b'Should a diner at Smith & Wollensky ask where their steak came from, they would be told with pride that all of the restaurants meat comes from a single family ranch, the Double R Ranch in Loomis, Washington. On the ranchs website, references are to be found to family roots in ranching and local family farms and Western values and traditions, but the phrase premium brand of grain-fed beef is the buried lead. With a little sleuthing, you can learn that this 70,000-acre, 1,200-head ranch is wholly owned by Agri Beef, also founded by Robert Rebholtz (the double R) and which purchases cattle from 1,000 farms, with 350,000 head spending 60180 days in its feedlots in Washington, Idaho and Kansas. At least when you go to McDonalds, even if you dont know whether the meat in your Big Mac came from cattle in the Amazon or a slaugh-terhouse in Dodge City, youre giving up any pretense to the narrative of local family farms or the role of properly managed grasslands in mitigating climate change. 6You may or may not believe, even if told, that some of McDonalds beef comes from deforested land in Brazil, that an area of the Amazon the size of France has been deforested since 1970, largely by cattle ranchers, or that McDonalds has committed to 6 For more on grasslands and the holistic management of livestock, go to https://savory.global/. More than a third of the earths surface is grasslands that are not suitable for row cropping and whose management is critical to efforts to mitigate climate change, manage water and address food insecurity. 15'