A cash-strapped rancher, a virus-stricken meatpacker, an underpaid chef, a hungry engineer: The journey of a single burger during a pandemic
Maximiliano Solano grills burgers at Le Diplomate. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)
By Jessica Contrera The Washington Post
Before the pandemic, the most popular French bistro in the nation’s capital didn’t offer to-go orders. Le Diplomate was the kind of place where reservations were bragging rights, special occasions were nightly occurrences and a double-patty cheeseburger was a $20 menu item, the Burger Américain. Since April, the restaurant has gone through more than 3,500 pounds of beef to meet the demand for the burger, sometimes selling 450 of them in a day — the equivalent of almost a burger a minute. When the mayor declared in late May that Le Diplomate could serve diners again, first at tables six feet apart outside and then, in June, at a reduced capacity inside, the to-go burger orders kept coming.
The burger met Maximiliano Solano in the middle of its journey. Solano plucked it from a chilled drawer and plunked it onto a griddle. He breathed in its greasy smoke through his now-mandated mask. He sprinkled it with salt using a gloved hand. He had made dozens of burgers already on a Friday evening and had hundreds more to go. This part of the burger’s story hadn’t changed. Fat bubbled. Edges crisped. It was going to be delicious.
But for months, the burger had been traveling through a complex supply chain crippled by the novel coronavirus. Now it was about to end up in a takeout box.
Solano pressed the patty with the back of his spatula and watched it ooze. This particular burger was on its way to an engineer who’d just finished another day of working from home — an option Solano and his nearly 200 laid-off co-workers never had. Instead, the 26-year-old took a pay cut and a demotion from sous chef to line cook just to be one of the few dozen employees able to return to Le Diplomate’s kitchen.
On the burger’s journey from a Kansas farm to the engineer’s dinner plate, every person had a story like Solano’s. A rancher with five children who lost thousands every week. A factory worker who brought the virus home to her son. A courier who calculated the true cost of every delivery not in profit, but in the risk it required her to take.
To follow the burger is to glimpse the lasting toll of this pandemic: on the beef supply chain, on the restaurant industry, on the people who were struggling before this catastrophe began, kept going to work throughout it and are still waiting to see what their lives will become when it ends.
Solano tucked the spatula under the patty. It spiraled into the air, one moment closer to a destiny that was set in motion two years ago.
Cattle commingle at Tiffany Cattle Co. in Herington, Kan. (Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)
Before the burger was a burger, or a slab of beef, or an animal that mooed, there was a frozen plastic straw of sperm on a sprawling pasture outside of Eureka, Kan. Matt Perrier thawed it in a water bath for 45 seconds and examined the cow that would become a mother.
His great-grandfather bred cattle starting in 1904, then his grandfather and his father took over the ranch, and in the spring of 2018, Perrier was carrying on the family business. Science had transformed the breeding process, but the result was just the same:
The arrival nine months later of a Black Angus calf, weighing as much as an 8-year-old child.
The calf grew fast, but not fast enough to become one of the bulls (a father, in cattle-speak) that Perrier, 46, sells to other ranchers who are breeding their own herds. Instead, the calf would become a steer, and then, dinner. And though the supply chain leading to Le Diplomate is really more of a supply web, with each burger composed of multiple cuts of meat from multiple parts of the country, one thread leads back to the place where Perrier’s steers often ended up: Tiffany Cattle Co.
Tiffany Cattle Co. co-owners Shane, left, and Shawn Tiffany. ABOVE: Travis Burns and Seth Bieler move Tiffany cattle to a truck to be transported for processing at National Beef. (Photos by Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)
Some 60,000 cattle come to the Tiffany ranch every year to “finish,” to eat and drink and grow for four to six months until they are ready for their grisly end. This particular hoofed purgatory is for what co-owner Shawn Tiffany calls “white tablecloth” cattle — beef that ends up with pricey stickers on grocery store shelves, or on plates at expensive restaurants like Le Diplomate.
The steer arrived in the fall of 2019, riding on a truck with around 60 of his 700-pound-and-growing brethren. The ranch, built on a World War II-era base for Army Air Corps bombers, was a destination for top-dollar cattle from across the country.
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