I don't eat a lot of red meat mainly because:
- I'm offended by the complete lack of respect and care our feed animals go through and the abuse many of them sustain at the slaughter houses.
- I am against the overuse of antibiotics used in feedlots.
- I'm against the unnaturally high amounts of red meat our culture tends to eat.
That said, I will occasionally splurge and purchase ranch raised, grass fed, "unfinished", organic Angus beef at an organic place down the street from where I work. It is expensive, but I don't have it very often.
Did you know, that in 1 McDonald's hamburger patty, you could be eating the meat from as many as 100 cows, if not more?
See all that black stuff in the picture below:
That's not dirt. That's feces. Nothing grows in feedlots; no grass, no flowers. Nothing. Some of them, in the US, are so bad, cows develop rot in their hooves from standing almost knee deep in feces. Because nothing grows in the feedlots, the feed the cows are given (which is mostly corn, which cows cannot properly digest, which leads to painful bloating, infections, and discomfort) are laced not only with antibiotics but also nutrients that cows would normally find if they were allowed to graze properly. I remember the story of one feedlot, before vitamin A was introduced into the feed, where many of the cows were going blind. Like, a significant number of them were going blind. No one could figure it out until they noticed a bunch of cows who weren't blind. They watched what they did. They managed to find a few shoots of grass just beyond their fenceline and grab them with their tongues and pull them out to eat. Just the little bits of grass they could get had enough vitamin A to keep them from going blind.
The reason that there are antibiotics in the feed is because:
- There are ALWAYS sick animals in the feed pens. ALWAYS.
- It's too expensive and too hard to remove those sick animals, quarantine them, and treat them so they just heavily dose ALL the animals with unneccessary antibiotics. Many doctors believe that the massive amounts of antibiotics we unwittingly ingest via our food sources is helping create such "super bugs" as MRSA, etc.
Do we need meat? Certainly. We are omnivores, but we don't need and weren't designed by whatever power you wish to believe in to eat meat every single day. Especially red meat. Plus, the meat in the supermarket, apart from being laced with everything you don't want, may also contain things such as salt (frozen chicken breasts, for example, often contain some form of sodium which, when you cook the chicken breasts, leaks out and thus you end up with smaller breasts than you'd like *I typed that with a straight face*), and in some cases even SUGAR, which has been injected into the meat to make it taste sweeter, because "manufactured meat" is (to me) almost totally tasteless.
Don't be overly fooled by organic meat in the supermarket either. Marketplace, a show on CBC, which does consumer investigations, found that almost all their organic chicken they bought from various super markets contained antibiotic-resistant forms of bacteria; up to 11 different strains.
If you can get it right from the farm, that's the best way to get it. Be cautious though: Free run doesn't usually mean what we think it means. In Canada, "free run" chickens must have:
- a window in their barn (they don't need to have ACCESS to the window)
- Enough room to spread their wings without touching another chicken.
- have access to nesting boxes.
That's it.
Free range chickens are allowed to have access to outdoors (though in Canada can only go outside for so long during the year b/c it gets cold earlier than say in Texas). They peck at their food from the ground (rather than battery chickens which are in cages and have food in troughs infront of them) and can nest where they wish. The higher cost of free range eggs though comes from the fact that a) eggs are sometimes laid all over the place rather than just in nesting boxes in a barn or in cages and thus labor costs are higher b) they may be laid in some rather unsanitary conditions, and c) Spoilage factors are higher than in battery or free run chickens.
Organic beef will be grass fed, NOT finished (the only way to "finish" a cow is with corn and that doesn't make it organic since corn isn't something a cow can easily digest - at least that's the understanding from the woman my parents get their beef from). They are free range and have access to a variety of grasses, flowers, etc upon which to feed.
I would say, in response to your question: If possible, eat the meat you can find through farmers, not stores, unless you can find stores operated by independent ranches that offer truly organic, free range meat. Stuff you find in Costco isn't truly organic apart from the fact that the "organic" meat may be missing the antibiotics traditional feedlot meat animals receive. Apart from that, not much else is different from my understanding. Same deplorable living conditions and same disgusting "harvesting" practices.
Right now, I currently only eat frozen chicken breasts (because the fresh kind are just too expensive) and locally canned salmon. If I want red meat, I will treat myself to the grass fed free range stuff at the store up the street. Beyond that, I try not to touch store bought meat and haven't for probably a year now.
Hope this helps.
This is a great website for grass fed meat and offers locations on where you can buy from pasture-based farms.
http://www.eatwild.com/index.html
http://www.eatwild.com/products/index.html
This is also a really interesting page on what actually consitutes as "feed" for our meat animals. The shocker for me: Pot scrubbers inserted into the cow's stomachs as "roughage" rather than bringing in hay.
http://www.eatwild.com/animals.html
Cheers!