Beef: It's What's For Dinner

by: Jill Richardson

Mon Sep 01, 2008 at 13:33:16 PM PDT

Well... here's where some more of that money is going. The Nebraska Beef Council gave an award for "Best New Beef Product" and the recipient gets checkoff money to market its product. A brilliant idea of the winner were "mom 'n pop" ... only the winner is Tyson. Hardly a company in need of extra cash. I bet they HATE the "big government" program that gave it to them too.

The winning product was called Yankee Pot Roast. More below the flip.

Greenwashing Beef

by: OrangeClouds115

Sun Aug 10, 2008 at 09:55:20 AM PDT

From the site:

Grain-fed for Minimum 350 Days

Our one-of-a-kind feeding program is a key contributor to incomparable taste and tenderness. For a minimum of 350 days, our cattle receive a high-energy diet consisting of corn and whole grains. It's a wholesome, nutritious diet that our cattle thrive on.

They say that after going on about how good the cows are for the environment, hormone-free, yadda yadda. Going back to Michael Pollan's article Power Steer:

We have come to think of "cornfed" as some kind of old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn't. Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier. (Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6, which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine and CLA, another "good" fat.) A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef. In the same way ruminants have not evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating grain-fed animals. Yet the U.S.D.A.'s grading system continues to reward marbling-that is, intermuscular fat-and thus the feeding of corn to cows.

More below the flip, including why I think it's cruel that Vintage Natural Beef feeds cows a grain diet but no antibiotics.