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How beef colonized the Americas

This is the sixth in a series of stories on how factory farming has shaped the US. Find the rest of the series and future installments here, and visit Vox’s Future Perfect section for more coverage of Big Ag. The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

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An illustration of a young woman carrying dishes from a green, cow- and cowboy-filled landscape into a cityscape.

This is the sixth in a series of stories on how factory farming has shaped the US. Find the rest of the series and future installments here, and visit Vox’s Future Perfect section for more coverage of Big Ag. The stories in this series are supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.

A young woman standing on a Tokyo train. Text reads: “The funny thing about traveling is that, without fail, I am reminded of how utterly, tragically, and perhaps beautifully American I am. Last December, I took a spontaneous flight to Tokyo and found myself wandering with no particular destination in mind.“A young couple asks the same young woman a series of questions. Text reads: “Oh, you live in New York? Is Times Square like Shibuya” and “I can tell you’re American — you smile a lot.” But what surprised me the most was how often people asked me about meat, as if pulled in by the gravity of Americana. “Do you like hamburgers?” (No.) “What do you think about wagyu beef here?” (Haven’t had it yet.) “Is steak really worth getting if I come to the States?” (Depends, but I think barbecue is way better.) I couldn’t blame them. To eat beef is to be American in the broadest sense of the word.A hand holds a phone, which reads “Where are you going now?” Other story text reads: My relationship with beef is a tense one. While it’s not my favorite meat in the world — fresh fish is right there! — the cultural weight beef commanded in my life was undeniable, embedded in my identity as a Mexican-Puerto Rican who grew up in Texas. Who am I without brisket, caldo de res, or picadillo? For a long time, I feared missing out on some grand, deeper connection that I’d gain at the family table. So I spent years defending the consumption of it — despite what I knew about cattle ranching’s negative impacts on the climate. Would I be a bad daughter if I rejected beef completely?

A Tokyo scene transitions into a rural cattle farm, seen through a train window. Text reads: My father left his family's farm in Mexico decades ago in pursuit of the American dream, spending early mornings toiling under the sun to build homes and apartment buildings. He used to joke that he was a "city guy" when taking me window shopping over the weekends. But in the last few years, he became committed to the idea of returning to his roots through cattle ranching — a chance to build the kind of generational wealth he never had access to as a kid. Influenced by a father figure who mentored him in Tennessee, he bought himself a farm and a few cows. My dad left his family farm all that time ago and swore he'd never return, but it called to him. It calls to me, too.

An illustrated path through a cattle farm surrounded by greenery. Text reads: I first visited his farm outside of Nashville in the summer of 2018, when I was in college. My parents had recently divorced, and my dad’s new lifestyle felt so foreign to me. Over time, the crunch of the grass, muddy rides in the buggy, and the buzz of cicadas enveloped me. This was home now. The cows, though, were what most drew me in — especially the babies. Whenever I wanted to escape for some quiet, I’d cross the fence behind the ranch, walking toward the cows carefully. They met my eyes and I found comfort in their company. I worried about becoming too close. These cows were destined for slaughter. I couldn’t get attached. But maybe we could give them a good life here, where they had open space to run. I could live with that.

An illustrated barbecue scene with young friends gathering under a pergola next to a red barn labeled “Rancho.” Text reads: My relationship with my dad never brought me as much joy as it did then. For the majority of my life, I’d always seen him as reserved and distant, like we would never truly get to understand each other. But then there would be those late summer afternoons on the ranch, where he’d flash a smile and break out a little jig while grilling. I didn’t know he even knew how to cook, but there he was, searing carne asada for his friends. And I loved it.An illustrated plate of carne asada tacos being held by a hand with bright pink nail polish. Text reads: Through something as simple as a carne asada taco, I held centuries of cultural practice in my palm. The thin slices of meat adorned with finely diced onions and a splash of bright, spicy salsa intoxicated me. Here, watching the laughter radiate from the party, I could see why beef holds such strong cultural power.An illustration of two men in nature cooking meat over fire pits. Text reads: For the somber price of a creature’s life, communities around the world can partake in arguably the only ritual that matters: quashing hunger. In turn, everyone gets to eat and partake in the revelry. Eating and socializing together is one of our most ancient human pleasures — together, these actions flood the senses, ignite deep neural pathways, and create an archive of tangible memory every time a dish is recreated.An illustration of a gaucho and a vaquero riding horses while using lassos. Text reads: In the Latin American context, so much of national and cultural identity is tied to cattle ranching and horse husbandry. Throughout the 19th century, as many countries fought and gained independence from Spain and Portugal, young Latin American governments ached for mythmaking — something to tie disparate racial groups together. The iconography of vaqueros and gauchos, or nomadic livestock herders that emerged in the 16th century throughout the Americas, became an easy shorthand for burgeoning national identity. Through adventure, ruggedness, and some damn good food, these cattle-stewarding legends cemented a culture that was uniquely pan-American long before the founding of modern nation-states such as Mexico, Bolivia, or Argentina.

An illustration of a man with a covered wagon in an expanse of green hills. Text reads: Here in the US, we know vaqueros by a different name: cowboys. Cowboys have become synonymous with exploring the American frontier, “taming” the Wild West. They also remain iconic: rough, ready, stylish in a way that holds an indelible presence in how we dress, talk, farm, and eat today. Americans are supposed to love beef, just as we love our land, our music, our people.

An illustration of a field of tree stumps with green hills in the distance. Text reads: The macho, enterprising spirit of vaqueros and cowboys represented national aspirations common to cultures around the world — a determination to conquer the natural world and to “make it.” To work with cattle meant to have power and to pass down wealth. And if beef for most people was once a delicacy only reserved for the weekends, these cattle herders ensured that, one day, everyone could have that luxury. “Food is often seen as standing for something else — that is, as a symbol,” wrote folklore and food scholar Lucy M. Long in 2019. “It can represent a variety of things: identity, place, status, power, lifestyle, worldview, values, ideas, relationships.” Spreading cattle ranching across the Americas depended on irrevocably changing the landscape, replacing native ecosystems with land-intensive ranches. Landowners and their cattle herders eyed the forests and jungles, finding valuable land ripe for the taking.

An illustration of a young woman reading a book while sitting on a blanket in Central Park with New York City buildings in the background. Text reads: When I left Texas to start college, right around the time my dad started ranching, I gravitated toward learning more about Indigenous cultures — a part of my heritage that I, like many Latinos, lost touch with through generations of assimilation. I wanted a deeper connection with my Southern and Latin American heritage.

An illustration of pigs and cows walking from a Spanish boat onto a beach shore. Text reads: Before European colonialism, beef had never been part of Indigenous foodways. In the late 1400s, it was the Spanish who brought cattle to the Americas alongside their better-known exports: Catholicism, smallpox, and slavery. To what is now Latin America, the Spanish also brought the hacienda system — large land holdings meant to be used for raising cattle and pigs, where Peninsular vaqueros worked for their patrón.

An illustration of bison laying bloodied within a rocky grassy landscape. Text reads: To do this, the Spanish conquistadores needed lots of land. So they took it. Over the course of 400 years, they kneecapped Indigenous food systems and with them, entire populations, cementing a culture of cattle in their place. What better way to silence a people than to replace the way they connect to one another? In the US, especially right after the Civil War, Anglo settlers pursued the dream of Manifest Destiny. Reconstruction wasn’t just for the renegade South, but the West, which they saw as lawless. As cattle ranching spread to Texas and other parts of the American West, the identity of vaqueros did too: cowboys were no longer about the nomadic, estate-to-estate lifestyle. They wanted ranches of their own. “There's a long-running sense in American culture, and I bet in lots of places, about the farmer or the rancher as having a kind of independence that someone who merely works for a wage doesn't have,” Joshua Specht, author of Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America, told me. “That’s scary, but it's liberating too, that you're out there on your own, you're making your own destiny, you're not relying on someone for a paycheck.” That so-called liberation came with a heavy price. The 1862 Homestead Act transformed land ownership in the American West, giving US citizens the right to claim and farm on parcels of land — Indigenous land. Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries endured scorched-earth tactics intended to destroy their access to food and land. Across the Great Plains, the US military facilitated the extermination of tens of millions of wild bison, part of an intentional policy to destroy Indigenous people’s means of survival and force them onto reservations. Once there, assimilation programs introduced Native people to dairy, beef, and flour, disrupting long-lived food histories.

An illustration of a worker processing bloody sides of beef as they move down a conveyor belt. Text reads: The founding myth of the beef industry, of enterprising cowboys on the frontier, elides both the ugly origins of beef and its present-day reality. Today’s beef industry, dominated by four big meatpackers, has been intensively industrialized. Beef feedlots, a kind of factory farming, crowd thousands of cattle in muddy pens, where they emit massive amounts of methane that fuels climate change. Nearby communities contend with severe air pollution, strong odors, and health risks. As the most land-intensive human activity in the world, cattle pasture consumes about a third of the land in the continental US. Much of that — about 215 million acres — is government-managed public land, where cattle damage native ecosystems. Industrial animal agriculture depends on our cultural identification with beef for its legitimacy. Wrapped in a glossy story of cowboys on the frontier, factory farming serves as an extension of colonial violence and dispossession. Today, such entitlement looks like modern-day cowboys like the infamous rancher Cliven Bundy, who has been illegally grazing cows on federal land for decades, but gets away with it because of the cultural power of ranchers. Meanwhile, intensive animal agriculture is also peddled as a cheap solution to food system problems around the world. The Amazon rainforest, vital for the stability of our climate, is being cleared, often illegally, to make way for cattle grazing. It ain’t right, and it ain’t natural.An illustration of a young woman watching her friends dancing outside under a pergola. Text reads: It's hard to know how to square all this. The legacy of colonialism is baked into the hybrid cultures found across the Americas, but that culture is nonetheless authentic to people today, like me and my father. Culture is dynamic — its participants have agency, and today, there’s a vibrant conversation about whether beef should still be a part of our cultural traditions. There’s so much more to us than beef — we don’t have to accept the narratives that have been sold to us. That’s easier said than done. Given food’s symbolic power and role as a social glue, letting go of beef needs to feel as culturally convincing as beef consumption. For me, curiosity about my cultural history has been an incredibly potent way to resist the chokehold of the beef industry.An illustration of two smiling young women sitting at a bountiful dinner table with friends. Text reads: My ancestors in the Americas, for instance, likely ate abundant diverse plant foods, like corn, beans, squash, yucca, potatoes, peppers, nopales, and rice. Our traditional cooking methods are still here, woven intrinsically into the tapestry of Indigenous, and American, history. Processes like nixtamalization — how corn is turned into masa, a dough used to make tortillas and tamales — survived, but now coexist alongside entirely new sources of food. Cowboys might have given us fajitas — but that someone can enjoy that skirt steak with fresh corn tortillas reflects how resilient and alive culture can be. “America has succeeded in becoming more Indian over the past 245 years rather than the other way around,” Ojibwe writer David Treuer wrote in the Atlantic. I think about that a lot, when I’m slicing tomatoes or nibbling on a bit of chocolate, precolonial foods that connect me to an Indigenous past, despite their now-global, decontextualized ubiquity.

An illustration of a young woman walking with a basket of brisket and a basket of salad next to a race track. Text reads: Today, I no longer feel the need to defend a rigid lifestyle or dietary habit to feel culturally connected. Retaining the traditions and ideas that actually resonate with me, and expanding my view of what it means to be American, have helped me shed my past defensive relationship with beef. I feel just at home in my roots making bean and squash tacos for a dinner party in Brooklyn as I do eating brisket with my dad by the side of a racetrack in Austin, cars whipping by.

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