The best steak I’ve ever eaten came from Argentina, where cattle graze on the lush pampas of the central plains. Hot off the grill at The Fifth, that grass-fed filet tasted like an entirely different animal: it was cleaner and sweeter than Canadian grain-fed beef, and it had a bold, gamy complexity that easily held its own against a green pool of chimichurri. The steak was lean, but still juicy and butter-knife tender. Savouring the first bite of that exquisitely charred meat, I instantly understood why the average Argentine eats four times more beef than we do—some 140 pounds per year.

Political and economic roadblocks have made Argentine beef exceedingly hard to find in Canada, but a handful of prescient ranchers are working to match its quality, and to satisfy a growing demand for beef that’s raised the old-fashioned way. So far, only a few restaurants, such as Susur, ever feature grass-fed, and although Jamie Kennedy once raised a couple of steers on pasture—and raves about the results—he doesn’t have any immediate plans to repeat the experiment on a large scale. Home cooks—not restaurateurs—are the ones leading this charge. At Toronto’s Whole Foods Market, sales of pastured beef have increased 600 per cent, to more than 150 kilos a week, since the grocer first stocked it last year; and a new supplier, called Natural Beef Meat Shop (1244 Yonge St., 416-916-2962), opened its doors in Summerhill in late May. The shop’s tender strip loins, from cattle pastured in Uruguay, are wonderfully marbled and clean-tasting, though with a little cheating: while the beef is sold as grass-fed, the cattle get supplementary grain in their last 90 days.