I love getting out into the Mountain West, but I hate eating badly once I’m there. This is why my packing lists, scribbled on the back of napkins, often read as some sort of absurdist comedy. Here’s one from a trip to Wyoming the week of July 4, for America’s 250th:
2 lobes of Hudson Valley Foie Gras (Grade A)
4 Black Truffles
3 Fly Rods (3wt, 5wt, 7wt)
11 pounds of salted cultured butter
Fleece zip-up Hiking boots
3 bottles of Domaine Tempier Bandol
1 bottle of E.H. Taylor Barrel Proof
External phone charger
It’s overkill. I know that. But no one on these trips ever complains about the food.
I was meeting friends at a retreat called the Wagon Box, outside the small mountain town of Story, Wyoming, to catch trout, drink an entire keg of a local beer called Speed Goat, and celebrate a country we all belong to and adore.
My buddy Paul picked me up at the Billings Logan airport. I was already hungry and planning dinner. I asked if we should stop at a butcher on the way. He told me not to bother. Peter Allen, who owns Mastodon Valley Farms in Wisconsin, was joining us for the weekend and bringing 40 pounds of his own beef. I asked what cuts. Paul said, “Oh, he’s just bringing a bunch of the ground stuff.”
I had not packed foie gras and Bandol to spend my one vacation of the summer eating ground beef. I had plans: I envisioned a whole lamb, slow-roasted over the fire, basted in a truffle sauce. Instead, I spent the night at the grill, making hamburgers.
The burgers put my grand plans to shame. I knew it before they hit the fire. I opened Peter’s cooler and found beef that hadn’t already started browning the way most “American” ground beef has by the time you buy it. Small one-pound packages greeted me, all colored a jewel-like red. The grind was coarser than what you’d find at a normal grocery store, and despite that, the fat content held. Formed into a patty, it didn’t crumble and weep out its fat in comically large flare-ups the way cheap ground beef does. It stayed inside. The bite was absurd. With September around the corner, it’s still the best thing I’ve eaten all year.
Butterworth’s is coming up on its second anniversary. For most of that time, we refused to put a burger on the menu. Some of that is my own particular strain of pretension. But mostly it’s a simple fact: it is very hard to buy quality ground beef in America. Most of it is a scrap-room process. A Chinese- or Brazilian-owned processor takes a little trim from Mexico, a little from Argentina, some lean trim from the U.S., some fatty trim from God knows where, and mixes it all together into something that resembles less a food product than a bathhouse orgy. Out the other end comes your hamburger. Seven dollars a pound. Thank you very much.
Americans didn’t vote for this. It happened the way most horrors do, one small, defensible decision at a time, each one minuscule in its consequence, until you wake up inside a Lovecraftian horror of your own making.
It started in 2002, when Congress passed a law that seems almost quaint now. You had a right to know where your beef came from. Born here, raised here, killed here, it said so on the label. Then, in 2015, under pressure from Canada and Mexico and a World Trade Organization ruling threatening over a billion dollars in retaliatory tariffs, Congress repealed it. Beef and pork lost their labels. Politics was a little boring back then, so hardly anyone noticed. The scrap room became a legal place to hide.
That repeal opened the door for mixed ground beef, and American ranchers started selling their cattle into a system that would cut it with whatever was cheapest that week, from wherever it came. With the economic incentive gone, the American herd began to shrink. A percentage drop here, a percentage drop there, and almost no one noticed. Then, in 2025, it became harder to ignore. The Department of Agriculture shut its livestock ports to Mexico in July, after a flesh-eating parasite called the New World Screwworm started working its way north through cattle smuggled across a border nobody could fully police. In January, the annual Cattle Inventory Report came back with a number that made even the economists tighten their sphincters: 86.2 million head, the smallest herd in this country since 1951. The slow death ranchers had been living with on the ground finally reached American wallets. This is where it left us.
I can name 20 small cuts along the way, but I will spare you. Suffice it to say, for a few decades now, we have slowly and deliberately hamstrung American ranchers in favor of third-world importers. This week, President Trump joined a long line of presidents and bureaucrats by expanding the import break even further.
I understand the logic. He’s trying to bring down the price of ground beef for everyday Americans, and in a year when every politician in the country is trying to work the word “affordability” into their stump speech, that has a kind of political sense to it. But it will not fix the problem. It is a bandage on a wound that needs a tourniquet, and one more step toward the end of American ranching as a way of life. More than that, it runs against the reason so many people voted for him in the first place. From Minnesota to the Texas border, Americans are frustrated that cheaper economies elsewhere are hollowing out our own.
This expansion will not help the American rancher; it will finish him off. He will look at what he’s competing against, do the math, and tell his son to go work in computers instead. We have to think about this long term, or we’ll keep circling the drain until the only thing left in the bowl is the pink slurry that fills a Doritos Locos Taco.
You will now, on occasion, find a burger on the Butterworths’ menu. I call up Peter, and when he can send his beef, raised on his land and cared for by him and his family, I put it on the menu. I do it because it’s delicious, because it speaks to America’s greatness, and because I’m secretly terrified we’re barreling toward a future where I won’t be able to find beef like his anymore.
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Bart Hutchins is the chef and owner of Butterworth’s in Washington, D.C. He’s on X @whiteguyfieri.
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