aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, February 24, 2008

How to avoid meat from factory farms

As you may have already read, yesterday I brought home half a cow (or, what has become, at this point, a side of beef).

I was lucky in that I got to meet and know the farmer, pick out the calf when he was young, then visit and watch him grow. This is grainy cellphone video of Doug hand-feeding him grass, and here are photos of our Italian Greyhounds who, oddly enough, enjoyed frolicking with the cattle.

We weren’t precisely inspired to do this by Michael Pollan—a set of fortuitous circumstances has it that in this small town I work with both the neighbor of the farmer and the live-in girlfriend of the owner of the abattoir—but Pollan’s writing has informed us all along the way.

Pollan says that you, too, can be a Retrovore. You can continue to eat beef but avoid factory farms:

I’ve written a lot on industrial meat production, and it’s very interesting to see how people react. Some people react by saying, “That’s it, I can’t eat meat anymore.” Other people look at this and they put it in a box. They don’t make the emotional connection between their 99-cent double cheeseburger and this process that we’ve seen in [last week’s Humane Society video depicting needless machine-like cruelty at slaughterhouses]. Still other people decide they want to still eat meat, but they want to eat meat they feel good about. They want alternatives. Luckily for us, there are some really good ones. There is meat produced in small batches, from ranchers that keep their animals not in feedlots standing in their own manure but in pastureland. They are slaughtered in small plants, just a few head a day.

He says even at farmers’ markets the only way to know for sure is to visit or to ask:

I think if you find meat at the farmers’ market, and it’s grass-fed meat, you are going to meet the rancher there and ask him. Ultimately, that’s the only real assurance: talk to the person who has raised the meat. I don’t know that natural or organic meat necessarily offers you any assurance that the slaughterhouse is humane. I think you really have to look at smaller slaughterhouses. It does tend to be more expensive, but you get what you pay for… Another thing people who are buying hamburger can do is buy hamburger from places that are grinding it themselves. You can go to your butcher or your supermarket and ask whether they are grinding the meat or buying it ground. If you are buying hamburger from someone who is grinding it themselves, it will [probably] come from just one animal, and that will lower the risk considerably.

SEE ALSO: A call for glass walls.