BEYOND BEEF : THE EXOTICS : The search for low-cholesterol meat has led to the unconventional. Is ostrich the beef of the future? : The Long Necks

Archaic creatures with long necks and scaly legs stalk through the grassy fields. This may be the future of meat, but Rancho Jocoso looks a lot like “Jurassic Park.”

Ten years ago, film director Mike Nichols was raising Arabian horses on this wooded Santa Ynez, Calif., ranch and selling them to fellow celebrities; the motto on the spacious Spanish Colonial horse barn still reads per equos ad astra , “through horses to the stars.” Today, Hawaii-based Multi-Industries Farms runs 500 head of ostrich here.

They strut around with an absurdly grandiose air, surveying the world from the eminence of their nine-foot height. They can’t fly on their richly plumed wings, but they sometimes waggle them around languidly. When they sit down, their legs bend backward, like a chicken’s, making them look as if they’re resting on their elbows and about to drum their fingers on the ground (actually, their legs end in two toes, one of which is like a hoof). They have huge eyelashes and brains the size of one of their eyeballs.

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In a quarter-acre pen, a ranch hand is trying to capture a troublesome young male. Ostriches may look quaint, but those massive legs can kick in a car door. Fortunately, they’re easy to overawe--stick a rake up in the air and most ostriches will figure you’re taller than they are and, therefore, outrank them in the pecking order.

This doesn’t always work, though, so the ranch hand holds the bird off with a set of bicycle handlebars mounted on a pole. Eventually he gets close enough to grab its neck and pull a hood over its head. Ostriches are actually calmer when they can’t see anything.

They also have a tendency to treat absolutely anything as food. “We have to run magnets over the whole property for nails that have come out of the fences,” says Rancho Jocoso administrator Laura Leifer. “The birds will eat them if we don’t. We call it ‘hardware disease.’ ”

Eighty miles east of here, 50 ostriches wander around a sloping field in Topanga Canyon, just a couple of hundred yards from a well-known organic restaurant. Proprietor Doug Osborne, a big, jovial, red-faced man in running shoes and torn jeans, was a pig buyer for Merrill, Lynch and PaineWebber before he discovered ostriches.

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“Eight years ago, I read a story about ostriches in the National Enquirer,” he says, lounging in front of a computer screen. “I came back to the brokerage and told (partner) Annette (Abel) about it. Six years ago we went to Texas to buy some birds.”

What did he read about ostriches? Only that they were the meat of the future: a tasty red meat that is fat-free, ecologically blameless and (at least potentially) cheap, coming from an animal that needs only a fraction of the space or food a cow does. And incidentally, ostriches have supple hides worth many times as much as cattle leather and five pounds of luxurious ostrich plumes per bird.

“Ostriches live up to 80 years,” Osborne says, “and from age 2 or 3, a pair will produce 20 or 30 eggs a year--after a couple of years, up to 60 or more. About two-thirds of the chicks will reach adulthood, and at 12 to 14 months each one will yield 75 to 90 pounds of meat.

“They’re extremely bioefficient. They eat grass and alfalfa, and it only takes 1 3/4 pounds of food to make one pound of ostrich. Compare that with cattle, where it takes 10 pounds. I’ve been trying to talk the State Department into setting up ostrich ranches in Haiti.”

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Part of this efficiency is the fact that growing ostriches use their ingested calories almost entirely for growth. They don’t start storing excess energy in body fat until they’re 2 or 3, and even then they layer it around their internal organs and under the skin, rather than “marbling” it into the meat.

Ultimately, ostrich meat should be even cheaper than beef, but in the short run, breeders are getting $11 or $12 a pound for hamburger and anything from $15 to $30 a pound for steak, because it tastes like beef but is leaner than chicken. The meat is already being sold to the public and featured in restaurants.

The current prices may seem high, but they apply only if a breeder is willing to sell a bird for its meat at all. At the moment, a year-old pair (ostriches are monogamous, so they’re always sold as mated pairs) that hasn’t even produced any eggs yet will fetch $12,000 to $18,000. “I don’t see a regular slaughter market for 7 or 10 years,” says Osborne.

And it will be probably much, much longer before many of us will ever cook an ostrich egg. That will be a study in itself. One egg is about as large as two dozen hen’s eggs, meaning you’d need an especially large omelet pan. Boiling will be a more practical cooking method. To soft-boil an ostrich egg, they say, cook one hour; to hard-boil, figure on 1 1/2 hours.

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With ostrich prices as they are, it’s no wonder Osborne and others estimate that there are at least 12,000 ostrich breeders in the United States, particularly in Texas, Oklahoma and California. Osborne’s own operation is fairly representative of the current state of the ostrich business. He doesn’t just raise birds for future meat sales. He also sells eggs and ostriches--and incubates eggs and raises birds--for other would-be breeders. With partnerships and consignment deals, he “networks” with 35 other ostrich ranchers, including several members of his own family.

At times, the frenetic ostrich start-up business has had the look of a get-rich-quick scheme along the lines of chinchilla ranching in the ‘50s, or even a pyramid scam. Osborne hastens to point out that ostrich ranching is successful in South Africa--there are difficulties, but no insuperable problems like the fur-chewing that made chinchillas a losing proposition--and ostrich breeding, unlike a pyramid scheme, really has a salable end product.

At any rate, the dollar signs are up on the wall, and ostrich rustlers have already appeared on the scene. A year and a half ago, police noticed some ostriches while investigating a Sunland, Calif., man for running an unlicensed motorcycle dealership out of his back yard. The ostriches turned out to have been stolen from the man’s former employer, and identification was positive--a hand-held reading device detected the tiny microchip “dog tags” implanted in their flesh.

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Maybe ostriches really are the future. In the meantime, these peculiar, primitive creatures, unchanged in 7 million years, are a handful for those who are raising them. “They have great survival instincts and no sense at all,” says Osborne. “They can’t tell one person from another, though they do sense that the one with the feed bucket is the most important one.” Every ostrich breeder, it seems, is familiar with at least one passage from the Bible--the description of the ostrich in Job 39:17 (“God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath He imparted to her understanding”).

But breeders tend to develop a wry, exasperated affection for their charges. At the American Ostrich Assn. Convention held in Las Vegas in February (see H19), one experienced breeder, having described all her troubles trying to raise ostriches, concluded, “Now it’s a pleasure to go out and look at those little feather dusters runnin’ around.” Or as a woman in a pantsuit told a companion at the trade show, “They’re dumb and mean, but they’re cute, honey.”

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Bird Bites

Texas is an ostrich-conscious state. Half a dozen restaurants there feature ostrich meat, including the Mansion on Turtle Creek and the Huntington Grill, both in Dallas. Ostrich is also sneaking into restaurants elsewhere around the country. The Forest Room at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Deer Valley, Utah, for instance, features pan-seared ostrich loin with roasted jalapeno and sweet potato Napoleon with blackberry cassis sauce.

In Southern California, at least four restaurants now make a point of serving ostrich.

* New Cuyama Inn, New Cuyama, halfway between Santa Barbara and Bakersfield, was long the only ostrich-oriented restaurant in the Southland, but its ostrich burger has been joined by others.

* Paula’s Burger Barn, Santa Ynez, also makes an ostrich burger.

* The Hitching Post, a well-known restaurant in nearby Buellton, features barbecued ostrich steak on special, accompanied by sweet-sour dried cherry and black pepper sauce, and there’s also an appetizer-size ostrich steak.

* Planet Earth, Santa Monica. Ostrich burgers and sliced ostrich with sweet potato puree, baked plantains and raspberry-Port sauce.

Other Southland restaurants that have ostrich on the menu at least part of the time are Gennaro’s and Il Gazebo, Glendale; Benvenuti, San Luis Obispo; and Sea Venture, Pismo Beach.