In these fraught political times it’s important to stay on top of emerging stories. With that in mind, I alert you to the upcoming vote on February 24th on a resolution designating the T-Bone as the official Oregon State Steak. It is sponsored by Senator Todd Nash, who, coincidentally, is a cattle rancher.

Senator Nash admitted he preferred the Ribeye as the state steak but Oklahoma already took that. No one else has even a state meat, although Louisiana has an official meat pie, the Natchitoches Meat Pie. Perhaps if there was more competition among the states he might be persuaded to stick with his original Ribeye, there being considerably fewer than fifty cuts of steak. The Ribeye could be the Northern Cardinal of official steaks. Basically all the states have the cardinal as the state bird because they can’t name any other birds.

Undaunted by the Oklahoma ribeye situation, however, Senator Nash flip-flopped to the T-bone and made a darn good case for it. After all, the T-bone has two distinct cuts of meat divided by a bone, representing Oregon’s natural divide to a T, as it were. The yummy juicy filet mignon portion is that precious smaller bit to the west of the Cascade Mountain Range, a.k.a. bovine lumbar vertebra, where the larger urban liberal populations determine the political outcome for the rest of the state, a.k.a. the more conservative but less populous eastern strip steak portion. And the disenfranchised strip steak portion of the state is now considering peeling off and consolidating with Idaho, probably because of its famous potatoes, but maybe also because of its conservative stance on such items as women’s reproductive autonomy, the rights of property owners to destroy ecosystems for profit, and the advancement of potato-white people in general.

Not to be out-maneuvered, the Oregon Potato Commissioner, Leif Benson, proposed and succeeded in making the potato the Oregon State Official Vegetable in 2023. Prior to that point, nobody even knew we had a potato commissioner.

Senator Nash, meanwhile, is not expected to meet with much opposition to his T-bone proposition. A significant portion of the Filet-Mignon side of the state has vegan tendencies, but they aren’t quite energetic enough as a group to mount an effective campaign. And they’re still smarting at the adoption of Brewer’s Yeast as the official state microbe, rather than Nutritional Yeast. The vegan electorate has been effectively silenced by the revelation that, unlike brewer’s yeast, nutritional yeast is killed during processing.

The elevation of Brewer’s Yeast, however, did spur the state of Illinois to designate their own state microbe, Penicillium rubens, the mold that led to the mass production of penicillin, which is considered a boon to humanity, if not on the same scale as beer.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been on fire to propose a state microbe, although since he is generally thought to be “in a state” of some sort, nobody knows which state it is, California and New York being in contention for the honor. Once that is determined, and settled by the appropriate courts in the states in which the gentleman would like to be considered a resident for political purposes, his resolution should encounter smooth sailing, there being so little competition for state microbes.

The only pushback might be if it is determined that Mr. Kennedy is, as the head of Health and Human Services, likely to benefit financially from the advancement of his favorite microbe Morbillivirus, which causes measles. Analysts see nothing but growth potential, however, and there’s nothing more American than making profit.