ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that the La Granda is only the final outcome of a contested process, originated in the second half of the nineteenth century, which has radically modified the political ecology of the Piedmontese breed. First it explores the development of the making of the Piedmontese breed from 1886 until the late 1950s. Finally, it deals with the shifting status of the Piedmontese breed from an apparently endangered local animal species in the mid-1990s into a food specialty for the cosmopolitan consumer in contemporary New York. In 1935 the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests established the first standard of the breed, which aimed at making of the Piedmontese a bovine population comprising animals specialized primarily in work and then in milk and meat production. Raimondi's support of the second standard was perhaps his final attempt to protect the normal Piedmontese livestock from the spread of the double-muscle factor, literally the last bulwark against the groppa doppia.
