For three days this week I was a student at  Beef 101 , an intensive course taught by the Texas A&M University meat science staff, led by  Dr. Davey Griffin , Dr. Jeff Savell , and Ray Riley. The class covers everything about cattle, from the time that they’re weaned to the moment their meat makes it to your plate.

The first day began with all of us students introducing ourselves. It’s a very cordial way of breaking the ice that I’ve come to expect at seminars in Aggieland. There were students from Cargill, Le Cordon Bleu, Taco Bell, and national grocery retailers. There was even an economy professor from Tokyo. They all explained their reason for taking the class, and most of those reasons were simple and straightforward: they wanted to learn about how a steer is graded or where the sirloin comes from. There were also a few barbecue guys there, like  Aaron Franklin  and Braun Hughes of  Franklin Barbecue  and Justin Fourton  of Pecan Lodge . They attended to understand how the brisket is removed from the steer and where all those short ribs come from. When the introductions got around to me, I said something about wanting to know more about beef ribs. But that was because it seemed a bit dramatic to be brutally honest: I was there to see a steer die.

Of course I wanted to learn more about the anatomy and the individual muscles that make up a side of beef. But I’m keenly aware that my job is essentially about eating beef, mainly smoked brisket. If that’s my livelihood then I should probably be able to witness how beef goes from being on the hoof to on the butcher paper. It started by meeting a few live steers.

Seven steers were inside a fenced area just outside the morning’s lecture hall. Each team was assigned one and we got to grading. The official beef grading happens by an inspector after the carcasses have hung for a few days, but we needed to become amateur estimators. We felt the animal's brisket, poked into his coat to estimate the amount of fat covering the ribs, and at one point had to stare straight at his ass end. With little confidence we wrote these numbers into a scoring chart that would be checked against the same animal’s carcass. The tan-coated  Simmental cross  I was inspecting was soon to become the carcass that we would butcher the next day.

Back in the classroom there was much talk of “harvesting.” This is the term used by most everyone at the university. I did hear the words “kill” and “slaughter” used a few times, but the obvious preference was to say harvest. We suited up in aprons, hairnets, and hardhats before entering the slaughtering facility. I was braced for the worst as the doors swung open. It was warm and there was a mineral smell in the air. Several of the cattle were hung and had already made their way through several steps of the process.

It starts by stunning the cattle. They are then hoisted upside down and bled out. The head, hide and hooves are quickly removed in preparation for evisceration. Once the guts are gone, a man with the very large portable band saw halves the carcass, which is treated with lactic acid to kill bacteria. Those half carcasses are then sent into a cooler to chill, usually for a few days.

At one point a student approached Dr. Griffin and asked if he could take photos. Griffin's response set me at ease about the intentions of the program. He said “Of course. We have nothing to hide here. This is why we're showing you all of this.” It’s a refreshing attitude in the wake of  "Ag Gag" bills being passed in states all over the country  where the simple action of snapping a photo in a processing plant is a punishable offense. We were all taking photos from one end of the floor to the other, then I heard the gate open at the stunning station. In walked a black Angus steer and the gate shut behind him. He was quickly stunned in the forehead by a student (almost the entire labor force are meat science students), and hoisted up  for the rest of the process to be carried out. I had witnessed what I came for.

I was one of the last to leave and Dr. Griffin stood just outside the doors. He asked about the experience. I had learned so much about the process of beef slaughter, but what stuck was how the still-warm carcasses jiggled. I was used to seeing them on the other end of that two-day chill in the cooler where they’re stiff and the fat is white. Griffin noted that the necessary evil was the harvesting process, and he quickly admitted that it wasn’t his favorite part of the job. “I don’t get excited about watching cattle harvested.” I then asked about that term “harvest”. He said there was some discussion in the industry to go back to a term like slaughter in order to be more honest about what occurs in that room, but one of the tenets of this industry is that these animals are raised for no other purpose than for food. When they have reached their optimal weight, cattle are sent through the processing plant in the same way that an ear of corn is plucked from the field when it’s ripe.

One thing that was most clear was that at some point the animal becomes beef. I mean that along the continuum of transformation that a steer goes through from stunning to consumption, most everyone has a point where the item in front of them is no longer an animal, but is food instead. For some this dissociation might occur when the meat is packaged for retail sale under shrink wrap or maybe just the act of cooking the beef dissociates it from