Food Does Not Come From A Store. Part Two: Meat

Let's pose a simple question: what kind of meat would you like to be eating? Would you prefer meat from animals that have been raised in cramped pens and boxes, fed hormones to make them grow faster, given antibiotics to prevent the spread of infectious disease? Or would you rather eat meat from animals that were raised like they were a hundred years ago, as in free-range and fed clean feeds (grass, grain, the things that they ate for thousands of years previously)?

If you don't mind the first, you're in luck. About 85% of the meat that you get to chose from comes from non-organic, non free-range raised, sources. If you prefer the latter, your choices are much smaller and the meats more expensive.

Take hamburger. Most of the commercially available burger is laced with the "pink slime." Never heard of it? I'm not surprised. The "pink slime" is fatty slaughterhouse trimmings treated to remove the fat. Ammonia is added to retard spoilage and turned into a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips. This is then added to hamburger to increase profits. The U.S.D.A. also allows the ammonia to be listed as "a processing agent" instead of by name. And they also okayed the processing method and later exempted the hamburger from routine testing, strictly based on the company's claims of safety, which were not backed by any independent testing.

And to emphasize: this pink slime isn't just in fast food burgers or free lunches for poor kids. This processed beef has become a mainstay in America's hamburgers. McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

This saves three cents a pound off production costs.

How about poultry? The birds are given feed laced, again, with hormones and antibiotics, kept in small confined spaces and most are debeaked to reduce the feather pecking that can occur in birds when they are unable to go about their normal bird behaviors of foraging, dustbathing, and wandering about. This causes the birds stress and pain and produces related hormones that then go into the meat and eggs of the animal. This is what goes into you when you consume them.

And you don't get many companies to choose from when you consume poultry products. As an example, Cargill, is one of the world's largest poultry producers. All of the eggs used in McDonald's restaurants in the United States pass through Cargill's plants.

Although some grocers have begun to stock organically raised meats and eggs, many are reluctant to carry products that fewer consumers purchase, are more expensive and that often have a shorter shelf life. Over the past few years, this has begun to change.

Wegmans, a large mega-store chain, has organically raised beef, chicken and eggs. Most other large chains at least carry organic free range chicken eggs. But how do you go to the next step, insuring that the meats and eggs you buy come from farms whose practices are clean and healthy?

Buy local, that's how.

Below are links for just a few sources for organic free range meats and eggs in Virginia. Also included is a link to Buy Fresh, Buy Local. If you do a little research, you can find sources for almost anything you'd like. Healthy eating.

The Home Farm Store in Middleburg, Va, carries many organic and free range products.
Ayrshire Farm has heirloom free range meat and eggs.
Hollin Farms has beef and pork in Delaplane, VA.
Eatwild is a site with info on grass-fed meats.
Buy Fresh, Buy Local has listings for most of Virginia.

Next: a simple, short book about eating well.