I once dined with the Masai in the Serengeti. Seven thirty for eight, smart safari casual. I tiptoed up to the thorn enclosure, shook hands, smiled, talked about the weather and the flies and the children’s beadwork, admired the big lotus-bladed lion spears, and then my host said, “Shall we go through?” We went into the dining room, which was also the cattle pen, where dinner was standing with a tourniquet around its neck and a lad pulling its tail. A boy took a bow with a blunt arrow and shot a hole in the animal’s jugular vein, which spurted a river of blood dexterously into a long, bulbous gourd that had been cleaned for my benefit with cow’s urine.

After about half a pint had been tapped, the tourniquet was released, a finger of dung applied to the hole, and the steer was re-united with his mates to complain about the greed and cold hands of cooks. The dinner soup was briskly whisked with a stick to keep it from clotting, the stick was handed to a child in the way your mother gave you the cake-mix spoon, and the gourd was hospitably given to me. It was heavy. The family watched with a host’s nervous expectation. Cheers, I said weakly, and lifted it to my mouth. The smell of the disinfected pot reeked rank as I felt the blood move and lurch in the gourd’s neck like a slinking dark animal. And then, before I was ready, my mouth was full, cheeks bulging with body-heat gore the texture of custard, silky and vital and forcing open my constricted throat. I swallowed. Great visceral chugs.

Imagine what it tasted like. Just think. Because, actually, you already know. You know what warm blood straight from a bull’s heart tastes of—it tastes of steak. Not merely like steak. Not just a little meaty. But of the very finest, perfectly velvety, unctuous steak I’d ever tasted. But it isn’t the blood that tastes of steak, it’s steak that tastes of blood, and that’s all it tastes of. I never eat a sirloin now without thinking, This is good, but not quite as good as the real oozing liquid thing. My Masai dinner was, incidentally, the only steak a vegetarian could ethically eat; no animals were killed. It was organic, and it was wholly sustainable. The Masai’s cows owe their long and treasured lives to this occasional painless cupping.

We live in the steak age; marbled fatty buttock is the defining mouthful of our time. Smart cities are being stampeded by herds of restaurants devoted to cows’ arses. This is the bovine spring of red meat, and it’s not just America or the West. Around the world, communities that a generation ago rarely or never ate steak are now craving and demanding the taste of blood. In 1950 there were an estimated 720 million cows in the world. Today there are nearly one and a half billion. In America there is one cow for every three people. Think of a third of a cow—that’s what’s on your plate, and you’re not getting up until you’ve finished it.

Why have we fallen in such greedy love with beef? What does steak say to us and about us? Well, it’s manly. If food came with gender appellations, steak would definitely be at the top of the bloke column. Women can eat it, they can appreciate it, but it’s like girls chugging pints of beer and then burping. It’s a cross-gender impersonation. Steak is a high-value food that doesn’t need a chef. You don’t want some twiddly-accented, jus-dribbling, foam-flicking chef mincing about with your meat. You want a guy in a checked shirt with his sleeves rolled up forking and tonging your T-bone. Steaks even come with their own butch utensils. It’s more like engineering or Lego than cooking. It’s boy stuff. The porterhouse used to be the dining choice of a gauche out-of-towner, a man who was uncomfortable with chic urban menus and didn’t know how to order—“Oh, I’ll just have the steak. Wipe its behind and bring it to the table,” they’d say, just to let the rest of us cheese-eating sophisticates know that they weren’t intimidated hicks. Restaurants would keep steak on the menu just for them because they knew there would always be a certain sort of guy who didn’t think it was an acceptable date restaurant if he couldn’t get a New York strip. Chefs hate steaks because their reputations are left in the hands of their butchers—two cuts off the same muscle can eat quite differently.