Foodies madness - know your steak's name and number

Time for a new section on this blog - a food writing equivalent to Private Eye's Pseuds Corner.

The opening offering is by Chris Johns writing in the Canadian Globe and Mail:

Jose Gordon approaches the 2,500-kilogram ox gently. The animal eyes him warily but without fear and eventually the famed Spanish chef gets right up beside the great beast and gives him a good scratch between the horns. For some time afterward the ox follows him around the pasture like a puppy.
Gordon has brought me here, to the village of Jimenez de Jamuz in Spain, to introduce me to the animals that will become what is widely considered to be the finest, most tenderly raised and carefully documented meat in the world.
The chef travels all over Spain looking for mature, working oxen that he brings back to his farm in the Castile-Leon region where they live out their final days in relative luxury. He doesn’t pick just any ox, however.
“The animal must have a good spirit,” Gordon explains through an interpreter. “The farmer who raised it must also have a kind personality. The animals need quiet and something nice to look at.”
When it comes time to slaughter, Gordon stays with the animals ensuring they remain calm until the very end. The heads of particularly impressive oxen are mounted above the entrance to the 100-year-old wine cave where he ages much of his meat for as much as 90 days. There probably isn’a chef in the world who knows more about the meat that he serves.
The desire to know more about what we consume isn’t just limited to eccentric chefs in remote corners of Spain, however, and the desire to understand the provenance of our food is now something of an obsession.
In a famous sketch from the satirical TV show, Portlandia, a couple of post-hipster diners in a restaurant gently grill the server on the finer points of the chicken on the menu. It is a “heritage breed, woodland-raised chicken that’s been fed a diet of sheep’s milk and hazelnuts,” she assures them, adding, “His name was Colin.”
While maybe not offering to name your meal, one Toronto chef would like to offer his guests a similar level of knowledge. Danny McCallum, a chef at Jacobs & Co. Steakhouse, is at work on a pilot project with the Ontario farm, Van Groningen Meats, that will give diners an unprecedented look at the life of their steak.
“Right now as a chef I can look up each individual tag number that Van Groningen sends me and I can see who a cow’s parents were,” McCallum explains. “I can see its phenotypic appearance, so I know its dad was Angus and its mom was Hereford. I can find out what characteristics that particular animal had, when it was born, did it look more like its mom or more like its dad. I know its birth date, I know its carcass weight, pretty much everything about the animal even as far down as its nose print and its hide colour.”
McCallum’s information is displayed on little more than an Excel spread sheet now, but he plans to make the information a little more appealing. “We’re working on QR codes that people can scan with their phones and pull up all of the information and an actual picture of the animal,” he says. “I picture it kind of like a hockey card.”
This chef will be able to trace the meat from pasture to plate, giving customers the confidence that they’re eating the highest quality, humanely raised beef.