Chewing Jerky Makes Your Face More Formidable
Long Detours for Good Jerky
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man driving alone across the country must be in want of jerky. Twice, I have made long detours into the Oklahoma panhandle to buy jerky, specifically to a lonely nowheresville called Boise City, where resides the world headquarters of a company called No Man’s Land Beef Jerky. Needless to say, it’s the best beef jerky I’ve ever eaten, and two pounds of it will last about 2,000 miles, give or take.
Jerky is saddle food, which is why its best eaten while driving across the Great Plains, and why detouring into remote parts of Oklahoma to acquire it is not just acceptable, but practically mandatory. With good jerky there’s an ancient atavistic impulse at work, the same one that causes men to devote their lives to perfecting barbecued ribs. Jerky calls up a deeply-buried ancestral memory of a steppe warrior, your greaty-great grandfather, astride a pony gnawing on an auroch. There are not too many other snack foods that can do that. Potato chips, popcorn, and cheese puffs are infantile, designed for people with weak teeth and narrow jaws. Chewing jerky makes your face more formidable.
Most brands of gas-station jerky are execrable. They taste of strange chemicals and societal collapse. That sounds apocalyptic and overblown, but the ubiquity of bad jerky is a sign of something wrong. I guarantee that come the After-After-Times we’ll have better jerky than we do now. Jerky should taste of beef, salt, pepper, umami, and maybe hickory smoke or red pepper flakes. Strangely flavored jerky is dishonest. Attempts to jazz up jerky with exotic flavors, like teriyaki, mango habanero, or Dr. Pepper marinade, are attempts to hide inferior meat and an industrial processing that dishonors the people who first cut mammoth in to meat strips.
I could spend most of the afternoon talking about the many, many brands of jerky that have disappointed me. Laying aside the inedible, like Obertis and JackLinks, near the top in disappointment is Love’s jerky, which is sold at the Love’s Travel Stop chain, a major feature of the American highway ecosystem. Love’s truck stops usually devote an entire aisle to their jerky, so popular is it. Which, more than anything, proves that you shouldn’t trust the culinary choices of truck drivers. By rights, Love’s jerky should be good. It’s produced by Robertson’s Hams, another fixture of Oklahoma, and purveyors of genuinely good ham. It’s made of nothing but beef, salt and pepper, and it doesn’t taste actively bad, just disappointing. The problem is two-fold: it lacks a certain umami and the strips are much too thin. It’s tough, as good jerky should be, but more crumbly than chewy, and insufficiently meaty. In short, disappointing.
Another thing that bothers me about Love’s jerky is the Robertson’s origin story found on the Robertson’s Hams website, in which ham patriarch V.B. “Tup” Robertson, like stout Cortez staring at the Pacific, discovers jerky.
That’s not a good origin story.
This, from Britt Smith of No Man’s Land Beef Jerky, is a good origin story:
Tup Robertson had only “heard” of jerky, while Britt Smith had actually tasted it. In fact, note the centrality of a road trip in that story, and how Britt was moved to action by bad gas-station jerky. Heroic!
Also, notice that 50 years ago, a man in the meat business, in Oklahoma, had no idea what beef jerky was. This suggests that either Tup was very dim, or what we think we know about the history of jerky is probably wrong, or at least in need of greater elaboration. I think we’re going to find, when we look at it, that there was a modern jerky revival starting in the 1960’s, one that was largely disconnected from the older jerky traditions of the 19th century American Southwest. But, that’s my guess and a topic for another time.
So, No Man’s Land Beef Jerky is my favorite. It comes in three honest flavors, Mild, Hot and Black Pepper. I’ve never tried Black Pepper. Hot is my favorite.
I bring up the subject of jerky, because I recently saw that the Mapco convenience mart around the corner, here in Nashville, was selling No Man’s Land jerky. This was a surprise because I had never seen it outside of Oklahoma or Texas. A quick google search brings up an article in which, under new ownership, No Man’s Land announces it has decided to go national. And there it is, in my local gas station.
Buyouts and expansions of beloved food brands are always bad news. I’m still reeling from Frank Pepe’s becoming a chain. However, the No Man’s Land jerky I bought the other day was as good as it’s ever been, meaty, beefy, salty, umami. So maybe this will work out for a little while. In the meantime, all I need now is a long road trip.
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