No Bull
'nuff said
Hawaii exported beef to Japan. We had a small slaughter house and feed lot operation right here on Oahu that supplied the local Honolulu market and sometimes shipped choice cuts to Japan. The cattle came from all the islands, but mostly from the Big Island of Hawaii. Most of you probably don’t think of Hawaii in terms of cattle ranching, but the Big Island has one of the biggest privately-owned spreads in the United States, the Parker Ranch, and several smaller cattle ranches. We have a long and proud history of cowboy culture out here in the Pacific, and our “paniolos” began winning rodeos in the U.S. West early in the 1900s. The paniolos and the cattle ranches are still here, but now they mostly ship their livestock to the mainland United States and Canada for slaughter.
Part of the reason for that is Japan’s hard-nosed attitude towards imported beef. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was in Tokyo yesterday, again asking the Japanese to loosen up their import restrictions that were implemented in 2003 as a result of a single instance of mad cow disease in a U.S. herd (and that cow, you might recall, was a recent import from Canada). Tokyo supposedly loosened things again in 2006 (they had an outright ban on U.S. beef for three years) by letting in beef from cattle that were 20 months old or younger. Japan argues that young cattle haven’t developed mad cow disease, while U.S. and European scientists say that is hogwash. Whatever, the result is that U.S. exports of beef to Japan have never recovered to more than 15% of their pre-2003 sales. All that for a single cow, now long dead. Something doesn’t add up.
But Hawaii’s beef sales to Japan died long before 2003. They were killed because of a Tokyo-manufactured tiff in which Japan insisted that U.S. slaughter houses couldn’t meet Japanese safety standards. The only alternative was to ship live cattle to Japan, which the feed lot owner tried several times. Apparently it was OK to send the beef in as long as it could walk off the ship by itself. The true killer, however, was Tokyo’s insistence that Japanese stomachs simply were not designed to tolerate foreign beef. No bull.
Kahua Ranch
If you travel to Hawaii, I recommend you go to the Big Island and take one of the tours offered by the renowned Merriman’s Restaurant in Kamuela. They take you out to see some of the local suppliers to the restaurant, often including Kahua Ranch where Peter Merriman gets his beef. Then you go back to the restaurant for a great gourmet meal featuring the suppliers you just saw. Good fun. No bull.
