While Texas grapples with its worst measles outbreak in decades, its Republican lieutenant governor has moved for the state’s restaurants and groceries to change the name of the “New York strip” steak cut to the “Texas strip” in what he evidently hopes is a blow to liberals.
Dan Patrick announced on Friday on social media that he intended to go to Texas’s senate and work with lawmakers to pass a resolution favoring the switch – which would not carry the force of law but nonetheless would amount to a substantial statement of legislative support.
Patrick’s announcement made it a point to allude to the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump ordered to be renamed to the Gulf of America in an executive order early in his second US presidency.
And, perhaps anticipating reproval for his choice to focus at least some of his attention on renaming meat after a child in his state became the first person in the US to die from measles in a decade, Patrick’s statement said: “In a world filled with serious issues that address every day at the Texas capitol, this simple resolution will help better market Texas beef.”
Some users of the platform where Patrick touted his proposed Texas strip resolution were not deterred from verbally assailing him over it.
“Glad to see you’re focused on the crucial issues plaguing your constituents,” one wrote sarcastically. “Very important cause here and not at all ridiculous or a waste of time.”
Another wrote that if Texas doesn’t strive to reduce property taxes, “many Texans will lose their own Texas strip of land.”
Patrick’s proposal takes aim at the New York strip as labeled by the Delmonico’s restaurant chain, which started in Manhattan in the 1800s and served the beef cut alongside mashed potatoes as its signature dish.
He said that he had recently met with Texas’s association of cattle feeders and cattle raisers – and he bristled when some of them told him their favorite cut of meat was the New York strip.
“New York has mostly dairy cows,” Patrick wrote in his announcement, which noted that Texas leads the US with 12.2m head of cattle. “Just because a New York restaurant named Texas beef a New York strip in the 19th century doesn’t mean we need to keep doing that.
Now, Patrick said, Texas would ask the state’s restaurants and grocery stores “to change the name of this strip of meat the next time they reprint their menus”.
“We want this to catch on across the country and around the globe,” said Patrick, who has been Texas’s lieutenant governor since 2015. “Liberal New York shouldn’t get the credit for our hard-working ranchers.”
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“We promote the Texas brand on everything made or grown in Texas because it fits our economy and jobs.”
Patrick’s announcement came on the same day that his state’s health officials reported measles cases in more than 145 people in Texas. Days earlier, a school-aged child who contracted measles died after not being given a vaccine providing immunization against the highly contagious but preventable disease.
The outbreak is Texas’s largest in about 30 years. And the child’s death was the first fatality from measles in the US since 2015.
By Sunday, the situation in Texas had deteriorated to the point that Trump-appointed US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr – who for years has sown doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy – published an opinion column on Republican-friendly Fox News that read: “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”
Texas’s measles epidemic is not the first contagious disease outbreak amid which Patrick has drawn political criticism from some. He managed to do the same in the spring of 2020 when he argued that “lots of grandparents” in the US would rather die than risk hurting the economy with activity restrictions meant to slow down the spread of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic.
