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Anya Fernald, with employees, at the Belcampo farm, in Gazelle, California.
  Credit Photographs by Carolyn Drake / Panos

Thirty seconds after I met Anya Fernald, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Belcampo, a sustainable-meat company whose ambition is to seduce Americans away from industrial food, she offered me a plate of lamb tartare. Fernald is thirty-nine and nearly six feet tall, with growing-out ombré hair and the exuberant energy of a team of wayward ponies; we were sitting at the counter of a butcher shop and restaurant she had recently opened in downtown Los Angeles. I said no, as nicely as I could. Something that a retired U.S.D.A. safety expert had once told me about raw lamb, stored grain, barn cats, and Toxoplasma gondii was ricocheting around my brain. Fernald looked at me quizzically and immediately delivered a mug of bone broth, a grayish, mildly animal brew that tasted how I imagine stone soup would. If I am ever recovering from hypothermia, I hope there is some handy. Then we split a succulent twelve-and-a-half-dollar steak-grind burger with homemade ketchup, and a Moroccan-flavored goat-leg sandwich.

The shop-a butcher case and a counter with six seats-is in Grand Central Market, a covered food court opened in 1917 and filled with sellers of Mexican mole, neon signs for chop suey, and macadamia-nut lattes: the Harrods of Los Angeles. Fernald told me that the first time she saw the place she thought, “Boom, I want to do that. I want to be a brand from the nineteen-twenties, a late-agricultural or pre-industrial brand.” In 1920, she says, people ate four ounces of meat every three or four days; they all had a tub of lard in the cupboard; and their hips were wider than their waists. (Today, the average American male eats 6.9 ounces of meat a day, and women eat 4.4. Lard has all but disappeared, and so have waistlines.) The location was a winner: between demand from Latin-American grandmothers and adventurous young urbanites, Fernald was selling four or five lambs’ heads a week. The chef, a CrossFit trainer, had attracted a muscular, grain-averse crowd. One diner customized a bunless sandwich of lardo smeared on headcheese.

Belcampo, which has its offices in Oakland, California, and its core landholdings near Mt. Shasta, owns a farm, a slaughterhouse, restaurants, and butcher shops, and grows most of its own feed. “Tyson figured out that vertical integration is the key to profitability,” Fernald says. “That’s the same thing we’re figuring out.” Tyson, the apogee of the industrial meat system, was founded during the Great Depression and succeeded in making meat plentiful, cheap, and commonplace. Belcampo, born in the teeth of a historic drought that is devastating California agriculture, in a country flooded with three-dollar-a-pound skinless, boneless chicken breasts, wants to restore meat to its status as a luxury: delicious, expensive, and rare. As a proponent of bones and skin, Fernald prefers her customers to eat whole quail but nonetheless reluctantly sells boneless, skinless chicken breasts, for $15.99 a pound.

As ranchers across the country aggressively destock-cattle inventory is at its lowest since the U.S.D.A. started keeping track, in 1973-Belcampo, which opened its first shop in 2012, is expanding rapidly. In addition to Los Angeles, it has butcher shops and restaurants in Palo Alto, Marin, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. In the coming months, the company will open in Santa Monica and in West Hollywood. Within a couple years, Fernald plans to replicate Belcampo on the East Coast: farm, slaughterhouse, and retail. The problem, she said at lunch, is beef, the Escalade of the livestock industry. Without more water, Belcampo cannot increase the size of its herd. Even though the company has raised its already steep prices five per cent, people persist in buying beef, and the farm is running out. “When people want rib eye and tenderloin, they really want it,” one of Fernald’s employees said.

More than any other food, meat focusses cultural anxieties. In the seventies, beef caused heart attacks; in the eighties and afterward it carried mad-cow. Recent decades have brought to light the dark side of industrial agriculture, with its hormone- and antibiotic-intensive confinement-feeding operations, food-safety scares, and torture-porn optics. The social and environmental costs, the moral burden, the threat to individual health-all seem increasingly hard to justify when weighed against a tenderloin.

To the concerned consumer, Fernald offers broad permission to indulge again. Her animals are raised in seemingly ideal conditions, and die about as calmly as food animals can. The ruminants eat only grass; the omnivores eat grain grown on the farm, supplemented with organic, G.M.O.-free feed that the farm buys. Her handlers practice low-stress stockmanship, gently coaxing the animals into trailers and corrals and into the twenty-thousand-square-foot slaughterhouse she designed in consultation with the animal-welfare expert Temple Grandin. The last sounds a Belcampo animal will likely hear are “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h, sh-h-h,” whispered by a handler it has known since birth. After that, the “knocker,” equipped with a bolt pistol and headphones, renders it unconscious with a pop. The breakdown of each animal is painstaking; Belcampo processes only eight cows a week. The result of all this care is a product that is precious in every sense: Belcampo’s premium cuts can cost four times as much as their equivalent in conventional meat. For internal accounting, the farm charges the shops “high market plus twenty per cent.”

“I live in a bubble and I’m trying to create a bubble,” Fernald told me. “I recognize that we’re creating a product that is financially non-viable for a lot of people. But I’m also prepared for when the health impact becomes undeniable and people decide to reprioritize their budgets. I think my bubble’s going to get bigger. Not because I’ll find more rich people-I think more of the rest of America is going to decide this is worth it.”