Those grass-chomping steers sprawled along the hills of West Marin might look peaceful enough, but they are at the center of a war being waged on your dinner plate. Call it the battle of the beef.

For much of the spring, the virtues of beef raised on Northern California pastures have been the talk of the Bay Area's top chefs. They argue that grass- fed beef is better for your health, easier on the environment and tastes better than what most Americans eat -- beef fattened on corn and soy in huge feedlots in the Midwest.

In the other corner are the traditional cattlemen, who say America's appetite for beef can't be sated on grass-fed alone. The fight even has respected Marin County rancher Bill Niman on the ropes. His product -- grain- finished beef served in the city's best restaurants -- is being dumped by those chefs who think beef fed exclusively fresh pasture and stored silage is a sustainable, healthier alternative.

"I just had my eyes opened, that's all," said Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse and the mother of California cuisine. She still serves Niman Ranch organic pork at her Berkeley restaurant, but the staff is searching for the perfect local rancher to provide grass-fed beef.

Why care about what a handful of fancy Bay Area chefs and boutique ranchers have to say? Because when it comes to food, the trends that start here end up affecting how the rest of the country eats. The Bay Area's early embrace of locally grown organic products, for example, is a large part of the reason organic vegetables and goat cheese are sold in grocery stores across the country.

What's more, culinary trendsetters say the local beef battle feeds into a growing national debate about the safety and health of the nation's $80 billion-a-year beef industry. It's an industry that relies on cattle bulked up on hormones, daily doses of antibiotics and feed that can contain chicken manure, feathers, rendered animal protein and cardboard fiber -- all of which is allowed by current federal regulations.
"This latest interest in grass-fed is part of a broadening awareness that people want more natural food -- food grown closer to home," said Ellie Rilla, director of the University of California cooperative extension in Marin County.

Her office has put together seminars to help West Marin ranchers learn more about managing pastures and raising natural beef.

The Marin Agricultural Land Trust has also taken an interest. Earlier this spring, the ranchland preservation group organized a tour of Marin Sun Farms, one of a handful of local grass-fed beef producers.

big apple beef
The trend might be hottest in the Bay Area, but it has the attention of ranchers and restaurateurs in New York. Beef was the topic of a seminar last month in Manhattan hosted by the Chefs' Collaborative, a 1,000-member group that deems itself the social conscience of the restaurant world. A star of the meeting was Larry Bain, general manager for Acme Chophouse at Pacific Bell Park, the Bay Area's first high-end restaurant to serve grass-fed beef.

Bain likens new beef to organic vegetables 15 or 20 years ago -- expensive, hard to find, of inconsistent quality and prized only by people outside the mainstream.

back to basics
U.S. cattle used to be raised on grass, as cattle still are in much of the rest of the world. But increased demand for food after World War II prompted ranchers to use inexpensive fertilizer to grow government-subsidized corn, which is cheaper than grass and grows beef faster and fattier. Now, a growing number of ranchers, environmentalists and consumer groups question whether this method is healthy or ecologically sound.

"You're really talking about the last 25 to 30 years when the beef system was transformed, in large part to meet the demands of fast-food chains," said Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling "Fast Food Nation."
"The present system has huge, huge social and environmental costs that we're just starting to realize," he said.

beef counter culture
The move against big beef has old roots here. Marin ranchers have grown grass-fed beef for local consumption for years, although what little grass-fed beef popped up in retail markets often has been tough, and off-tasting. Orville Schell, who was a ranching partner with Niman before becoming head of the University of California Graduate School of Journalism, published in 1983 "Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones and the Pharmaceutical Farm," one of the first books to unblinkingly examine the amount of chemicals used to grow cattle. And since the late 1960s, the Bay Area has hosted a strong community of vegetarians.

A new crop of local chefs started paying attention to beef politics in March, when an alliance of Northern California ranchers began selling their grass-fed beef to a couple of high-end San Francisco restaurants. About the same time, author Michael Pollan, former editor-at-large of Harper's magazine, published a cover story in the New York Times magazine that backers of the new beef hope will have as much impact on the beef industry as did "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's 1906 expose of Chicago meatpacking plants.

Pollan bought a calf, and his story followed it from birth to slaughter. He depicted massive Midwest feedlots built on manure and threaded through troughs almost nine miles long, filled with a mixture of corn and antibiotics. Corn, not a steer's natural feed, so upsets the animals' digestive system that a constant stream of antibiotics is the only way to keep them thriving. In addition, he argued, corn upsets the chemical balance in a steer's stomach, affecting the animal's natural ability to fight bacteria and making it more prone to pass on a particularly deadly strain of E. coli.

What really turned Waters' head was Pollan's argument that the beef industry has replaced what was an efficient method for turning solar energy (grass) into protein (meat) with a system based on oil in the form of petrochemical fertilizers needed to grow the corn used to raise beef.

answered prayers
While the National Cattleman's Beef Association has called the article misleading, Bay Area gourmets and chefs traded copies like they were swapping recipes.

"When the article came out, I raised my eyes to heaven and said thank you," said Ernest Phinney, general manager of Western Grasslands Beef, an alliance of ranchers who were the first to sell grass-fed beef to the Bay Area retail market and who have used Pollan's article as a marketing tool. In just over two months, accounts have jumped from two to 25.

Pollan is surprised by the response here. "I'm amazed you can come to this area and write about beef and have it be such a big deal," he said during a visit earlier this month. He also didn't know the article would drive some Niman Ranch customers away, angering Niman, who is considered the area's pioneer of premium "natural" beef, raised with attention to animal welfare, human health and environmental impact.

Niman was so concerned he e-mailed Pollan, saying, in part, "As you know, the story is very complicated and the lay public considers all feedlot cattle the same. This is absolutely not true."
Niman, a man embraced by chefs for his steaks, by environmentalists for his adherence to the Animal Welfare Institute slaughter protocols, and by family ranchers for helping to keep them in business, is caught in the middle. He believes beef raised mostly on pasture but finished on grain simply tastes better.

"People want to imagine a beautiful vision of a chicken out there eating earwigs and cows roaming free around the pasture," Niman said. "To feed millions of people every day? No way. If they want to eat grass-fed, they have to think of this as a seasonal thing like a peach or a tomato. Eat it in May or June 'cause that is when it is peaking."

rehashed debate
Others in the beef business say this latest fascination is just another turn in the barrel for the romantic notion of free-range, grass-fed cattle, which the American palate simply won't accept on any large scale.
"We try and reinvent this wheel about every 10 or 20 years in the United States whenever the price of beef goes up," said Jim Oltjen, a UC Davis beef specialist who grew up working the feedlots of northeastern Kansas. "There are some real hang-ups with grass-fed beef and the American consumer, who wants that corn-fed beef taste. And if we only produce grass-fed beef, we'll only produce half of what we produce now."

But many chefs aren't convinced. Laurence Jossel of the high-volume Chow and Park Chow restaurants in San Francisco recently switched his $50,000-a- year ground beef business from Niman to grass-fed.

"I love the stuff," he said. "And overall, karmicly speaking, I think it's the right thing to do."