A few more thoughts on grass-fed beef...and meat in general

You may be saying to yourself after reading my last post:  “I want to get me some of that grass fed beef.” Here are some things to look for.

All range cattle destined for the dinner plate (or fast food wrapper) start out life grass fed. Cattle are allowed to graze on grass until 7 months. Then they’re moved to the feed lots to be fattened up. So theoretically a market could advertise that their beef is grass fed. Be sure to look for labeling that says “100% grass fed” or “grass finished”. This ensures that the steer only ate grass. You might see at the market “organic beef”. This simply means that the grass the steer fed on wasn’t sprayed with pesticides and that the corn it ate wasn’t genetically modified (those nasty GMOs). While that’s all fine and dandy the fact remains that the steer was fed a diet of corn which its body can’t digest.  The best of all would be organic grass fed beef (in yelp language: $$$$) which, come to think of it, I haven’t seen too often. I’m pretty sure they carry it at Berkeley Bowl if you’re fortunate enough to be able to shop there.  Whole Foods has grass fed beef but it’s not organic…and they just upped the price to $8.99lb! Like I said, I get my beef from Tassajara Meats at the Friday farmer’s market. Not too sure if it’s organic or not.

How much do I pay per pound? All I can afford is ground beef…$6.00lb. More expensive than Costco’s finest? You betcha. But in the realm of grass fed meat prices, a great bargain. I saw grass fed beef at Nob Hill ($5.99lb) but it comes all the way from Australia. Too big of a carbon footprint for me.  So we eat smaller amounts of beef...which is vital to the health of our planet. Read on…

If you want to jump on the grass fed beef bandwagon, come aboard! There’s plenty of room. But you must realize that it’s not a panacea that will solve all our problems. The United States has become a huge meat-eating machine. We consume massive quantities of meat: beef, chicken, pork.  Meat is a major portion of our diet. Other countries are eating more and more a Western diet…and so the demand for more meat rises.  But having everyone start buying/eating grass fed beef isn’t the answer. There simply isn’t enough grazing land on planet Earth to support the amount of meat that the USofA consumes. This is why factory farms were started in the first place: to conserve resources. So really the only solution is to eat less meat.

Mark Bitten (Food Matters) talks about being “less meatarian”. In other words, limiting meat to just a few times a week will make a drastic difference in the health of our planet.  The Environmental Defense Fund supports this idea helping consumers understand what kind of impact meat production has on our resources such as water, fossil fuel, greenhouse emissions:

“If every American had one meat-free meal per week, it would be the same as taking more than 5 million cars off our roads. Having one meat-free day per week would be the same as taking 8 million cars off American roads.”

We eat vegetarian 2x week. And when we do eat meat, I try to treat it more like a condiment (Bitten’s idea) or if we’re having bbq chicken, I limit the portion to the size of a deck of cards. I’m not always successful but I’m trying to be conscious of what we’re eating and that’s the first step. No, I’m not aiming to be vegetarian; just trying to have a shift in awareness.

Why I buy grass fed beef (aka why I don't buy factory farmed beef)

Corn: If I’m going to talk about beef, I have to talk about corn. Corn is being grown in massive quantities. And not the juicy sweet corn that appears at the farmer’s market begging to be shucked and grilled and slathered with herbed butter. Nope. This corn is industrial grade corn that is inedible for human consumption. Yet, farmers in America are being subsidized by Uncle Sam to plant acres upon acres of the stuff. In fact, to stay afloat financially, farmers have to grow more than is needed. What happens to the excess? The corn is dumped into colossal piles creating gargantuan mountains of inedible food.  (A lot of it is destined for highly processed foods but that’s another post!)

Cattle: Let’s take a moment for a short anatomy lesson. Cattle are ruminates. They have 4 stomachs for digesting food. They have a super capacity for taking food that has no nutritional value for humans (like grasses and clover) and extracting nutrients by chewing and swallowing, then regurgitating the mass (cud) to be further digested in each of the four stomachs. Pretty cool.  

Unfortunately, someone got the brainy idea that one way of eliminating the vast overproduction of corn would be to feed it to cattle, even though cattle do not have the ability to digest the corn. So what happens when you give an animal food whose body is not designed to digest?  Michael Pollan wrote an article in the New York Times about what happens:

“Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates.
A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.”

Yea baby! Grill me up a burger from that meat! The remedy for the problem is to give the cattle copious amounts of antibiotics and other pharmaceutics to keep the animal alive until it can be slaughtered.  At one time cattle were brought to market when the animals were 4 to 5 years…now its 14 -16 months. Cattle need to be fattened up quickly to make the whole production profitable…enter the factory farm: huge feed lots where animals, standing in their own excrement, are corralled into small areas. There’s a whole bunch of other problems and ramifications from the production of factory farmed beef. Indeed books have been written on the subject. Suffice it to say, I think it’s pretty clear why I just can’t bring myself to ever spend one red cent on factory farmed beef.



Lucky me! I get my beef from Tassajara Meats at my
local farmer's market.



Grass fed beef on the other hand, is letting the animal do what it was created to do.  Grasses and clover are so conveniently converted into a high quality, healthy protein. Grass fed beef is lower in calories and fat than factory farmed beef. It’s high in omega-3 fatty acids. True, grass fed beef is expensive. So what I do is use smaller quantities and add to the meat beans and grains. Great flavor, awesome nutrition, humane animal husbandry. Hey, that would make a good bumper sticker. You heard it here first!

(PS...if you want to know more about the relationship between corn and factory farmed beef watch Food Inc and King Corn. Both are eye openers!)