It is becoming a common expression with those around me lately, but BEEF is seriously WHAT'S FOR DINNER for as long as the eye can foresee. I picked up my order of a 1/2 cow today! All 270 lbs! Its 100% grass-fed, organically-raised cow from a farm in southern Ohio. They supply the local co-op and appear at a farm market right up the road from me.
Check 'em out, http://www.ravenrocks.org/ More stuff going on there than just beef, including some outstanding photos.
I ate their meat when I was going through cancer radiation therapy and had to be on a restricted diet (no iodine residue, which is common in some meat-processing facilities). It did me good then, I expect it'll do me good now.
The health and environmental benefits of grass-fed meat is a very, very long list, and I encourage anyone to check it out: http://www.eatwild.com/ I really believe that eating meat raised in this manner is a good alternative to being a vegetarian, especially those like me who don't respond well to a vegetarian diet (I'd tried).
[I'd challenge vegetarians out there to really look at where their food is coming from and how its produced, because they may not be having quite as good of an environmental impact that they think (although there is no question that eating a conventionally raised vegetarian diet is better than eating factory farm animal products, but I think organically raised meats, eggs and dairy would give any vegetarian a run for their money in terms of environmental responsibility. I'll take my grass-fed meat, raised locally and organically to your polluted and plantation-grown bananas shipped from 3,000 miles away anyday.)]
Wow! That's a lot of beef! Do you have a freezer big enough? How are you storing it? I hope you have some left next time I'm in the neighborhood! :)
ReplyDeletePS - And yes, the eating locally thing is amazingly important. Barbara Kingsolver spoke here at Emory a few weeks back about her adventure with eating locally as documented in her latest book. Good stuff. I'm hoping to do more research regarding how to integrate local/organic food purchasing into my life. Maybe you can give me some pointers!
ReplyDeleteI read that book and loved it, but I also have to sympathize with this critique:
ReplyDeletehttp://reason.com/news/show/120449.html
"it's not for nothing that dairy farms are called penitentiaries without walls..."
Ouch! Nobody's telling that guy that HE has to move back to the farm!
ReplyDeleteHis claim that organic farming is more land-intensive is an important one. I would argue that conventional farming may be more land-intensive, since the chemical runnoff can decimate ecosystems far removed from the fields themselves. And land erosion by conventional farming methods ruins land, requiring additional farmland to be tilled.
Still, the yield-per-acre of organic farming is a concern for large-scale viability. But conventional methods do not have long-term sustainability, so something's gotta give on the conventional side eventually.