A man of apparently several talents outside of disrupting tech (hydrofoiling, MMA fighting, smoking meats), Mark Zuckerberg is ready to take up disrupting cow diets as his next challenge.
In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Meta’s CEO said his newest project is to “create some of the highest quality beef in the world” on his ranch in Hawaii by feeding macadamia nuts and beer to Wagyu and Angus cattle, two breeds that produce some of the world’s most sought-after meat.
Zuckerberg rarely gets a break online these days, and his move into cattle ranching is already being mocked online. It can’t help that the core of his plan to produce better steak is to feed cows the world’s most expensive nut, even if it’s a local one. He explained in his post that the cows in his herd each consume an average of 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of feed a year. One pound of macadamias costs $36 at Hawaii’s Foodland supermarket chain; if Zuck were to stock up on feedstock during normal grocery trips, he’d be out $180,000 to $360,000 a year for each cow.
But since Zuckerberg is No. 6 on the Bloomberg Billionaires List, a better question is how this unusual diet will impact the other end: the cattle. It turns out Zuckerberg hasn’t quite figured that out himself yet.
In the comments, BroBible publisher Brandon Wenerd gushed that he had “So many questions!” about what purpose the macadamia meal serves. “It’ll take a couple more years to fully explore how this diet affects taste,” Zuckerberg answered. “But at a minimum, macadamia nuts are very high nutrition density with lots of proteins and fats.”
He called this likely “a lifetime hobby,” and went on to add:
There is some research on the affects of alcohol on relaxation and muscle tension, but I’m not convinced on that one way or another yet. . . . We’ll tune the beer to whatever they enjoy most over time. Of course, they also graze on their pasture as well so getting the right nutrients in the soil still matters a lot. I have a lot more theories for how to improve this over time.
Zuckerberg didn’t specify what percentage of his feedstuff is macadamia nuts, or where he acquired this newfound animal husbandry trick. The truth is that since the mid-20th century, few animal scientists have explored the benefits of macadamia meal.