively, know everything, and one wrote,

Trying to be brief: America has sufficient feed and market to specialize cattle. There are milk cows (think gangly Bossy, the black-and-white bovine with a cow bell) and there are beef cattle (think stout Black Angus or Herefords). Beef cattle don’t produce fatty milk well, and meat from milk cows is stringy and very tough. The Holstein and Guernsey milk cows won’t produce milk unless they have a calf now and again. The male offspring of the milk cows ain’t gonna give the dairy farmer any milk, so they become “veal,” and the quotation marks are valid. . . . Europeans (generally) have multi-purpose cattle — not milk/beef-specific — and the calves they do not need or don’t want to feed become veal. . . . European veal = good; American veal = don’t bother.

And now a word about fat (which I also mention in this column) (and this word is from the same reader): “Very lean beef actually tastes terrible — something like a liver taste — and can only be rescued by sauces or gravy, or by adding substantial fat as it’s ground into ‘hamburger.’”

Hungry yet?