American food historian Betty Fussell (The Story of Corn, My Kitchen Wars) has penned much gustatory memoir, cookery compilation, and historical exploration over the past few decades. So taking a bite of her latest, Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef, is confusingly unpleasant: nicely charred on the outside, unpalatably gristly on the inside.

In Steaks, Fussell clearly wanted to combine two currently popular genres in the food-nonfiction world: the how-a-single-food-changed-the-world genre (Oranges, Vanilla, Banana, Tuna, and the like) and the let's-investigate-the-food-industry genre (Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Stuffed and Starved, The End of Food and so forth).

Her take on the first genre — a lofty sweep through the cultural history of the cow in America — is entertaining and sure-footed, with plenty of amusing hyperbole: "Steak is fast, mobile, improvised, casual, egalitarian, reliable, raw, bloody, and violent — and it tastes best outdoors." Her investigative chops, however, are flaccid. Steaks is presented as a random road trip — now Fussell's in New York, chomping down at a steak party, now she's on ranches in Texas, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, now she's back in New York at a steakhouse — and the book's journalism is as scattershot as her travels.

The problem is partly one of context, or the lack thereof. Floating quotes go unattributed throughout the book, an oddity not rectified by the capacious endnotes; public figures such as George F. Will and Vandana Shiva are mentioned without being identified as who they are or why they're important. (Marion Nestle is mentioned twice, for example, before she's finally described, on the third mention, as a "nutrition expert.")

Of the dozens of ranchers, scientists, and activists Fussell interviewed, most are introduced so briefly, so interchangeably, and with such forgettable clichés that they blur into a mush of ground beef. A "lady meat buyer" is "a vivacious pretty blue-eyed brunette," for example, while one of the many (always heroic) ranchers is simply tagged with an inane query: "Why is it that ranchers always have sky-blue eyes?"

Underneath this Sloppy Joe ooze, however, are the bones of what could've been a fine piece of investigative journalism. Fussell visits industrial feedlots, tours a massive slaughterhouse, and learns how to butcher a cow by hand. She documents, somewhat haphazardly, our country's addled marriage of farmers and ranchers with corporations and government, and dabbles in the quite terrifying science connecting industrial food production to such major public-health threats as E. coli and mad-cow disease. But even in condemnatory mode, she’s mild, and offers no prescriptions for change. Instead, she abandons the queasy chapters for a round of enthusiastic steak-chomping at Peter Luger in New York, and wraps everything up with a selection of recipes. Appetizing? Only to those with no beef to grind.

CAROLINE CUMMINS is the managing editor at Culinate, a national food-awareness website.