Before I read Betty Fussell's "Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef," I thought I knew enough about America's quintessential meal. After all, I wolfed down quite a few myself. And I'd read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "Fast Food Nation." And there was some additional experience in 4-H. At 12 I wrestled 200-pound calves at the county fair's Calf Scramble. The next year I was back at the fair with a 1,200-pound steer I'd trained to walk on a leash and tolerate having his tail braided with vinegar and water to give him the perm of a Sarah Palin-era beauty contestant when it was brushed out.

But there is much more to be learned in Fussell's rangy, inquiring book about the cultural, political and environmental aspects of the steak. And while the subject of beef may seem pretty well-chewed, Fussell goes where no Pollan or Schlosser has gone before.

The author of nine other books, including "My Kitchen Wars," Fussell is a writer of an idiosyncratic but rigorous stripe. She doesn't just read about slaughterhouses, she takes a class in commercial butchering. She details a recipe for disaster (the government's failure to test rigorously for mad cow disease) alongside actual recipes for White Dog Cafe's Philly Cheese Steak and Steak Diane, among others. The only problem is that by the time you get to the recipes you may feel queasy about eating the beef.

"Raising Steaks" starts with a rewriting of the history of the settling of the West through steak. "Like a movie Western, steak ritualizes our appetite for violence and purges us of its needs," she says. As with the Western, the steak's purity and naturalness turns out to be an illusion.

In the early part of the book she combines historical research with visits with modern-day cowboys and cattlemen who discuss the pros and cons of different types of rangeland feeding. Although these portraits are interesting enough, none are deep or critical enough to create a narrative beyond where on earth Fussell, who is in her 70s, is going to go next.

But perhaps that is one of the lessons. Fussell observes as she traces the history of the rodeo and the cowboy, "That the cattle business is a form of show business was apparent from the start." Without the sizzle, would we care about the steak?

"Raising Steaks" hits its stride in Greeley, Colo., home to the largest concentration of cattle feedlots in the country, and also the former home of Fussell's grandparents: "strict teetotalers, farmers, and colonic irrigationists." She traces this concentration of the country's cattle ( just 2 percent of America's feedlots supply 85 percent of the beef ) through its baroque history, mentioning that some of the feedlot cows receive not just antibiotics, growth hormones and corn, but also chocolate bars, popcorn and Tater Tots junked by nearby factories.

"What I saw ... intimately was the history of these feedmills and how they grew from innocence to monstrousness," she says, observing pointedly that critics like Michael Pollan have failed to understand how the feedlots reflect what she calls "the human face of men who'd grown up with cows and cared about them. ..."

Through this she comes to what may be the book's real contribution to the beef debate: "I came to feel that if you must single out any single element of the contemporary beef industry in order to condemn it, it should not be corn or feedlots per se, it should be industrial scale."

Later she mentions that the beef industry's opposition to testing for mad cow and E. coli seems rooted in a fear that the "rugged individual, maybe even America itself, is no longer in control of his destiny." I think she's on to something, and I wished she'd pounded the point home with a sledgehammer.

But a few pages later, Fussell is off to the slaughterhouse to make a different point about how the USDA's grading system has almost nothing to do with consumer preferences and everything to do with the beef industry. Soon she's sneaking into a beef industry conference to dissect its politics, which include suspicion of "the East," environmentalists and "Marxists" as potential agents of bioterrorism, or Nazi storm troopers "persecuting" the industry. Marxists in the meat supply! She ends the book, fittingly, with a recipe for eating steak raw.