Evening Edge

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John Kessler writes food features and a column about food and more for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution E-mail John Kessler Recent Kessler columns Hours of low-temperature cooking yield tender, juicy meat  Different things to sample on my new dining menu  A forgotten recipe, a stew that fits all restrictions         More John Kessler Related: John Kessler's blog: Food & More John Kessler's recipes Meridith Ford Goldman's Table Talk Jeanne Besser's Feeding Frenzy Evening Edge Atlanta Restaurant reviews and search Recipes from Atlanta restaurants Favorite Atlanta recipes

As a rule, I want to know where the beef I purchase comes from, how it was raised and what grade the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its infinite wisdom, bestowed upon it.

But then I find a bargain like the $34 tenderloin at Super H. Mart. Not $34 a pound — $34 for the whole, nearly 5-pound tenderloin. At Whole Foods, they're asking $27.99 per pound.

Surely this cow was an also-ran brought up on some vast feedlot — some federally subsidized bovine hell on earth set up for the sole purpose of supplying Americans with the inexpensive meat they consider their birthright. I turn this shrink-wrapped torpedo of blood-red Bessie in my hands and think: $34.

I could have a dinner party for $34. I would cut the tenderloin into thick filets and marinate them overnight with olive oil, garlic, shallots and cracked black pepper. I'd grill them over real charcoal in my Weber kettle and serve them with creamed leeks, a sharp arugula salad and those potato wedges I roast in chicken stock until the stock disappears and the potatoes transform into cream and crust. Everyone loves those potatoes.

But will they love this tenderloin? The packaging offers no clue to its provenance. I assume it to be USDA Select. Sure, I'd want a better grade for strip steaks or rib-eyes. Choice or Prime steaks would have the marbling and flavor that come from the longer time the cow spent on a corn diet. But tenderloin is more about texture than flavor.

Of course, so much of our corn production goes into feeding these cows rather than feeding humans. Not only would we get more bang for the caloric buck if we just ate the corn, we'd be making a healthier food choice.

Good lord, here I am again, stuck in a morass of moral relativism over food choices. I've dead-ended here before, standing like a dim-bulb fool in the middle of the supermarket, holding a package of individually quick-frozen chicken breasts and wondering if they came from a bird that was de-beaked as a chick in order to keep it from pecking its neighbors.

But ... $34. I could just stick this tenderloin in the freezer. Then, when we've got one day to prepare something for a school potluck, I could roast the whole thing, let it cool to room temperature, slice it on a platter and serve it with an easy mash-up of sour cream and horseradish. With a dish like this, I could go into catering. I would buy decorative kale, maraschino cherries and plastic platters covered in shiny metallic laminate, and I'd become a fixture at Atlanta weddings and bar mitzvahs. The guy with the cheap tenderloin.

OK, this is so stupid. Why am I standing here, not buying? Um ... guilt, maybe? I've lived in Colorado, so I've seen feedlots. I've smelled feedlots on the distance, long before I've seen them. I remembered reading somewhere* that cattle production generates more greenhouse gases than transportation.

This tenderloin has me frozen in indecision, yet I don't think twice about getting my favorite beef salad at the little Thai restaurant near our house.

I wonder if they've alerted store security about me. Strange, immobile man in the beef department: proceed with caution.

Thirty-four dollars! I spent more on my pampered Thanksgiving turkey.

Here's another thought: retro party. Whiskey sours, space-age bachelor pad music and a Beef Wellington. It's actually easy to make: smear the tenderloin with food-processed mushrooms and shallots cooked down to a dry paste, wrap it in a sheet of store-bought puff pastry and bake it until it looks like 1958. That's a lot of swank for a slender price.

Besides, this cheap tenderloin isn't like cheap hamburger, right? You don't know what's in that. Well, if you've read "Fast Food Nation," you do. E. coli's favorite medium. This muscle, on the other hand, remains whole and untrimmed of the fat and silverskin on its surface. I don't know where it came from, but it looks wholesome.

So I slip it into my cart. Thirty-four dollars. I can't resist.

Which I know, of course, is the wrong moral choice. This piece of beef was so cheap because of the presumed factory farming that produced it and the federal subsidies that benefit the meat industry. I should only buy meat produced on small, environmentally responsible farms.

But not this time. I wish I could afford to buy a whole tenderloin at Whole Foods, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. I want to make the right food choices, but I also want to enjoy the amazing variety of foods we have available to us in this country.

That's my dilemma. And it's all of ours.

* "Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options." A 2006 report to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, by H. Steinfeld, P. Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, M. Rosales, C. de Haan.

Editor's postscript: After this column was posted, several readers asked for John's potato wedge recipe. He offers two, this one posted in the comment fields below, and a second, which we are calling John Kessler's Gratin Dish Potato Wedges, originally published in the AJC several years ago.

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