In Costco a few days ago, a customer interrupted me as I reached for roast. “Excuse me. My doctor recently told me I needed to add meat back into my diet. I don’t know anything. Why did you choose this cut over that cut?”
I’d overheard her asking the butcher where the grass-fed beef was. He told her they didn’t sell it.
YOU GUYS. Everything within me wanted to break it down for this lady. I wanted to take her to school in every way. I wanted to whip out a legal pad, scribble notes and tell her to keep searching for local meat. I wanted to invite her to my house and give her cooking lessons. If her doctor is telling her to eat meat, she must be sick and needs the healthiest food available.
I should have said, “Sign up for my newsletter.”
But I didn’t. I was in a super-duper-beyond-hurry and didn’t have time to pontificate. I gave her a one sentence answer, felt guilty for being rushed (still do), and moved on. Haven’t stopped thinking about her.
What I Wish I Could Tell Her
YAY that your doctor isn’t demonizing beef! Yay that you’re buying meat and trying to learn to cook it! Baby steps, sister!
Beef is one of the healthiest meats because of the size of the animal, the number of stomachs and the time it takes for maturation. Stop to think about this: a thousand pound animal that survives on salad? aka grass.
She was looking for grass fed meat in a grocery store. The problem with not buying directly from a farmer is that we can’t ask questions about how the animal lived its life.
Better than grass fed from Costco would be to look into a delivery program like the popular affiliate linked Butcher Box. Actually, Grass Roots is better than Butcher Box, if you’re going to buy from a cooperative and not directly from a farmer. Reasons more than I want to explain here…in a nutshell, the standards for Grass Roots are higher than Butcher Box.
Best of all is to buy directly from a farmer.
Baby Steps
Chances are if she was asking the meat guy at Costco about grass fed meat, likely she doesn’t frequent farmers markets.
Her first baby step would be to find a farmers market and go. Buy something. Anything. Talk to the vendors there. Get a feel for the market and the people.
Another baby step could be to find someone who raises chickens and sells eggs. Eggs are super nutritious and cheap considering the amount of protein per egg. Here’s an article I wrote about finding the most nutritious eggs, even at the store. Pay more and look for a few key words to get optimal nutrition.
Labels Are Tricky
Just because a label proclaims health doesn’t exactly mean it is healthy. This is why we must educate ourselves and be on the alert for fancy labels.
“Grass fed” is one of those tricky statements. Probably 100% of beef has been grass fed at some point. And probably 99% of beef has been grain finished. Grain finishing makes incredible marbling (flavor) but at the expense of altering the health of the animal.
Questions to Ask Farmers
When talking to farmers, try to ask open ended questions. Try not to appear to be the armchair expert. Try to have the heart of a learner and talk to them like a neighbor instead of grilling them for a job interview. I’ve been guilty.
When buying local meat, I like to ask beef farmers:
How much grain do you feed your cows? Assume some. Farmers use grain to convince thousand pound animals to go where they need to go. Growing up my dad could walk out into a pasture and his cows would follow him to the end of the earth…if he had a bucket of grain.
When it comes to grain, my preference is less. Some farmers will contain animals and feed grain exclusively the last weeks/months of life. I want my beef to have room to roam. I would rather have “gamey” tasting meat than marbly grain finished. Best is grass finished meat that is marbled; this takes knowledge, skill, and time.
Pork and Chicken
Can your animals go outside? Do they? Sunshine and fresh air is so important. Most pork and chicken sold in stores is raised exclusively indoors.
Sunshine in pork translates to vitamin D in the meat which is important for our immunity as we’ve learned in the pandemic.
When packaging says “vegetarian fed” this means grain. Both pigs and chickens are omnivores and are meant to have a varied diet.
What do you feed your pigs/chickens? It’s not uncommon for pigs and chickens to be fed food scraps. Best is when this farmer has a cow and feeds the skim milk to piggies and chicks. Skim milk makes fat pigs (and people!)
Pigs and chickens will need extra grain. They cannot live on grass alone.
How much antibiotics do your animals get?
Store bought: I look for some form of “no antibiotics” on the label for pork and chicken. Unless you see those words, assume the meat has been given routine antibiotics.
Antibiotics in our meat translates to antibiotic resistance in humans, as well as weight gain. Animals are given antibiotics to help them gain weight (store bought meat). I don’t need any help gaining weight thankyouverymuch.
Other General Questions
Tell me about your farm. How long have you been farming?
What makes your farm different?
What are the best/worst parts of farming?
Are you able to find GMO-free grain? (organic and GMO-free grain is difficult to source in some parts of the country. Often very expensive.)
More on Grocery Store Meat
Last week thousands of cattle died in feed lots in Kansas from extreme heat. If those cows had been living on grass, like the way we like imagine our beef, they would not have died in the same temperatures. Grass is able to absorb heat. Cows in feed lots that end up in grocery meat cases are living in squalor void of grass. Local farmers usually provide some form of shade. Each year this is a repeated catastrophe because cows are not meat to exist in such conditions as feed lots.
The American consumer is to blame because we require animal protein for pennies. Could you replace ONE MEAL this month with local meat? To change the way America thinks about meat it takes many of us taking baby steps.
I recognize food prices have skyrocketed in the last year. I don’t buy all our meat from local farmers (thus the story of me getting roast at Costco.) I’m not trying to beat up anyone. I am encouraging us all to take a baby step to do better. Not just for the animals but for our health and the health of our planet.
Personal Update
Moving to a new city has many challenges. My husband grew up in this part of town and unfortunately his familiarity doesn’t transfer to me. Or maybe I should say fortunately.
He’d never taken me to the Valley Dairy Freeze in the 25 years I’ve known him. (It’s been around since 1959.) Fortunately he had not taken me so the kids and I can say we found this diamond in the rough! The kids and I ate lunch and ice cream there this week and promptly fell in love. Our summer challenge is to try a new ice cream combo every week.
We’ve moved a few times in our married lives (to Little Rock, Phoenix, overseas to Fiji, and summers in Florida and Colorado when he was teaching.) These moves made me painfully aware that while I *think* routine is boring, routine is surely convenient.
I’m starting from scratch trying to source our food. In Little Rock, I was submerged in the local food movement. I knew farmers. We drank raw milk, ate pastured meats and biodynamic veggies.
We are not starving in Louisville. There’s a Costco here but it’s 30 minutes one direction - in good traffic.
Jigg’s is a local produce stand just a couple minutes away that sells seasonal produce and several Kentucky products to include meat and pasteurized, non-homogenous milk. I asked the market owners about the growing conditions of the meat but they could only tell me it was raised in Kentucky.
And of course there’s Kroger and Wal-Mart.
I’ve wanted to hit up farmers markets. Our 3 Saturdays here have been packed with other essential activities. I’ve identified markets I want to hit this Saturday and stalked farms on-line. I’m talking to like minded friends and asking where they source meat. I’ve found raw milk on the other side of town. I’d love to find a farmer and get a half side of beef in my freezer this fall.
Baby steps.
Life is hard, food doesn’t have to be,
Julie
PS - if this newsletter has been encouraging to you, forward it to a friend and encourage them to sign up.