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 Mexicanmole, 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 focuses 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.” One June night, I had dinner with Fernald and some of her employees at the Belcampo farm. In a garden strung with fairy lights, watching the sun set on Mt. Shasta, I ate a sausage, packed in a pig bung, which had cured for three months in a nineteen-forties root cellar. It was my first time on a farm with perfect Wi-Fi, a Polycom conference phone on the dining-room table, and a hand-cranked coffee mill in the kitchen, for triceps exercise. The gate code was 0314, as it was the third quarter of the fiscal year. Smoke from a rack of lamb roasting on a homemade grill drifted over us. In spite of the abundant summer vegetables on the table, it would have been hard, just then, to be a vegetarian—a habit I’ve observed on and off over the years, more for reasons of diet than of spirit. Lately, the bad news about meat had turned me into a timid carnivore. For about a year, I hadn’t eaten it unless I knew something about the source, and I’d all but banned chicken from the house. Here in Fernald’s bubble, where piglets scurried around in fields behind their moms and sheep calmly nuzzled the grass, I wiggled my conscience around but couldn’t make it hurt.

The lamb came to the table, crackling with fat and smeared with vivid green chimichurri. Unlike some grass-fed purveyors, who make a virtue of leanness, Fernald slaughters her animals later in their lives, when they have put on more weight and show the marbling usually associated with the feedlot. She forked me a flap from the end of a rib. “This is the kind of cut that just never gets used anymore,” she said. “But it’s so good when you do it on the grill like this. There’s just so much fat it seeps through. It’s self-basting.” Fernald, like most of her management team, went through her own period of renunciation. Born on a farm in Bavaria, she spent her childhood drinking raw milk and eating liverwurst sandwiches. Her father, a professor of biology at Stanford, was working with the animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, and her mother, who now directs a laboratory devoted to language acquisition at Stanford’s Center for Infant Studies, was apprenticed to a goldsmith. The family were tenants on a baronial estate, living over the dairy barn in a loft that was previously used to teach milkers. A rubber udder hung from the ceiling; the cows below provided heat. On a trip to London, Anya, passing a butcher shop, pressed her face against the glass and declared, “There is nothing so beautiful as freshly squiggled meat.” She was twelve when the family moved to Palo Alto. She became a vegetarian and then, for one dark summer after her sophomore year at Wesleyan, a vegan, grinding her own flour from cattails. In 1999, Fernald went to Sicily to help a consortium of cheesemakers manage an E.U. project to produce Ragusano, a cheese made from pasture-raised cows. She taught the locals how to use Excel, and they taught her how to negotiate. Her mafioso accent, her American parentage, and her car—a BMW with Catania plates—earned her the nickname the Daughter of Al Capone. She could valet-park anywhere, for free. “She picked up her business sense in Sicily,” her father told me wryly. After two years, she went north, to Bra, where she started a job at Slow Food International, travelling the world to find local foods that were in danger of extinction and helping the sellers to develop and market their products. She worked with Bosnian makers of plum jam, Bolivian llama farmers, elderly vanilla growers in Madagascar. In Sweden, she found the only indigenous population in Europe that made dried reindeer meat. “I got enough knowledge to be dangerous at any type of food,” she says. A funny thing happened while Fernald was in Italy. Having given up vegetarianism and the fat-free ways of her adolescence, eating farm animals and butter and drinking a lot of milk, she grew slimmer, and noticed that she no longer had split ends. After six years in Italy, she came home to California and within five months gained forty pounds: American processed food. It took two years to lose the weight, during which time, missing the salamis she’d feasted on abroad, she started a meat C.S.A. She distributed whole cows from the back of a van and had to duct-tape her freezer door closed; she and her friends spent Sundays breaking down pigs to make bacon.

In September, I had lunch with Fernald at the L.A. shop again. While she set to work on a Superman Salad (greens, medium-rare steak, soft-boiled eggs, avocado, sunflower seeds), she urged me to try something new on the menu. “We’re experimenting with a lot of ready-to-go paleo food,” she said, passing me a golden-brown lump. I bit through the deep-fried crust into piping-hot gloop. Fernald laughed. “You can solve for two variables, but maybe you’re only supposed to solve for one variable at a time. I solved for paleo using entrails and ended up with a yucca pastry full of tendon chunks.” Hopes of an El Niño that would dump rain and replenish reserves had evaporated, Fernald said; meteorologists were predicting another dry winter. Travis Cash, the cowboy who runs Belcampo’s North Annex, brought in a witch, in the hope of finding urgently needed stock water. Weed, a town near the farm, was gutted by a wildfire, and two employees lost their homes. Fernald put tip jars on the butcher counters: “Spare Change for Weed.” The beef situation had grown dire, along with the weather report. With the Santa Monica and West Hollywood locations in the works, Fernald was going to need more land to keep her cases full. “Let’s just say I’m not fully bullish on beef,” she said. “We’ve joked that if in 2015 things continue this way we’ll scrape off the gold lettering from our signs and replace it with ‘Nuttin’ but Mutton.’ ” The exigencies of the drought, if Fernald can navigate them, could provide her with the best opportunity to change the way people eat meat. As in other times of scarcity, necessity might drive consumers to broaden their habits—teach them to cook cheaper cuts and accept alternatives to beef. They will almost certainly be forced to eat less and pay more: the U.S.D.A. recently reported that beef prices had increased fifteen per cent in the past year, and are expected to keep rising.