Flickr/alenlin

Lindy and Grundy

Where's the beef? It's at these Los Angeles meat shops, which will most certainly be bustling in preparation for this weekend.

We've outlined a few recommandations for what to get a several of the city's most respected butchers -- locally sourced, organic, all that good business -- but we also name-dropped a few off-the-path places you might not of tried yet.

As Homer Simpson once said, "All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say 'Yo Goober! Where's the meat?' I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad."

Just kidding vegan friends, we made enough gazpacho for everyone. Turn the page for 6 great Los Angeles butcher shops, listed alphabetically.

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courtesy vegasstripsteak.com

The Vegas Strip Steak

If there were a Nobel Prize for meat, the team of researchers at Oklahoma State University's Robert M. Kerr Food & Agricultural Products Center (FAPC) probably would be a shoe-in this year. The group has discovered an entirely new cut of beef it has named the Vegas Strip Steak, which is being hailed as the first new style of steak in years.

The Vegas Strip, an eye-rolling play on the New York Strip steak, is the brainchild of Dr. Tony Mata, head honcho of the beef industry group Mata & Associates, who approached the FAPC for help developing the cut. "Initially, the cut was labeled as undervalued," Mata told the Drovers Cattle Network. "Whenever we can take a muscle and turn it into a steak rather than grinding it or selling it as a roast, we are adding value to the carcass." (One man's hamburger is another man's steak.)

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Anne Fishbein

Beef ribs at Smoke City Market

Finally, the scientific reason that we associate Ron Swanson with manliness, other than the mustache and the whiskey: According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, there is a "strong connection between eating meat -- especially muscle meat, like steak -- and masculinity." Because of that connection, the researchers say, men are more wary of trying vegetarian products.

Researchers analyzed whether Western cultures associate meat with masculinity. Unsurprisingly, they found that certain foods, like meat and milk, are associated with specific genders, and that meat was rated as more masculine than vegetables. Overall, people perceive meat eaters as being more masculine than non-meat eaters. More interesting, perhaps, is that though the study was conducted in both the United States and Britain, the authors of the paper also examined 23 languages that use gendered pronouns and found that meat was most often associated with the male gender.

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Anne Fishbein

Last month, The New York Times' Ariel Kaminer announced an essay contest in the paper's op-ed section: Carnivorous readers must defend, in 600 words or less, why it is ethical to eat meat. Entries were judged by some of the foremost authorities on modern food practices, including Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer and Andrew Light (where the ladies at?), who then selected a winner from the 3,000-plus entries.

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jgarbee

Novy Ranches Ground Beef And Organ Meat (Right)

If you've been wondering where all the "organ burgers" have been hiding among the ground beef, turkey and vegan summer grilling options, you're in luck. Novy Ranches recently began selling ground grass-fed organ meat (kidneys, heart and tongue) at the Sunday Brentwood Farmers Market and on its website.

The new ground meat mixture, which sells for $6 a pound or $20 for a four-pack, is the impetus of Jason Yates, the same Novy Ranches representative whom we talked to about eyeballs and other "off" cuts last time we spoke (the ranch's owner, veterinarian Lowell Novy, is more of a steak sort of guy).

"I'm the only organ guy in the company," Yates said rather fervently as he handed over a pack for a side-by-side color comparison to the ground beef (organ meet is a deeper burgundy).

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Anne Fishbein

Butcher competition at the 2011 Cochon 555

Just when you'd managed to expunge -- via marathons and wheatgrass-and-spinach elixirs -- the last traces of Wilbur from your digestive tract, the Cochon 555 roadshow is back for another round. This time, five local chefs, five heritage hogs and five winemakers will tangle at the House of Blues on Sunday, May 6; and once again just one chef will be selected, by the judges and gathered swineaholics, to go on to the national competition.

According to the Cochon 555 folks, more than 1,200 pounds of pork will be served. Depending on your experience at last year's fest -- a carnival of sweaty, gluttonous overkill -- you're either salivating or hitting the back button on your browser.

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Cut menu word cloud

If you're a vegetarian, this might seem less like a highly curated menu than a do-not-enter sign. If so, no Snake River Farms Wagyu and John Baldessari art for you. But if you're happily carnivorous, then this menu -- the dinner menu from Wolfgang Puck's Beverly Hills steakhouse Cut -- may read like a jigsaw of the perfect meal. Add a bit of bone marrow, some truffles (you were expecting something else?), a pour of chimichurri or Bordelaise and die happy. (That's an expression, not a secret PETA morality tale.)

Screenshot of Anthony Bourdain's Twitter page

G. Snyder

Death by Meat

The latest addition to the list of things that can send you to an untimely grave: red meat. A study published yesterday by the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that eating a single serving of red meat per day may raise the risk of early mortality by as much as 13 percent.

The results of the study were based on 120,000 participants who recorded their lifestyle habits by filling out surveys over a period of several years. Those who consumed red meat regularly tended to have other bad health habits, like smoking, drinking alcohol, being physically inactive and eating fewer fruits and vegetables. Even when those factors were discounted, though, the link between early death and red meat remained.

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Guzzle & Nosh

A cheeseburger from Pie 'n Burger

Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with which they say they will be able to produce the first lab-grown "hamburger" by the end of the year, BBC News reports.

Their goal is to find a more efficient (and cruelty-free) way to produce meat than rearing animals. At a science meeting in Canada, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands said lab-grown meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.

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