The Daily Beef

Healthy eating habits are paramount to a well-balanced lifestyle. Too often does convenience take priority over a robust diet. More often than not, the average person thinks of food that is “healthy” and food that is “affordable” as being mutually exclusive. In the United States alone, meat can compose almost every meal that an average person will eat over the course of a day. Meat of almost any description can provide nutrients essential to a healthy body, but in the pursuit of becoming and staying healthy it isn’t enough to rely on fast food hamburgers. Even in this era of convenience, picking and choosing the right meat is of paramount importance to staying healthy.

These five films prove that anyone with a taste for meat should use careful judgement when deciding where and from whom to purchase their dinner. Modern farming practices threaten the welfare of millions of animals who are systematically abused in “concentrated animal operations” before becoming “food.” These documentaries prove that you can still have a heart and be a meat eater.

On March 8, 2012, Organic Valley announced the launch of Organic Valley Grassmilk™, an organic specialty milk produced from cows that are 100% grass-fed. Organic Valley is the only national brand to produce 100% grass-fed milk.

Jacques Pepin, the prominent tv cooking celebrity, recommends you crack an egg by tapping it against a flat surface, like a countertop. You can see his technique here at around the 5:40 mark. When I try the method, the egg is as likely to crack longitudinally as it is the right way. Or it cracks crazily and the albumen dribbles all around. So, like my mother and every other cook I've ever seen, I continue to crack eggs on the edge of a bowl or pan.

How does your USDA Certified Organic milk measure up?  Believe it or not, the differences between organic milk brands are considerable.

 

 

What's In A Name?

I came across an article the other day on Discovery News that said that dairy cows with names produce an extra 500 pints a year of milk.  Apparently, this study finding was published in January in a journal called Antrozoos.  The conclusive findings? Cows with names produce up to 5% more milk than their nameless peers over a 10 month period. 

 

On January 22, 2010, the SLATE, an online daily magazine on the Web, published a wonderful article entitled "Beware the Myth of Grass-Fed Beef: Cows raised at pasture are not immune to deadly E. coli bacteria" By James E. McWilliams.  People have been posting links to this article like crazy.  There are hundreds of posts to Twitter and even NPR did a story on it. If you have not read the article, you should as it is well written and informative.  But, in my opinion, the article is incomplete and does not tell the whole story when it comes to E. coli risks between typical grain fed beef and grass fed beef.

Never heard of battery cage chicken farming? It is unnecessarily cruel. Hens are cruelly confined in barren battery cages so small they can barely move their entire lives. Restaurants like IHOP buy from these types of farms. When we eat grocery store and fast food chicken or when we buy their cheap eggs, we are supporting the use of battery cages and other unhealthy and unsustainable farm practices.

Genetically modified foods have been creeping into our food supply right under our very noses.  In the United States, there are no laws requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods and the biotech companies want to keep it that way.  But you might be asking yourself, what's so bad about genetically modified foods? Aren't these biotech companies just using science to make our crops and farms more productive and disease resistant?

According to best selling author and genetically modified food expert Jeffrey M. Smith, eating genetically modified food is gambling with every bite.  Smith links geneticaly modified organisms (GMO) to toxins, allergies, infertility, infant mortality, immune dysfunction, stunted growth, and death.  Not only are GMOs a threat to our health, they are an even greater threat to the environment.

Do you know how the current beef “quality” grading system works? Well, you should, because the beef industry is obsessed with fat, and they want you to equate Fat with Flavor and therefore Quality.  Well, we say, that’s just a bunch of Bull!  Not only is this approach flawed, it’s downright unhealthy.

Genetically Engineered Alfalfa A Threat To Organic Dairies

Alfalfa is one of the most important crops used in agriculture and is widely grown throughout the world as forage for cattle.  It's one of the highest yielding forage plants and is often harvested as hay.  With the highest feeding value of all common hay crops, Alfalfa plays an important roll in the raising of dairy cattle.