Real Food Blog » Meat Production

Meat Production

...now browsing by category

 

Vegan Turned Butcher Talks About His Journey

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

The farm-to-table philosophy has been mostly about knowing where food was grown. For meat, that meant knowing if your chickens were caged and if your beef was grass fed.

But with the revival of the butcher shop, some young people are undertaking the largely lost art of butchering as a stronger way to connect with their food.

For 24-year-old Andrew Plotsky of Washington, D.C., that meant leaving his job as a barista in a snobby coffee shop to learn the process of raising an animal, slaughtering it and butchering it for a meal.

“I had a romantic idea of the way I thought animals should and could be processed,” he tells The Salt. He says he was attracted to the small scale tradition of a whole community having its hands involved in the raising of animals for food. “I wanted to be a part of that process,” he says. “Somehow, that manifested in pig slaughter.”

Long gone is the idea that only chefs care about the provenance of the meat they cook. Now, the notion of knowing a piece of meat’s history seems to be trickling into the mainstream. Who raised it? Who killed it? How did it die? Who butchered it? It was questions like these that led Plotsky across the country.

The former vegan went to Vashon Island., Wa. to learn the butcher trade from Brandon and Lauren Sheard. His goal was to document the process for about a week and half. He ended up staying for two years.

“I had been preparing myself intellectually for years,” he says. “The immediacy of taking life was difficult at first. It’s still something I’m figuring out how to rationalize.”

Pigs are first shot with a rifle to stun them. Then their throats are cut to let them bleed out. “The moment of silence before the shot is taken was difficult,” Plotsky says. “It came out of fear that the pig would suffer.”

By killing the animal himself, Plotsky says he strengthens his bond to that animal, as well as the food it provides, the ground it lived on, and the family and friends he shares the meal with.

Though killing the animal weighs heavy on Plotsky’s heart, carving the precise cuts from the pig weighs heavy because of its physical size. He has to wrestle the carcass and take awkward positions to make sure he gets exact cuts. “There’s a steep learning curve,” he says.

As a pork butcher, Plotsky typically uses a bone saw, a cleaver, a boning knife and another sharp knife to “break down” a pig. Each side of the pig will get cut into quarters: the shoulder, the leg, the loin and the belly. Using geographical markers, such as the sternum and vertebrae, butchers locate exactly where to slice first. For the leg quarter, it’s one vertebra up from the curve near the bottom of the spine.

Two years later, the butcher and filmmaker is still working at the farm and documenting the process with the Sheards for others to see. He says he finds the work enriching because he’s present for the whole process — something he hopes more consumers can connect with through his agrarian videos.

It seems to be working, too. “I see the ‘hipification’ of butchery in urban areas like Brooklyn and San Francisco,” he says. “It’s a good thing.”

His favorite cut of a pig? The trotter, or the foot. “If you have a trotter on a plate, you should feel blessed and not say ‘Ew,’” he says. “They’re kind of everything a chicken wing dreams of being.”

Andrew Plotsky’s film on pork butchery. Caution: Some images may be graphic for some viewers.

On The Anatomy Of Thrift: Side Butchery from farmrun on Vimeo.

Source: NPR

Posted in Meat Production | No Responses »

Lierre Keith on The Vegetarian Myth

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

Posted in Meat Production | No Responses »

47% Of Supermarket Meat Has Drug Resistant Staph Bacteria

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

Meat in the U.S. may be widely contaminated with strains of drug-resistant bacteria, researchers reported Friday after testing 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased at grocery stores.

Nearly half of the samples — 47% — contained strains of Staphylococcus aureus, the type of bacteria that most commonly causes staph infections. Of those bacteria, 52% were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

DNA testing suggested the animals were the source of contamination. Environmental health scientist Lance Price, the study’s leader, said the animals most likely harbored these drug-resistant pathogens because antibiotics routinely are fed to livestock to promote growth and prevent disease in crowded pens on large farms.

“These findings really point to serious problems with the way food animals are raised in the U.S. today,” said Price, who directs the Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research center in Phoenix.

Last summer, the Food and Drug Administration urged the meat industry to cut back on antibiotic use out of concern that the practice breeds drug-resistant bacteria in stockyards and makes antibiotics less effective in humans.

But other scientists said it was premature to conclude that antibiotics in animal feed were to blame. About half of all humans have staph bacteria in their noses or throats, and a food handler with poor hygiene could introduce the pathogen to the food supply, said Beilei Ge, a food scientist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

The meat and poultry samples tested in the study represented 80 brands and were purchased in Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Flagstaff, Ariz., and Washington, D.C.

Scientists incubated the samples for up to 24 hours in a broth that was kept at human body temperature and used genetic tests to determine whether they contained the staph bacteria. Then they treated them with vancomycin, oxacillin, tetracycline and other antibiotics to determine whether they were resistant to the drugs.

The research was funded by the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, which opposes the routine use of antibiotics in animal feed.

About 11,000 people die every year from S. aureus infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than half of those deaths are from the hospital “superbug” methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA.

The direct risk that consumers may acquire a staph infection from meat can be reduced by cooking meat thoroughly and washing all foods and surfaces that come into contact with raw meat, whether or not it is resistant to antibiotics.

However, Caroline DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C., said the study results suggest that consumers might benefit by wearing gloves when they handle raw meat. “It’s making us rethink our advice to the public,” she said.

The American Meat Institute, which represents producers, said Friday that the country’s meat and poultry supply was safe. And data from the CDC show that cases of food-borne illness in the U.S. have declined 20% in the last decade.

William Marler, a leading food safety attorney, said it was helpful to test meat samples available in stores because the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service focused its testing on meat production facilities.

“It’s good to see more people doing retail testing because it shows us that our meat is far less sanitary than most consumers would think,” he said.

But the bigger threat to public health is that widespread antibiotic use in livestock could make the drugs increasingly ineffective in humans, Price said.

The American Medical Assn., the World Health Organization and other medical groups have warned that the misuse of antibiotics in food animal production may be creating a serious problem for human health by fostering development of drug-resistant bacteria.

Studies in Canada and Denmark show that taking antibiotics out of animal feed makes antibiotic-resistant bacteria less prevalent in both animals and people with no ill effects for animals or ranchers, Price said.

“Our lifesaving medications are being used as tools to make animals grow faster,” Price said. “We must do everything we can to protect these antibiotics that protect our health.”

Source: Los Angeles Times

Posted in Factory Farming, Meat Production | No Responses »

Why Eating Meat Is Not Immoral

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

I came across this blog post today linked to from the Weston A. Price Foundations Facebook page. While I think in some ways their argument is a little simplistic. (e.g. The argument that, “It’s what we have always done”. The same could be said of slavery and foot binding, after all.) Although, generally I think it puts the issue out there in a pretty nice way.

From: Real Food Dudes

This is a special post where I  (Dude1) have the special privilege to interview Erik (Dude2) regarding a hot button topic.  Hopefully, you find it interesting and please feel free to voice your own opinion in the comments section.  Today’s topic is the controversial subject of meat eating vs. vegetarianism.

Dude1:
So let’s talk meat.  I know you have something on your mind that occasionally comes up and tends to drive you a little crazy.
Dude2:I read a rant last night about how people shouldn’t eat meat and it got me thinking about what exactly is wrong with their argument.
Dude1:What was the reasoning of this particular person for why nobody should be eating meat?
Dude2: Their argument had two key points. First, they say that people don’t eat other people, so why is eating other animals any different? Second, they say that meat animals are bad for the environment.  I think that’s pretty representative of most of these debates.  Sometimes they throw in a nutritional angle, but that’s easy to shut down if you specify humanely raised grass-fed meat.
Dude1:I don’t understand the people don’t eat other people argument.  Obviously, nature doesn’t work like that.  Funny how lions don’t eat other lions.
Dude2:Yeah, the first argument is a red herring.  They are trying to cast the issue as one of superiority and “speciesism” (discrimination based on species…), when the truth of the matter is that it’s an issue of ecological natural order.  Some animals eat meat, and humans are in that group.  It has nothing to do with some kind of power trip, it has to do with biology, nutrition, and digestive systems.  Conflating that with the moral issues of human society is simply a distraction.  Another issue I have with this argument is that it’s trying to make an absolute moral distinction where there is none to be made.  If breeding, killing and eating animals for sustenance is immoral, why does the same rule not apply to fruits, vegetables, fungi, and microbes?  When you start talking at an ecosystem level, it is difficult to distinguish so-called “sentient” life from these other life forms — their interrelationships are so complex that they develop a form of intelligence all their own, and it is certainly disrupted by tilling it under to grow domestic veggies.
As for the environmental part of the argument, this is a little more nuanced.  I have to agree with them that the vast majority of meat animals currently being raised in industrial society have enormous bad impact on the environment.  The grain that is raised to feed them, the antibiotic resistant pathogens that result from constant drugging, the air, soil, and water pollution that come from the concentrated herds are all detrimental.  However, this is a problem of the practice of animal husbandry, not a problem with the existence of the animals.  Animals raised correctly on pasture do not cause pollution, and they actually  improve biodiversity and sequester carbon into the soil at the same time they promote healthier soil and plant life.  They are healthy and do not require maintenance dosing of any drugs, and they generally live a life much like you would expect to see in a wild population.  So, CAFO meat is indeed bad for the environment, but pastured meat is not.
Dude1:I often hear it being argued that if humans can survive on nothing but fruits, vegetables, and grains, then why should we be eating meat?
Dude2:Because it’s good for us, and we like it!  Humans are a part of nature, and our natural role includes the consumption of both meat and plant foods.  Besides, the burden of proof is on the people making that kind of argument because they are proposing a radical lifestyle and nutritional change.  The “why not” approach is not sufficient for them, but it is for me; i.e.  we’ve always eaten meat, so why shouldn’t we?
Dude1:But can you tell us why you think it might actually be important that humans eat meat?
Dude2:I’d say that it’s important that at least a significant portion of humanity continues to eat meat.  There are several reasons, but the two biggest are nutrition and ecology.  While it’s certainly possible to have a complete diet based entirely on plant foods, it is more difficult and expensive to do so.  Access to meat greatly improves the likelihood of getting an appropriate amount of fats, protein, and other trace nutrients for the average person.  Additionally, good quality meat animals can be raised easily on land that would not support the type of agriculture necessary for plant-based crops of the same nutritional value.  On the ecological side of things, humanity is basically the only functional predator remaining in large areas of the world.  While I agree that this is not a good thing, it does mean that we have the responsibility to play that role appropriately or face the degradation and likely extinction of many prey animals that have co-evolved with their predators.  All life occurs in a cycle between birth, growth, death, and decay.  Participating in that cycle is not immoral, and upsetting it would likely have dire consequences.  If prey animals are not to be allowed to go extinct, then they must be part of a functioning predator prey cycle.  If it is okay for “natural” predators to eat animals, but not for humans, then the argument is basically saying that humans exist outside of nature.  I don’t think that’s the case, and I’m sure that the other side of this debate would agree.  In fact, the argument I read last night seemed to be saying that because humans are part of nature they must not eat meat.  My mouth was left hanging open on that one.
Dude1:That’s where I see that some environmentalists go wrong.  They define nature as the state of the earth without human interference. Therefore, they are implying that humans are not part of nature.
Dude2:I consider myself an environmentalist, in that I do as much as I can to leave the world in better condition that it was in when I found it.  I believe that they share that goal, but in my opinion they seem to have a misunderstanding of ecology. Being part of nature means fulfilling your natural roles, and for humans that includes consumption of meat. Ironically, there are a lot of environmentalists that say there are too many people, then argue (possibly even correctly) that the only way to support more people is for everyone to be vegetarian.  That seems like it would exacerbate the problem to me…
Dude1:Good point.  But they may be talking about supporting existing humans that are starving to dealth across the world.
Dude2:They may be, but then if they make life supremely comfortable for everyone by providing a bountiful harvest (with or without meat), it is an absolute certainty that we would end up with even more people unless there is some serious education regarding the reasonable ecological role of the human.  Besides, the lack of hooved animals is a prime contributor to the desertification of those arid areas where people are actually starving.  Governments regulate the rangeland to limit “overgrazing” (which they have incorrectly defined), and the side effect is that the grasses and forbs that co-evolved with the ruminant animals are killed from lack of animal impact.  That’s a large part of what the holistic management book is about.  Arid areas NEED meat animals in order to maintain their ecosystems.

Posted in Meat Production | No Responses »

Prime Cuts May Be Just Glued Together Left Over Scraps

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

Meat Glue: It sounds utterly repellent; like some pre-industrial, rustic adhesive, but it’s actually a fine, tasteless powder that looks like icing sugar and is it makes meat and other proteins stick together like super glue. If your eating meat, chances are you’re eating or have eaten the glue at some point.

This sort of thing has been a boon to the food industry, which can now treat all sorts of proteins like meat or fish as just another material to be processed, but in the hands of molecular gastronomists it’s become a way to manipulate food in a way that would have been previously impossible. It’s possible, for example, to make tenderloin rolls wrapped in bacon that hold together perfectly without the need for twine or toothpicks. So what kind of glue is it exactly?

Produced as Activa by Japan’s Ajinomoto Company, it’s scientific name is “transglutaminase” and it belongs to the family of clotting enzymes which are eight in number.

Thrombin is a coagulation protein which together with the fibrous protein fibrin can be used to develop a “meat glue” enzyme that can be used for sticking together different pieces of meat. It can be made from blood taken from either cows or pigs.

Less than a year ago, the European Parliament had voted to ban bovine and porcine thrombin. The House said the meat glue has no proven benefit for consumers and might mislead them instead.

The Parliament estimated that there is “a clear risk that meat containing thrombin would find its way into meat products served in restaurants or other public establishments serving food, given the higher prices that can be obtained for pieces of meat served as a single meat product”.

But two weeks ago, all but one of the European Union nations voted in favor of using Thrombian, or Transglutaminase (TG). They now joing other developed nations such as teh U.S., Canada, and Australia who approved the product.

The Swedish government’s recent approval of the use of Thrombian prompted the Swedish Consumers’ Association and politicians to join together to criticize this approval.  “We do not want this at all–it is meat make-up,” Jan Bertoft of the Association told IceNews, a daily Icelandic newspaper.

“The problem is that Thrombian-enhanced products look like real meat.  It is the dishonesty in it that makes us think that it is not okay,” said Bertoft.  For example, pork tenderloin can have numerous small parts fused together to produce what will appear to be a full fillet.

According to blog, Cooking Issues, Meat Glue is commonly used all the time, primarily to:

• Make uniform portions that cook evenly, look good, and reduce waste

• Bind meat mixtures like sausages without casings

• Make novel meat combinations like lamb and scallops

According to the Food and Drug Administration’s website, Transglutaminase is classified as a GRAS product (generally recognized as safe).

Health Canada approved the product. However, the glue also raises food-safety issues, says Keith Warriner, an associate professor of food science at the University of Guelph, in a phone interview from his office. If there is a bacteria outbreak, it’s much harder to figure out the source when chunks of meat from multiple cows were combined.

Yet another innovation is “modified atmosphere packaging”, the widespread practice of filling meat packaging with adjusted levels of oxygen and other gases. The gases can keep meat from losing its fresh-looking red hue. Shiv Chopra, an Ottawa food-safety expert and retired Health Canada scientist, said in an e-mail that the technique is “dangerous” because it may prevent shoppers from seeing when meat has gone bad. UBC’s Allen agreed: “This can be misleading to consumers.”

Click to continue »

Posted in Meat Production | No Responses »

Our Quest For Artificial Meat Hits A Snag

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

What does artificial meat taste like? Our chances of learning the answer anytime soon look dismal. Vladimir Mironov at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) has been developing bio-engineered meat for years. He recently told the Associated Foreign Press that he planned on offering one of the first taste tests for his creations this August at a European Science Foundation workshop in Sweden! The chances that he’ll actually be able to follow through on that proposal, however, looks pretty slim. Why? MUSC recently suspended Mironov and other members of his team following accusations of “unacceptable behavior” – apparently unrelated to his faux meat dreams. This is just the latest in a roller coaster history for Mironov’s lab grown animal muscle. Will we ever know if his Charleston-engineered-meat (aka “Charlem”) tastes as good as the real thing? Hopefully yes, but that day is probably not going to come this August.

Over the past decade, Mironov has developed techniques for taking myoblasts (cells which later form muscle), bathing them in fetal bovine serum, and growing them in a bioreactor. There has been success with tissue from turkeys, chickens, lambs, pigs, and cows. Mironov and his close collaborator Nicholas Genovese were recently interviewed by Rob Carli for the AFP about the progress they’ve made with Charlem. Their dream is that such in vitro meat will one day be able to be produced on a large scale. The same way we have wineries and breweries we will have ‘carneries’ that grow artificial meat for mass consumption. At the moment liver cells are actually the easiest ‘meat’ to culture in the lab, which means that the taste test that Mironov planned to give to fellow researchers in Sweden could have been a form of foie gras.

Around February 11th, however, the path to the first faux pâté hit a pitfall. MUSC suspsended Mironov, Genovese and others on the artificial meat team. According to the Post and Courier, the suspension was due to comments Mironov made to a USC administrator. The account in the Post and Courier reads like a soap opera: voluntary psychiatric evaluations, intimidating suggestions to retain legal counsel, escorts by security guards from laboratories. There is little to no indication that any of this is a result of work on the Charlem, it’s probably stemming from a “more important” $20 million tissue biofabrication for human organs project that Mironov was set to lead. Still, the effect on Charlem doesn’t look good. Genovese told a local ABC news affiliate that their work would go on with or without MUSC, but I don’t think you can see this as anything but a set back.

In fact, it’s one in a long history of travails for Mironov and his in vitro meat. Funding has been a roller coaster ride. More than 10 years ago, he got some major grants from NASA to develop in vitro meat for long range space flights, but his project was eventually defunded in favor or transgenic plants. Back in 2006 Charlem received some great media attention around Thanksgiving, but Mironov still wasn’t able to secure grants from the FDA, the NIH, or the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The most recent funding for Charlem research (before the suspension) came from PETA.

Yet if Charlem’s taste tests seem inevitably delayed, the general march towards artificial meat staggers on. Mironov and Genovese were just two out of dozens of researchers invited to present at the ESF workshop in Sweden. Singularity Hub covered efforts to create synthetic pork more than a year ago. When Mironov talked to the AFP he lauded Douglas McFarland of South Dakota State University and his work with developing myoblasts for culture. Charlem may have been one of the best chances at producing savory faux meat this year, but it wasn’t the only option. We may still see others produce a viably tasty product soon. PETA is even offering a $1 million prize for anyone who can grow a commercially available synthetic meat for market by June 2012.

And let’s not count out Mironov and Genovese entirely either. Sure, things look pretty grim for the team now, but Mironov has been working on this project for more than a decade. He’s tenacious and undeterred by skepticism. Which I think you’ll be able to see clearly in this interview he gave the Colbert Report in 2009. Oh Stephen, if only I could end all my posts with your not-so-subtle mockery of everything I find interesting…

Posted in Meat Production, Stranger Than Fiction | No Responses »

Eat A Bug

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

At the London restaurant Archipelago, diners can order the $11 Baby Bee Brulee: a creamy custard topped with a crunchy little bee. In New York, the Mexican restaurant Toloache offers $11 chapulines tacos: two tacos stuffed with Oaxacan-style dried grasshoppers.

Could beetles, dragonfly larvae and water bug caviar be the meat of the future? As the global population booms and demand strains the world’s supply of meat, there’s a growing need for alternate animal proteins. Insects are high in protein, B vitamins and minerals like iron and zinc, and they’re low in fat. Insects are easier to raise than livestock, and they produce less waste. Insects are abundant. Of all the known animal species, 80% walk on six legs; over 1,000 edible species have been identified. And the taste? It’s often described as “nutty.”

The vast majority of the developing world already eats insects. In Laos and Thailand, weaver-ant pupae are a highly prized and nutritious delicacy. They are prepared with shallots, lettuce, chilies, lime and spices and served with sticky rice. Further back in history, the ancient Romans considered beetle larvae to be gourmet fare, and the Old Testament mentions eating crickets and grasshoppers. In the 20th century, the Japanese emperor Hirohito’s favorite meal was a mixture of cooked rice, canned wasps (including larvae, pupae and adults), soy sauce and sugar.

Will Westerners ever take to insects as food? It’s possible. We are entomologists at Wageningen University, and we started promoting insects as food in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Many people laughed—and cringed—at first, but interest gradually became more serious. In 2006 we created a “Wageningen—City of Insects” science festival to promote the idea of eating bugs; it attracted more than 20,000 visitors.

Over the past two years, three Dutch insect-raising companies, which normally produce feed for animals in zoos, have set up special production lines to raise locusts and mealworms for human consumption. Now those insects are sold, freeze-dried, in two dozen retail food outlets that cater to restaurants. A few restaurants in the Netherlands have already placed insects on the menu, with locusts and mealworms (beetle larvae) usually among the dishes.

Insects have a reputation for being dirty and carrying diseases—yet less than 0.5% of all known insect species are harmful to people, farm animals or crop plants. When raised under hygienic conditions—eating bugs straight out of the backyard generally isn’t recommended—many insects are perfectly safe to eat.

Read the rest of the story at: Wall Street Journal

Posted in Meat Production | No Responses »

Fatty Grassfed Meat Is Best

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Our culture has a phobia about animal fat. The horrid nutritional guidelines just issued by the U.S. government tell us to eat meat only occasionally, and eat only lean meat. This is truly a shame, because animal fat from pastured animals contains many vital nutrients that are easily absorbed and hard to get elsewhere. Animal fat from grassfed animals also gives great taste, tenderness, and satisfaction (unlike the lumpy, greasy fat so prevalent in factory meat).

All grassfed meat is leaner than factory meat. Many producers advertise how lean their grassfed meat is. Some grassfed meat is much leaner, and some contains more fat. So which is better? For our ancestors, the choice was simple. Fat meat was desirable and cherished—lean meat was eaten to avoid starvation or thrown to the dogs.

For me, the answer is also simple. Most of the nutrients in grassfed beef are in the fat. Fattier cuts of grassfed meat have more flavor and come out more tender. The fattier the better, when it comes to grassfed meat.

Grassfed Fat vs. Factory Fat

There is a great difference in the content and composition of the fat of grassfed animals and the fat of factory animals finished in the feedlot.

The fat of grassfed animals has a much higher ratio of omega-3 fatty acids to omega-6 fatty acids, has much more CLA, and is much richer in other nutrients. The fat of feedlot-finished factory animals has a much higher omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio, much less CLA, and contains substances from the feed that get stored in the fat.

The fat in grassfed meat appears both as a covering over the cut of meat, and in small white flecks that can be seen in the meat itself. These small flecks are called marbling. The fat of feedlot-finished factory meat also appears as a covering, but it can often be seen in the meat itself as thick, blocky veins of fat, or lumps of fat. No grass finished meat has this appearance.

I personally find the fat in grassfed meat to be delicious and satisfying. It smells so good when the meat cooks that it makes me very hungry. I find the fat in feedlot-finished factory meat to be greasy, unpleasant, and downright disgusting. Factory meat does not satisfy me, and leaves me hungry and bloated. Grassfed meat always leaves me feeling satisfied and good—which is one of the main reasons why I only eat grassfed and grass finished  meat.

What about the Studies?

The media often publicizes studies that claim that eating meat, especially fat meat, is unhealthy.

While I never blindly believe any study, knowing how flawed and biased they can be (though some are completely valid, you just have to study the details), I have noticed two important points that make them inapplicable to grassfed meat and fat:

  1. All of these studies include the eating of highly processed factory meat, meat that is full of preservatives and chemicals, such as luncheon meat. It is impossible to know if the negative results claimed by the studies come from the meat or the chemicals.
  2. None of these studies are limited to the eating of pastured meat processed without the use of chemicals, but are based almost totally on feedlot-finished factory meat that has been raised with artificial hormones, chemicals, antibiotics, species-inappropriate feed, and other factors that were never used by our ancestors. It is impossible to know if the negative results claimed by the studies come from the meat or the hormones, chemicals, antibiotics, species-inappropriate feed, or other factors, or any combination of them.

The main studies we have on the nutritional effects of traditional meats, fats, and diets are the customs of our ancestors, and the vital research of Dr. Weston A. Price. These traditions and the research of Dr. Price support the health benefits of eating traditional unprocessed animal fats.

Why Fattier Grassfed Meat Is Better than Leaner Grassfed Meat

Once again, the traditions of our ancestors are the key to understanding. Every traditional meat eating culture preferred fat meat to lean meat. Traditional recipes for meat always make sure that it is cooked and eaten with plenty of fat, with roasts being inevitably covered by a glorious crown of their own magnificent fat. The most prized, luxurious cuts of meat were always the fattest.

Traditional Inuit were known to reserve the organ meats, fatty meats, and fat for themselves, while throwing the really lean meat to their dogs.

The most valued traditional foods included the fats of pastured animals, with lard, beef tallow, goose fat, duck fat, and chicken fat being heavily used for cooking in traditional Europe. The Native Americans used bear fat, bison fat, and the fat from other game. Lamb fat was prized in the Middle East, where breeds of lamb were raised that had huge tails composed almost completely of fat, which was used in all kinds of cooking. Lard was the most important fat in China, used for cooking almost everything.

I am convinced that cooking traditions reflect the collective experience of the people who have them, representing thousands of years of trial and error, passed down from parent to child, from teacher to student. The wisdom of these traditions was proved by Dr. Weston A. Price, who discovered that traditional peoples eating their traditional diets were completely free of the chronic diseases that afflicted modern peoples, remaining healthy and vigorous into extreme old age. Every one of the peoples studied by Dr. Price only ate meat with plenty of fat.

An example of this wisdom is pemmican, a staple preserved food of the Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains of the United States. Pemmican consisted of dried bison meat, dried cherries, and a great deal of bison fat. The Native Americans knew that the fat was absolutely necessary for the pemmican to sustain life.

Most of the nutrients in grassfed meat are in the fat, not the meat itself. Very lean grassfed beef, that has no visible marbling, will have fewer nutrients than grassfed meat that is nicely marbled. A roast that has all the fat cover trimmed off will have fewer nutrients than a roast cooked with a cover of its own natural fat.

I have found that the fattier the grassfed meat, the more tender and tasty and satisfying it is. You can make lean grassfed meat tender and delicious, with the proper technique and marinades. But the grassfed meat that has the little flecks of fat in the meat will be more tender, and more tasty, and more satisfying. The grassfed roast cooked with a cap of its own magnificent fat will always come out much better that the totally trimmed roast. Our ancestors knew this, and it is a delicious and healthy tradition to follow!

Source: Tender Grassfed Meat

Posted in Health, Meat Production | No Responses »

Scientist Works To Grow Meat In Lab

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat.

A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering “cultured” meat.

It’s a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way … on the hoof.

Growth of “in-vitro” or cultured meat is also under way in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand.

The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, won’t fund it, the National Institutes of Health won’t fund it, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded it only briefly, Mironov said.

“It’s classic disruptive technology,” Mironov said. “Bringing any new technology on the market, average, costs $1 billion. We don’t even have $1 million.”

Director of the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Center in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the medical university, Mironov now primarily conducts research on tissue engineering, or growing, of human organs.

“There’s a yuck factor when people find out meat is grown in a lab. They don’t like to associate technology with food,” said Nicholas Genovese, 32, a visiting scholar in cancer cell biology working under a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals three-year grant to run Dr. Mironov’s meat-growing lab.

“But there are a lot of products that we eat today that are considered natural that are produced in a similar manner,” Genovese said.

“There’s yogurt, which is cultured yeast. You have wine production and beer production. These were not produced in laboratories. Society has accepted these products.”

If wine is produced in winery, beer in a brewery and bread in a bakery, where are you going to grow cultured meat?

In a “carnery,” if Mironov has his way. That is the name he has given future production facilities.

He envisions football field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors, or bioreactors the size of a coffee machine in grocery stores, to manufacture what he calls “charlem” — “Charleston engineered meat.”

“It will be functional, natural, designed food,” Mironov said. “How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.

“I believe we can do it without genes. But there is no evidence that if you add genes the quality of food will somehow suffer. Genetically modified food is already normal practice and nobody dies.”

Dr. Mironov has taken myoblasts — embryonic cells that develop into muscle tissue — from turkey and bathed them in a nutrient bath of bovine serum on a scaffold made of chitosan (a common polymer found in nature) to grow animal skeletal muscle tissue. But how do you get that juicy, meaty quality?

Genovese said scientists want to add fat. And adding a vascular system so that interior cells can receive oxygen will enable the growth of steak, say, instead of just thin strips of muscle tissue.

Cultured meat could eventually become cheaper than what Genovese called the heavily subsidized production of farm meat, he said, and if the public accepts cultured meat, the future holds benefits.

“Thirty percent of the earth’s land surface area is associated with producing animal protein on farms,” Genovese said.

“Animals require between 3 and 8 pounds of nutrient to make 1 pound of meat. It’s fairly inefficient. Animals consume food and produce waste. Cultured meat doesn’t have a digestive system.

“Further out, if we have interplanetary exploration, people will need to produce food in space and you can’t take a cow with you.

“We have to look to these ideas in order to progress. Otherwise, we stay static. I mean, 15 years ago who could have imagined the iPhone?”

Source: Reuters via Yahoo News

Posted in Meat Production | No Responses »

‘Cows Eat Grass’ Remark Costs Professor Job

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

Cows eat grass. You wouldn’t think it’s a big deal to state this, but at Iowa State University a highly qualified job applicant who had the temerity to voice this simple biological fact was ejected from consideration for a post leading a sustainable agriculture program, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Among those who study sustainability, saying cows should eat grass is not a controversial statement. But saying so in Iowa—which grows more corn than any other state—is likely to attract attention.

Well, it sure did. Ricardo Salvador is a well-respected sustainable agriculture expert and a former professor at Iowa State—and a natural, many observers thought, to lead the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture as its new director. A finalist for the position, however, he didn’t get the post even when the top candidate turned it down. Apparently, his cow comment came back to haunt him:

The remark that may have sunk Mr. Salvador’s candidacy came 37 minutes into his on-campus presentation. While discussing a research project in New York State, he mentioned meat being “produced in the natural way that meat should be produced, which is on land suitable for grasses and perennial crops.”

If this were a TV game show, a loud buzzer would have gone off and Mr. Salvador would have been escorted from the stage that very moment. Because apparently he was supposed to say that cows should eat corn. Even if that’s not natural or sustainable, it’s simply how things are done in Iowa, a state built on big agriculture:

Corn allows cows to get fatter faster and be ready for slaughter sooner. But there are downsides, including the fact that cows have trouble digesting corn and must be fed antibiotics to prevent them from becoming ill. What’s more, the beef from corn-fed cows tends to have more fat.

The danger of the truth is so great that the Chronicle couldn’t even get Wendy Wintersteen, the dean of Iowa State’s agriculture school, to go anywhere near it. When asked whether cows evolved to eat grass, she replied, “I don’t have an opinion on that statement.”

Sheesh. Consider, for a moment, the man that the Leopold Center is named for, famed conservationist Aldo Leopold. In 1939, in the essay “A Biotic View of Land,” he wrote:

Each species, including ourselves, is a link in many chains. The deer eats a hundred plants other than oak, and the cow a hundred plants other than corn. Both, then, are links in a hundred chains.

Sorry, Mr. Leopold, but I’m going to cut you off right there before you say anything more inflammatory. Some university officials are not going to be happy about this.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Posted in Dairy Production, Meat Production | No Responses »

« Older Entries