What Did Your Meat Eat?

Grass Fed or Grain Fed, and Why It Matters

How do you want your food? Free ranged, or confinement? Genetically modified, or natural? “Enhanced,” or pure? With or without growth hormones and antibiotics?

There are already too many choices involved in providing healthy, conscientious foods for your family. Now add “grass fed, or grain fed” to the list, and then qualify it, because it’s legal to advertise some “grass fed” meats that are finished with grain diets.

Why should you care what your meat ate anyhow? The answer depends on whom you ask.

The Case for Grass

Those of us with only one stomach can’t digest grass. Cows are different. They have a double gutted system which includes a 45 gallon fermentation tank called the rumen. This converts cellulose into protein and fat, using stomach bacteria as a catalytic converter.Until the 20th century, virtually all beef was grass fed. In American supermarkets today, it’s nearly impossible to find any beef that didn’t come from a feedlot. However, to convert the cow’s natural digestive process, man had to mess with nature. Francis Thicke, an organic dairy farmer in Fairfield and candidate for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, puts it simply.“Grass loves by nature to stay in one place. Cows love by nature to graze. The madness of modern agriculture reversed the process,” he told us.
In 100 years, corn has shortened the average life of a steer from 5 years to 15 months, while adding body fat to its carcass. Grass can’t take a baby calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in a year and a quarter. For that matter, corn can’t do the job alone either - it takes protein supplements, antibiotics and growth hormones.

Michael Pollan wrote about the consequences for cows taken off pastures and put into feedlots:

1.) Their new diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, so rumination all but stops. Then gasses inflate the rumen like a balloon, pressing against the animal's lungs. Unless action is promptly taken (forcing a hose down the esophagus), the bloated animal suffocates;

2.) Corn turns cows’ rumens unnaturally acidic, causing them to pant, salivate, paw at their bellies and eat only dirt. This can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of their immune system.

This has further consequences for meat eaters - the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Acidic rumens breed pathogenic E coli bacteria. Unheard of before the 1980s, E coli now lives happily in the intestines of most U.S. feedlot cattle. According to Pollan, the microbes that find their way into hamburger used to get killed off by human stomach acids, but by acidifying cow guts with corn, modern agriculture destroyed the food chain’s natural defense system.

Other health arguments for grass fed beef include much higher omega-3 fat counts, more vitamin E and conjugated linoleic acid, a nutrient associated with lower cancer risk. Thicke sums it up.

“Our cows harvest their own food and spread their own fertilizer and they love their work. This makes more sense than the modern mode of hauling fertilizer and feed in trucks making round trips,” he said.

The Case for Grain

Iowa was built on corn grown to feed animals, giving Americans the highest powered diet in the history of the world, at bargain prices. Grain fed meat costs less to produce, at least with all the current political subsidies in place.Some environmental and humane advantages of grass fed livestock are debatable. Cattle raised on pasture produce more methane than feedlot animals. Even with U.S. beef cattle spending only six months outside feed lots, huge parts of the American West are used for grazing livestock that pollute water, erode topsoil, kill fish and displace wildlife. Bringing cows to market weight on rangeland alone would multiply the damage. The USDA's Animal Damage Control (ADC) program was established in 1931 to eradicate, suppress, and control wildlife considered detrimental to grazing livestock. Opponents dubbed ADC “All the Dead Critters” and “Aid to Dependent Cowboys,” so the federal government changed the name to “Wildlife Services.”

Government “services” include poisoning, trapping, snaring, denning, shooting, and aerial gunning. In “denning,” government agents pour kerosene into a den and ignite it, burning young critters alive. Among the animals intentionally killed are badgers, black bears, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain lions, opossum, raccoons, striped skunks, beavers, nutrias, porcupines, prairie dogs, black birds, cattle egrets, and starlings. Animals unintentionally killed include pets and endangered species. The agency, whose motto is “Living with Wildlife,” intentionally kills more than 1.5 million a year.

This prompted a bumper sticker that reads “Wildlife Services, “Living with (Dead) Wildlife.”

In the Pudding

Most people think corn-fed beef is superior, but that is a matter of taste. Corn-fed cows develop well-marbled flesh, which lends a melt-in-the-mouth texture and a softer flavor that most American and particularly Japanese diners prefer. Grass fed beef is leaner and has a heavier flavor, preferred by traditional diners in parts of Europe, particularly among those who chew more than the average American.

Generally speaking, because of its lower fat content, steaks and roasts of grass fed meat taste better undercooked, rare or medium rare. For this reason, burger is by far the most popular form of grass fed meats. Jerky is also a crowd pleaser.

Buying Grass Fed Meat

Iowan Steve Wallace has assembled a coalition of ranchers who raise cattle fed 100% grass diets. Wallace Farms is adding new family farmers to the group, to increase production. Grasstravaganza, Thankful Harvest and Klinge Farms also offer grass fed Iowa beef.

Some Iowa buffalo and elk ranchers offer meat that is grass fed, too, but sometimes these animals also eat grain. Heartland Elk eat only grass and hay unless drought intervenes.

Grasstravaganza beef can be found occasionally at the Downtown Des Moines Farmers’ Market. New City Market at 48th and University sells Wallace Farms burger, steaks and roasts year around. All these ranchers sell directly to the public via mail order.

Grasstravaganza
641-449-3254, grassfedmeat@yahoo.com.

Klinge Farms
563-783-2456

Thankful Harvest
712-365-4433, tagerman@netllc.net

Wallace Farms
630-466-8723
info@wallacebeef.com

Heartland Elk
Metro Market
2200 Woodland
heartlandelk@hotmail.com