Low Carb Confidential

I’ve come to recognize the sad simple fact that I will never in my life have an original thought. I thought “Graze Anatomy” was pretty clever; apparently, so have a lot of other people (Google it and see). Oh well, on with the post…

For a variety of reasons, I decided it was time to look into grass-fed meat. LCC had written some things a while back about it, and when I’d mentioned in a post that I was interested in moving toward a higher meat content diet in the belief that meat basically contains everything needed for healthy subsistence (as intimated in Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories), one of our readers, Dave Dixon, advised me of the following in a reply:

Be careful about assuming that eating nothing but meat provides all of the nutrients you need. This may not be true for grain-fed meat, which is known to contain less of most micronutrients than grass-fed meat, sometimes a lot less. Hunter-gatherers also eat the entire animal, preferring organs to muscle meat. The organs often have much higher micronutrient density than the muscle meat.

I did some early research a couple months ago, and then investigated further a couple weeks ago when I was ready to buy something.  Where I live, there aren’t any real opportunities for buying locally farmed grass-fed meat, so if I want it, I have to get it via the internet.  There are a LOT of sites online where you can buy grass-fed meat.  According to some estimates, the number of U.S. farms producing grass-fed meat has grown from about 40 in the late 1990’s to over 1,000 today (but they all don’t sell over the internet).  I spent a bit of time checking out packages and prices and finally decided to start with American Grassfed Beef in Missouri.  One of the many packages they offer contained a selection of steaks that appealed to me: four 8 ounce cuts each of tenderloin, ribeye, and strip steak, and eight 4 ounce ground beef burgers.  I added a couple sirloin butt steaks for a total of $175, and if you spend over $150, they throw in a 2 pound chub of ground beef.  Orders over $50 get free ground shipping, but you can get air freight for an additional charge.

Over the previous weekend after I’d placed the order, I was at Wegmans and picked up a package of fresh bison sirloin steaks for the heck of it.  Although the package made no mention of it, I assumed  these huge animals would naturally be pastured.  I got into a conversation with one of the meat department workers who told me the Black Angus meat they sell is grass-fed.  I’d asked there about this before and was told that Wegmans does not sell grass-fed meat.  Looking at the label on one of the Black Angus packages, it did say that no hormones or antibiotics were used, but it also stated there are no “animal by-products” in the “feed.”  Wanting to get to the bottom of it, I went home and did some more research and found that Wegmans gets their Black Angus meat from Meyer Natural Angus.  Meyer’s website declares that:

Our cattle are raised on a strictly vegetarian diet. They are fed only natural feed and rations, such as pasture grass, hay, grains and legumes, and then finished on a corn-based diet for true corn-fed flavor.

This points up what was stated in a CBS news report about grass-fed meat a couple years ago: 

With so many producers rushing into the market, the definition of grass-fed varies.  Some meat is sold as grass-fed when grass is only part of the animal’s diet.  “In the eye of the consumer, grass-fed is tied to open pasture-raised animals, not confinement or feedlot animals,” said Patricia Whisnant. “In the consumer’s eye, you’re going to lose the integrity of what the term ‘grass-fed’ means.” 

(Whisnant is the operator of American Grassfed Beef and also heads up the American Grassfed Association, by the way.)  The report also stated that all beef cattle graze on grass at the beginning of their lives, but the general difference is that grass-fed beef herds graze their entire life in pastures, while conventionally produced cattle spend the last three or four months of their lives being fattened with corn or other grains in feedlots.

So, if you’re looking into purchasing grass-fed meat, you’re going to have to do your homework to make sure you’re getting what you want.  That bison I bought?  It was delicious.  But it wasn’t grass-fed as I’d assumed.  I checked out the website of Great Range Brand Bison, the producer of Rocky Mountain Natural Meat, and found these animals are grain-fed.  They show a nice photo of a herd of bison out on the range, so I suppose, like the beef cattle mentioned earlier, the bison also start their lives grazing in the pasture.

My box of meat from American Grassfed arrived last Thursday, right on time.  The carton was like a mini-freezer, and although the package of dry ice included had melted, the meat was frozen solid.  Each item was nicely vacuum packed and neatly labeled.  We left out a four-pack of the burger patties (which took two days to thaw in the fridge) and had them for dinner over the weekend, adding bacon and guacamole.  They tasted just great, and I can’t wait to try the steaks.

Buying meat this way is by no means inexpensive.  My order averaged nearly $16 a pound, and a good chunk of the package by weight was ground beef, which I’m used to buying for $2 a pound on sale at Wegmans (90% lean).  I certainly can’t afford to eat this grade of meat on a regular basis.  To be fair, I’m more of a steak eater than a roast eater, and there are less expensive packages that include roasts and such that go a lot farther for a dollar (they’re sometimes grouped by the sellers in what they call “family packages.”  It’s still an expensive venture to explore, but there must be people out there doing it or there wouldn’t be such an explosion in the number of farms trying to meet the need.  It is possible that demand may shrink in the wake of what the economy is going through at the time.

When I get through some of the steaks, I’ll let you all know what my thoughts are about the whole shebang.  In the meantime, I’ll tell you something as long as you promise to keep it a secret: At these prices, I’m NOT serving any of this to my cook-out guests!